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10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
- dinedal 16y agoCongrats on your success! You know you have a good product when people want it before it's even officially public.
- wheaties 16y agoRight place, right time, good product, and a little luck. That's awesome to read, hear, and see. I wish them the best and hope all my endeavors bear such tail winds.
- savrajsingh 16y agothis.
- apu 16y agoFYI: a 'this' comment is better done by simply upvoting and not commenting at all.
- dpritchett 16y agoGreat 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.
- mcdowall 16y agoAgreed, wasnt aware of Nezumi before this read. Well done to all involved.
- mwhuss 16y agoGlad it helped you out! http://nezumiapp.com 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 16y ago[deleted]
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- pchristensen 16y agoRats, I was too late! I'll probably buy it when it's time for me to launch.
- mwhuss 16y agoAnd a few more for those late to the game 6EA3K3EJMW4Y 9M3N36YFFXXR FRMN3PXL777Y HN6F3PNEPPK4 4RA47J33WHMF HKYXTJY99RYF N3A3HNN7YKMW 9YA3RMWJJYWX NLY67WJ393WT
- desigooner 16y agothanks for the codes .. really appreciate the gesture!
- snsr 16y agoAnd a few more for those late to the game Thank you!
- spoiledtechie 16y agoI like the idea and love to see it working for a long time, but I totally see GMAIL doing something like this in the future or hopefully buying you out...
- Sukotto 16y agoGreat work guys. Ride the rocket as high as you can! (You're missing an opportunity to funnel people to your site from your blog. You should have a little PR blurb and link at the top of the page) Also... Additional respect that you took the time to send some love to your service and infrastructure providers.
- rahulvohra 16y agoThanks :) You're absolutely right, we need to customise the posterous theme a tad. Edit: added blurb, not yet a link.
- jambo 16y agoGreat write-up. I'd heard of you but couldn't remember what your product was. Have you thought about putting a PR-type blurb at the top of your blog, like "Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox." with an obvious link to your website?
- rahulvohra 16y agoGood point. Added the blurb to the blog, but couldn't find a quick way of adding a link. That might require theme customisation. (Or am I wrong?)
- jambo 16y agoI'm not familiar with posterous. If you don't want to change your template, you could copy & paste the link/lead into each blog post as if they're press releases, which they might effectively be.
- fjabre 16y agoTo 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.
- rahulvohra 16y agoHey 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 http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/mailchimp-in-your-gmail-with-rapportive http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/mailchimp-in-your-gmail-with-r... and this funky video: http://blip.tv/file/3859911 http://blip.tv/file/3859911 There are more of these Rapportive applications, or Raplets, at http://raplets.com http://raplets.com You can find the documentation at: http://groups.google.com/group/raplet-dev http://groups.google.com/group/raplet-dev http://groups.google.com/group/raplet-announce http://groups.google.com/group/raplet-announce
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- oziumjinx 16y agoI'd second that request. It would be great if I could utilize the Rapportive engine to show all the juicy details you guys can grab on someone based on their email, within my app.
- bigiain 16y agoThat 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?)
- rahulvohra 16y ago
- grep 16y agoI wonder how are they going to make money off this.
- whakojacko 16y agoThe obvious guess would be sell it to Yahoo/Microsoft/Google, but I hope they have a more creative solution than that.
- woodall 16y agoA 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.
- rahulvohra 16y agoWe have plans which we're going to test in the coming months. As much as we can say right now is that it will be freemium: we intend to keep the core service you see today free, and to charge for premium features.
- nickpp 16y agoThat's not a startup, it's a Gmail feature. Amazes me what gets financing nowadays...
- rahulvohra 16y agoIt 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.
- nickpp 16y agoJust to clarify: I have nothing against you and your team. Good luck to you and kudos! It's just that I remember a time when starting a business meant creating a product, finding a market and people in that market willing to pay for your product. I completely fail to see any of that in your case. But maybe building a feature for an existing product of a company in the idea of selling to that company IS a viable business model. And maybe I am getting old...
- samstokes 16y agoWe think we have all three of those things. We do have plans for features that we think people will be happy to charge for. Right now, we're not ready to talk too much about those features, but we think there is real pain we can remove. We feel validated by the fact that people love the features we have right now so much that many have asked if they can pay for them. Free is a strategy. We'll let you know how it works out :)
- betterlabs 16y agoRight on. And I am looking forward to what you do next. Having said that though, what you have right now is a "nice to have" and it excites everyone for the soft value it adds. But I wonder if the current product can pass the Penny Gap. I know you don't think its meant to, but I am really not sure if the current users will be the ones who would pay for whatever it is that you will build in the future. Xobni is a good example of it. Dropbox on the other end is a great example of a free strategy that sold users on the same product that they expected users would pay for. Basically with a strategy where you acquire a lot of free users thinking they will pay for what they have not seen as yet, can be a dangerous one.
- zohaibr 16y agoCongrats to the founders. Great insight on really how Heroku can be beneficial.
- waratuman 16y agoI 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.
- rahulvohra 16y agoCloud computing has made it possible to choose a hosting provider which allows you to scale with approximately no effort.
- samstokes 16y agoYou'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.
- waratuman 16y agoGreat response. I would say that developing on Heroku and Google App Engine drives practices that lead to the ability to scale. This can be done with any hosting provider, as long as you are ready and know what to do.
- rfolstad 16y agoHow do you justify removing gmail ads and replacing them with your social addon? Isn't google going to be slightly pissed?
- petervandijck 16y agoNah, anything that makes Gmail more useful is good for Google. The ads don't mean much.
- axod 16y agoIf they "didn't mean much" Google would have removed them. They make Google millions. Obscuring other peoples advertising is a douchebag move.
- petervandijck 16y agoNo it's not. It would be if they were replacing them with their own ads, but they're adding tremendous value to Gmail.
- koenigdavidmj 16y agoQuite nice. I would be interested in seeing this in Thunderbird, though.
- barmstrong 16y agoOne 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?