Rapportive

Stalk and Talk: reverse-engineer anyone's email with Rapportive

Sam describes a process he used to land an Airbnb interview: generate ~100 first+last+@domain email permutations in a spreadsheet, paste them into Gmail, and let Rapportive reveal which address surfaced the real social profile.

“And so I invented this thing, this process called stalk and talk. And the idea was I was going to use it to help me get a job at a company. I made this spreadsheet where I would put someone's first name, their last name, and then their URL, like @airbnb.com. And like, I would put Brian and then Chesky and then @airbnb.com, and it would give me like 100 possible combinations of what the name or his email could be. And then I would put it in Gmail and I would highlight each one and Reportive would tell me which email is his because it would show the social profiles related to each email. I ended up emailing the founders of Airbnb, an interview there using Reportive.”

Steal thisGenerate every plausible email permutation for a target, paste them into Gmail, and use an enrichment tool to spot which one resolves to a real profile.

Rapportive sold to LinkedIn making only 15 cents of total revenue

Rahul Vohra reflects that selling Rapportive 20 months in was an efficient outcome, but admits the business was brittle: across its entire history it had figured out how to make only 15 cents of revenue.

“You have to remember that I sold the company only 20 months into its existence for a sum that even to this day remains undisclosed. Assuming it was a good amount of money, then it was a very efficient outcome for the amount of time we put in for what was actually a very brittle business. We'd only figured out how to make 15 cents of revenue in the entire history of the company.”

Superhuman: ~20,000 paying subscribers at $30/month for faster email

Sam pegs Superhuman, the premium email client from Rahul Vohra (who earlier sold Rapportive to LinkedIn for ~$15M), at around 20,000 paying subscribers at $30/month.

“He launched this thing called Superhuman. I think they have about 20,000 paying subscribers at like $300, uh, $30 a month. $30 a month. I bought it. It's cool.”