
10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt - rahulvohra
http://blog.rapportive.com/the-accidental-launch
======
dpritchett
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._

~~~
mwhuss
Glad it helped you out!

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~~~
mwhuss
And a few more for those late to the game

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~~~
snsr
_And a few more for those late to the game_

Thank you!

------
barmstrong
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?

~~~
callmeed
That was asked previously but I never really saw a (valid) answer:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1568890>

------
Sukotto
Great 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
Thanks :) You're absolutely right, we need to customise the posterous theme a
tad. Edit: added blurb, not yet a link.

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

~~~
pg
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.

~~~
dschobel
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.

~~~
j-g-faustus
Speaking as one of the technical crowd, it is hard to adjust to the fact that
all of your skills put together contributes only a few percent to the success
of a product.

It is obviously true, but it still takes a while getting used to :)

~~~
dschobel
Oh I agree and it's my reaction too, "yeah but what problem are they solving?
how are they doing it?"

That's the extent of my evaluation. And that's also why I'm not an
entrepreneur. :)

There's a definite mismatch between the valuation function I (and a lot of us,
I think) use and what the market uses which is addressed by the YC's of the
world.

But the bottom line is I don't think pg should misconstrue the confusion (and
sometimes frustration) as malice.

------
jambo
Great 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
Good 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
I'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
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.

~~~
rahulvohra
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 [http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/mailchimp-in-your-
gmail-with-r...](http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/mailchimp-in-your-gmail-with-
rapportive) and this funky video: <http://blip.tv/file/3859911>

There are more of these Rapportive applications, or Raplets, at
<http://raplets.com>

You can find the documentation at: <http://groups.google.com/group/raplet-dev>
<http://groups.google.com/group/raplet-announce>

~~~
bigiain
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?)

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

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

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

~~~
woodall
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.

------
rfolstad
How do you justify removing gmail ads and replacing them with your social
addon? Isn't google going to be slightly pissed?

~~~
petervandijck
Nah, anything that makes Gmail more useful is good for Google. The ads don't
mean much.

~~~
axod
If they "didn't mean much" Google would have removed them. They make Google
millions.

Obscuring other peoples advertising is a douchebag move.

~~~
petervandijck
No it's not. It would be if they were replacing them with their own ads, but
they're adding tremendous value to Gmail.

------
spoiledtechie
I 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...

~~~
samratjp
They could obviously make it happen for other platforms and the API could be
monetized :)

------
waratuman
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.

~~~
samstokes
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_.

~~~
waratuman
Great 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.

------
wheaties
Right 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
this.

~~~
apu
FYI: a 'this' comment is better done by simply upvoting and not commenting at
all.

------
dinedal
Congrats on your success! You know you have a good product when people want it
before it's even officially public.

------
zohaibr
Congrats to the founders. Great insight on really how Heroku can be
beneficial.

------
koenigdavidmj
Quite nice. I would be interested in seeing this in Thunderbird, though.

