That's not a startup, it's a Gmail feature. Amazes me what gets financing nowadays...
At one time, Google itself was thought to be a Yahoo feature.
It's sad that these "it's a feature" comments keep getting voted up.
10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
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Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
because at the stage we invest at, we assume the idea is inevitably going to change so we're really looking at how strong the founders are. that's why it doesn't matter to us if google could 'do it themselves' or if there's competition from other startups, since we're funding the team not the idea.
Could you elaborate about the qualities that you look for in a founding team?
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Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#63That's not a startup, it's a Gmail feature. Amazes me what gets financing nowadays...
There's an incredible amount of cool stuff you can do with this kind of email integration, and mostly it's done in-house by companies for competitive advantage reasons.
A real world example I've seen: A potential clients emails you, the system checks if they know any of your colleagues or friends, pull up data on the client's company (company news, figures, creditworthiness, etc.), finds common interests, etc. With the extra information instantaneously to hand, your chances of converting the prospect to a client go up by an order of magnitude.
That kind of functionality can be worth a fortune. But at the moment it's only large enterprise companies that can build it, making it affordable to small to mid-size companies seems a pretty solid business plan. I think Rapportive in going the more "generic" route (api, etc.) are going to steal etacts thunder and the marketplace. It's a brilliant idea.
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#64Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#65One 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?
That was asked previously but I never really saw a (valid) answer:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1568890
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#66That's not a startup, it's a Gmail feature. Amazes me what gets financing nowadays...
Have you seen raplets? Being the gatekeeper to the email inboxes of thousands of people is a pretty compelling opportunity.
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#67How do you justify removing gmail ads and replacing them with your social addon? Isn't google going to be slightly pissed?
Nah, anything that makes Gmail more useful is good for Google. The ads don't mean much.
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#68Great PR for Heroku and Nezumi: If we were on a cheap VPS, we would have crumbled to pieces like Cobb's limbo in Inception. As we were on Heroku, we could simply increase the number of dynos. I still vividly remember when our traffic hit. I was away from my desk, so I reached for my iPhone and dialed us up to 20 dynos using Nezumi. A few seconds later, we had scaled.
Glad it helped you out! http://nezumiapp.com Here's some promo codes, first come first serve, US App store only: HELW6W9WM7TT LHYWXEF3MW7L 7PXPFAFT6EL7 MKXH39WWWXKL YKYT6H3KKP6E WMNNXL6NRH9L KLPAPYJRTLLM 3P6FW6NFNEAN T7J9A79HYKY3 63HJH7NTYXXR
Rats, I was too late! I'll probably buy it when it's time for me to launch.
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#69That'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…
pg, if you don't mind me asking, how are they planning to make money?
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
we didn't ask that question because we don't care what the answer is. the biggest threat is almost always from another startup anyway, not google/microsoft/etc so we want to back the best founders. if you've met the rapportive team, you'll see pretty quickly why we funded them.
Could you elaborate on why you wouldn't care? A competitor is a competitor, no matter if they're an elephant that can make waves, or a cheetah that can pivot on the dime. Shouldn't the mantra be to focus more on what your customers want/need rather than worry about threats from other companies?
Because frankly, Google does half-assed work these days. Small companies can do very well just by cloning and supporting various features and applications that Google has already abandoned. Worrying about what Google might do in the future is just silly.
Consider all the posts made to HN by users mourning the loss of Etherpad, for instance... and look back at them in light of what's happened. Google fashioned the technology into a proof of concept called "Wave," shipped it, started to build a user base, then - oh, look, a bicycle. I wonder if it's one of the new carbon-fiber Cannondales?
Basically, Google has a severe case of corporate ADD, just like any number of organizations who have failed to capitalize on assets they already owned. Believe me, entrepreneurs can eat very well from Google's table scraps.