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

blog.rapportive.com

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

#31

Post by [deleted] »

mwhuss wrote: post #29
dpritchett wrote: post #4

Great 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

[deleted]

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

#32

Post by Harj »

christonog wrote: post #27
Harj wrote: post #25

Earlier 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 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.

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

#34

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #31
mwhuss wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

[deleted]

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

#35

Post by rahulvohra »

waratuman wrote: post #33

I agree with most of this post except that you should build to scale. Scaling isn't what you should be focused on. If you focus on this you will loose sight of the product you should be developing and responding to user feedback.

Cloud computing has made it possible to choose a hosting provider which allows you to scale with approximately no effort.

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

#36

Post by [deleted] »

rahulvohra wrote: post #30
AmberShah wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys seem really positive. How do you stay positive in the face of so much negativity that must come your way? This post is one example, but I assume there's a lot more where that came from.

Positivity is something I consciously work on. 1. If at every point you're taking what you believe to be approximately right decisions, given all the information you have at that time, then you can ban regrets from your mind. This is a good frame of mind to be in: you can focus on the future. The corollary is to arm yourself with information. For more on this, and more besides, see: http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/30/ho…

[deleted]

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

#38

Post by pg »

nickpp wrote: 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 familiar with the strategy of launching something minimal and then expanding it. And yet here is a startup doing exactly the right thing, and they have a mob jeering at them.

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

#39

Post by dpritchett »

christonog wrote: post #27
Harj wrote: post #25

Earlier 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?

YC has invested in the company, not the product. They see enough good signs to be interested in networking into the company and investing in its potential success.

Even if the sub-20k investment doesn't pan out, YC is going to get good press and goodwill out of this. Other YC companies will absorb some of the buzz around any YC success.

The above all increases Rapportive's chance to flip the company even if only under the Greater fool theory.

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

#40

Post by samstokes »

waratuman wrote: post #33

I agree with most of this post except that you should build to scale. Scaling isn't what you should be focused on. If you focus on this you will loose sight of the product you should be developing and responding to user feedback.

You're quite right - spending significant effort on scaling when you're building an MVP is probably wrong. The point is that we got our first 10,000 users without any scaling effort.

When writing this post we talked a lot about this, and the wording is quite carefully chosen: be ready to scale. Having a contingency plan in case you need to scale, however, is a good idea if it doesn't cost too much (in either money or distraction).

The observation we make in the post is that cloud hosting like Heroku or Google App Engine makes it much more likely that you can be ready to scale without any substantial effort early on.

Obviously the "cloud scales easily" line only gets you so far. For example, while the web tier scales easily, if you built on a relational database that will impose a limit on your magical cloud scaling powers. Once you hit that limit, you still have to face up to the fact that scaling takes care and effort. But cloud hosting lets you delay that effort until you're at a size that warrants thinking about it.

Maybe we should have made this point more directly in the post: be ready to scale, because (for many applications) it no longer costs you very much.

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