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Comment by roh26it | Hacker News Reader

Gmail has ~500mn users. Rapportive is possibly the most used Gmail extension out there for Chrome & Firefox. By deduction, Rapportive is the largest business/product built on top of Gmail. With only 326,000 active users isn't it a worry that products on top of Gmail are difficult to market?

Is this a reason of fear for companies like Streak and Yesware who bet heavily on the Gmail extension? (Technically their market size would have been 500mn but since the largest player only has 326k users, the total addressable market becomes really small). Something seems off since YC itself has many companies that are following this model.

Anything I'm missing out here?

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Founder of Streak here, we aren't too worried that Rapportive only had 326K users. First that number is a pretty low estimate. Thats their current active weekly users. This is after they let their product die slowly after a few years. This also doesn't count all the installs that didn't use to be from the chrome webstore nor does it count safari and IE.

Even if those numbers were accurate, I don't think products like Rapportive/Streak/Yesware are limited at all by Gmail. If anything being in Gmail helps a ton with engagement. The reason the install numbers seem low is the same reason any startup may have low install numbers - their small, they need to perfect their product/distribution/sales/etc. I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that they are in gmail.

The fact a user might have installed from somewhere other than the webstore, or if they're on Safari or IE, is entirely irrelevant - the 326k is active users, eg people who have accessed the Rapportive API in the last week. That's everyone using Rapportive regardless of where they installed from or which browser they're in.

Whether or not Rapportive is limited by GMail is a good question. Getting 0.065% market penetration after 4 years would worry me, but doesn't mean they weren't making giant piles of cash. You could easily run a profitable business with 326k users even if only a tiny proportion are paying something. The important thing to take away from Rapportive's numbers is that a huge market doesn't automatically translate in to a huge market of available customers for your product. There might only be a tiny proportion who want what you're offering. Fortunately that doesn't actually matter if you can run your business profitably anyway.

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