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Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others

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Re: Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others

#21

Post by smiler »

zackattack wrote: post #7

Rapportive is one of those things that I didn't have a need for, but now that I have it installed, I wouldn't want to be without.

Are you getting lots of e-mails from people you don't know? In general I'm getting e-mails from people I already know (if its business related, I'm not too fussed by their facebook profile) and if they're friends, well - they contact me on fb anyway and not e-mail.

Any companies I get e-mail from, I already know about so the company profile feature isn't that useful idea.

I'm just wondering what the value prop is if you can enlighten me?

Re: Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others

#25

Post by samstokes »

smiler wrote: post #21
zackattack wrote: post #7

Rapportive is one of those things that I didn't have a need for, but now that I have it installed, I wouldn't want to be without.

Are you getting lots of e-mails from people you don't know? In general I'm getting e-mails from people I already know (if its business related, I'm not too fussed by their facebook profile) and if they're friends, well - they contact me on fb anyway and not e-mail. Any companies I get e-mail from, I already know about so the company profile feature isn't that useful idea. I'm just wondering what the value prop is if…

The core idea is that there's a lot of useful context about the people you email, but email clients right now don't give you any of that context. We serve it up right next to your email, so you don't have to hunt around for it. We want to help you engage more meaningfully with the people you email.

We've found different people find it useful for different reasons. Founders, journalists and BD people get a lot of mail from people they don't know, and we've had a lot of love from that demographic because we help them put a face to the email. But as you say, a lot of people get mail mostly from people they already know.

We've got some ideas coming up for that which we think are going to be incredibly useful. Right now, if you get an email from a friend, you can see their recent tweets right there in your email - I've found this really useful, as I can refer to their tweets while replying to their email, or see who else they've been talking to. There's a lot more coming along those lines.

Is there anything we could do that would make it indispensable to you?

Re: Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others

#26

Post by davidedicillo »

jasonwilk wrote: post #24

Not to be biased, since I know the guys, but eTacts (YC w2010) is a much more powerful solution for making my inbox life better.

I think that Raplets are what makes the difference between the two services, because it let developers easily integrate their application in it, so for example if you have a to-do list app, you could integrate it with Rapportive to show any open to-do item related to that person.

Re: Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others

#27

Post by samstokes »

marcamillion wrote: post #5

Not to be disgusting...but where is the revenue generation play? Or is this a str8 sell to Google play?

We've got some great premium features planned, but right now it's more important to us to get the free product from "quite useful" to "couldn't live without". We think we're well on the way there, but we're still working really hard to understand what would make it more useful.

Re: Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others

#28

Post by samstokes »

danfitch wrote: post #3

Is that legal to replace the ads? I would think it is against the TOS of the site.

We believe the context we provide is a much more valuable use of the limited sidebar space than the ads it replaces; and we think that adds value to the platform, both for Google and for its users.

We're not interested in cheating Google out of their ad revenue, although we suspect the Gmail ads aren't making that much revenue anyway.

Update: I should also add that we have a good relationship with Google, and we were a launch partner for their contextual gadgets platform: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/putting-email-i...

Re: Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others

#29

Post by samstokes »

davidedicillo wrote: post #26
jasonwilk wrote: post #24

Not to be biased, since I know the guys, but eTacts (YC w2010) is a much more powerful solution for making my inbox life better.

I think that Raplets are what makes the difference between the two services, because it let developers easily integrate their application in it, so for example if you have a to-do list app, you could integrate it with Rapportive to show any open to-do item related to that person.

We're really excited about the potential of Raplets: they make users' lives easier by integrating repetitive workflows into their email, and they help websites increase engagement by being right there in their users' inboxes.

For example, we have an internal admin page allowing us to fix and diagnose bugs, showing us what browsers someone uses, etc. It took us about half an hour to build a Raplet that integrates that into our email, so that whenever we get a support email, we're one click away from the admin panel for that user.

We also have some great integrations with web services like Crunchbase - see an investor's portfolio as soon as they email you - and MailChimp - when a customer emails you, see whether they read your newsletters and what links they've clicked on.

Re: Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others

#30

Post by redorb »

rahulvohra wrote: post #22
jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #16

congrats to an amazing Open Angel Forum company! proud to be an investor.

proud to have you on the team. let's crush it.

How do you get away with removing the ads from Gmail? is that not against their TOS?
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