Announcing Clearbit Connect

I'm one of the 7000 Connect beta users and would like to say that I'm very happy with it.

Other commenters are comparing this to Rapportive. LinkedIn has discontinued Rapportive and this is an excellent substitute.

So far the hit rate for finding emails has been about 80 - 85% in my experience.

As an aside: I think Clearbit's building a really excellent suite of APIs, and Connect is only the icing on the cake.

Does anyone else think it's scary that they are asking everyone on the community plan to share all of their business contacts? (https://www.dropbox.com/s/uuq96vivlbbrrak/Screenshot%202016-...)

Definitely stopped me from signing up to give it a try.

I've been using the beta in my gmail for a while and the attention to detail is so amazing.

I built a similar tool back in 2010 - for gmail, yahoo mail and hotmail.

It was a browser plugin for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

I learned a lot about Gmail's DOM (it's highly obfuscated) and how terrible the plugin-writer's experience is for Internet Explorer.

After six months of promotion on peoplesmart.com as an add-on to allow our users to get more information about the people in their email conversations, we had about twenty users total.

The project was scrapped, and I moved on to my next thing.

Perhaps it was just timing. Best of luck!

I am one of beta users, Clearbit is really nice, it really helps me understand and research companies. Not all of them are covered but when they are, it is super useful.

Also, because they have Alex MacCaw on team, for whom I have great respect as a developer, really makes me enjoy and like this product.

Only thing that I encountered as a problem is that privacy plugins tend to disable it and mess with it running. I whitelisted it a little but it somewhat helped, not completely.

Anyhow, really great product.

A product people liked got shut down, so someone else rebuilt it. As a society, we're needlessly duplicating so much effort because we've decided treat software as a private good even though it's non-rivalrous and non-excludable. If we can come up with better ways to fund software, we can end this widespread waste and make progress faster.

There's an api, and the pricing isn't cheap, but I feel like this is going to bring a whole new wave of spam after the initially scraped list gets resold over and over.

You might have an additional revenue stream selling an "opt my email out of this thing" plan.

Announcing Rapportive ... again.

This will never be as useful as Rapportive without having LinkedIn as a data source. And since LinkedIn owns Rapportive and is probably not keen to share that data with a competitor, I don't see that happening any time soon.