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10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt

blog.rapportive.com

51–60 of 92 posts

Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt

#51
post #10

I wonder how are they going to make money off this.

The obvious guess would be sell it to Yahoo/Microsoft/Google, but I hope they have a more creative solution than that.

A meta-social network profile. In all seriousness this seems like an awesome tool for people in HR, PR, or anywhere you have to deal with unknown peoples. Integration with desktop email clients- OutLook, ThunderBird, Mail, ect- would also be nice. I see a bright future if they play their cards right.

Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt

#53
post #38
post #12

That's not a startup, it's a Gmail feature. Amazes me what gets financing nowadays...

What gets financing is founders. And what smart founders do is launch as soon as they have anything usable. It's not the last thing they'll build. See part 8, and in particular the third paragraph: http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html It makes me wince for HN to see so many people upvoting the parent. It's not just the meanness of it; it's that it's both mean and wrong. Surely at this point everyone is at least fami…

I somewhat agree - but when we're talking about minimal people usually mean a minimal feature set on a clearly much bigger product. It's hard to imagine a full product being built around this. I think what's also frustrating is for some is that it's hard to imagine anyone ever paying for this.

It is cool and useful though, so lets certainly not belittle that.

Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt

#55
post #38
post #12

That's not a startup, it's a Gmail feature. Amazes me what gets financing nowadays...

What gets financing is founders. And what smart founders do is launch as soon as they have anything usable. It's not the last thing they'll build. See part 8, and in particular the third paragraph: http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html It makes me wince for HN to see so many people upvoting the parent. It's not just the meanness of it; it's that it's both mean and wrong. Surely at this point everyone is at least fami…

Part of the difficulty is convincing a strongly technical crowd that companies and products live or die for reasons other than technology.

Unless they're solving crazy hard problems, a lot of engineering types are just going to be underwhelmed. Add in a lot of early success and that quickly turns to cynicism and frustration.

Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt

#56

One thing I've been wondering - how does rapportive remove the Google Adwords in the right sidebar without pissing off Google? This has got to be a violation of their TOS or something isn't it?

Same way adblock does without violating their TOS?

Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt

#57
post #8

To the founders: Congrats and thanks for sharing your reflections with us. Is there a Rapportive API in the works? I would love to integrate Rapportive into some apps I'm currently working on instead of plugging into the Gmail sidebar.

Hey Fred, thanks for your kind words. Yes, there is a Rapportive API. It doesn't allow for Rapportive to go inside other applications, but it does allow folks to embed their own applications inside Rapportive. Would that be useful at all to you? For example, MailChimp recently released an integration which allows Rapportive users to see how the people who email them interact with their email newsletters. Checkout htt…

That MailChimp integration is a _great_ idea! I could _so_ easily sell some of our clients on that. (I don't suppose you've got anything in the works with Campaign Monitor on that front?)

Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt

#58
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Fred, thanks for your kind words. Yes, there is a Rapportive API. It doesn't allow for Rapportive to go inside other applications, but it does allow folks to embed their own applications inside Rapportive. Would that be useful at all to you? For example, MailChimp recently released an integration which allows Rapportive users to see how the people who email them interact with their email newsletters. Checkout htt…

That MailChimp integration is a _great_ idea! I could _so_ easily sell some of our clients on that. (I don't suppose you've got anything in the works with Campaign Monitor on that front?)

Nothing yet on Campaign Monitor, but I've added it to my list. (If it helps, Constant Contact is in the works.)

Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may look like that today, but when you pitch investors you sell them on the team, the market and the vision. You paint a compelling picture of how you get from where you are today to somewhere incredibly exciting.

I hate how well-designed your site is! Congratulations and good luck!

Thanks! We are very fortunate to be working with a truly awesome designer (@limedaring on twitter). We simply did not stop working on the site until we felt it was awesome (I think I spent almost a week fulltime on it, and I wasn't doing the design).

Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt

#60
post #38
post #12

That's not a startup, it's a Gmail feature. Amazes me what gets financing nowadays...

What gets financing is founders. And what smart founders do is launch as soon as they have anything usable. It's not the last thing they'll build. See part 8, and in particular the third paragraph: http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html It makes me wince for HN to see so many people upvoting the parent. It's not just the meanness of it; it's that it's both mean and wrong. Surely at this point everyone is at least fami…

Even if we immediately see how wrong the feature comment is, it's still likely many of us won't come up with anything as useful as Rapportive's "gmail feature". That's the real kicker.

I fell in love with Rapportive the moment I installed it, but probably because I'm a regular blogger and glutton for info about people.

I had no idea it had 10k users in 24 hours, that's Facebook like numbers.

What I'm most surprised at is that they went into YCombinator after such amazing traction and gave up equity for such a small cash offering. The could have had any angel round they wanted with that type of fire. That's a big compliment to YC, but a strange business move for a new company.

Did they give up less equity for the 20k?

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