nirajr

GrexIt

http://grexit.com

10/15/2010

GrexIt lets Google Apps users create a knowledge base out of their day-to-day email communication.

Needed from HN community: Review, advice, early adopters.

Key problem?

Commit 5 billion dollar to a 'frozen' business plan, that will take years to execute, while the world changes under your feet. You know there's no room for iteration, so you don't pay heed to whats going on until you've burned all the cash.

Bliss in ignorance that was by design because of the nature of the business plan.

Precisely why I'll not debate this any further :)

As an Indian, I can tell you some fundamental differences between India and Pakistan:

- India is usually very open to debate, on just about anything. - Radicalism, though exists in India in pockets and in different forms, is not a chronic national disease. - People understand the language of development now (to a large extent) - Knowledge and Education is very deeply valued. Its a part of how most Indians think. - Corruption is rampant, but media is becoming extremely vigilant. We have a Right to Information, which has been used to great effect recently to curb corruption and malpractices. - Lastly, we are a democracy in the true sense of the work. 80% of Indians are proud of it.

We are chaotic and corrupt and crippled with hundreds of problems, but at the same time, we're enterprising, hard-working, mostly ambitious, and mostly open-minded.

Thats a theoretical question.

Point is, writing down a very large part of what goes on in your mind, and then being able to mine it for stuff can be worked upon.

I find the idea very interesting. I end up ignoring a lot of thoughts that come to my mind, and I usually get most of the ideas when I'm not working very hard. Probably it would be great to take 10 days off work, do nothing, and just write down whatever comes to mind. I'm going to try this.

That is exactly the point. Why resort to protectionism. Let the market forces play themselves out. Protectionism is just the opposite of what the US preached to the world.

Indians are sufficiently entrepreneurial - especially given the constraints they work under. I am quite confident that Indians would figure out a model that will continue to work.

As for Facebook:

- It helps me connect better with people I already known for long (There are a lot of people I'd have been out of touch with if not for Facebook)

- It helps me also maintain a network of 'loose connections'. These are people I don't know very well, but can now easily keep in touch with. I would otherwise have never written or phoned them.

- I get a lot of relevant content from Facebook - this includes links to articles/blogs that are relevant to me,videos that I find to be fun/useful/inspiring.

- I have had some of the most interesting debates on people's Facebook walls. Some very long ones. At times, we've decided to then take the debate offline, and have actually followed that up with a debate when we meet.

facebook for me is content discovery + keeping in touch + updating + discussing. Thats a lot, and quite simply, it is not very far from being at the center of a lot of my online activity.

Ask Facebook users how many of them would be fine with paying a dollar every month to use it if its easy to make the payment. You will get a good idea of its value.

Thanks :)

We're still some way off from seeing who they are pitching it to. Its more a question of having your ears to the ground and trying to understand who this can be sold to. I think that applies for any business. I am sure they'll pitch it to whoever it makes the most sense to pitch to.

Great questions to ask early employees for startups.

Definitely.

One candidate when faced with some questions on how he'll handle load said he'll switch to Oracle :) Promptly asked to leave.

Good ones clearly show that they have the ability to deal with multiple tracks of ideas, know that trade-offs need to be taken care of, in general, have an approach that with some ingenuity, almost all problems are solvable. Thats the attitude I (and I guess you too) look for.

To know about 'intrinsic' value of a consumer tool (like FB or Twitter), I usually ask people - would you pay, say $1 per month to continue using the tool, if the payment process was very easy and invisible to you.

I hear a yes from most FB and Twitter users. That I think speaks very loudly about the value of these two tools.

I love to ask something that is simple to start with, and then build on it interactively with the candidate.

One of my favorite questions is - Give me a normalized database structure that you'll implement if you were to build gmail - incorporate conversations, messages, multiple message participants and labels.

Then, depending on the candidate, I build upon the question,and go into various optimizations possible, the ways caching would be implemented, sharding/splitting/de-normalization would be done with load, etc. etc. With good candidates, its always a very interesting discussion. And even the bad ones can leave the interview thinking they know something and don't need to feel bad :)

Would be great if you could review http://grexit.com and let us know your opinions on it. We're based in Delhi.

I tried registering on RhinoCloud, and I get a 500 error on this page: https://app.rhinoaccounting.com/gaccount/newcompany/

We're working on a contextual gadget. It would be up on the marketplace in around 2-2.5 weeks.

We built the DOM scraping+manipulation version first, as it gives us more flexibility with the placement of the "Send to GrexIt" and the search area.

Hope you try it out.

Thanks :)

email is a very generic communication, and in my opinion, it is possible to build tools on top of email that can give every collaboration/crm/project-management tool in the market a serious run for their money.

Every email front-end now supports extensions/plugins (for gmail, its gadgets+contextual api or DOM scraping), and of course there's imap to interact with the data, labels, headers and attachments. These two together yield a lot of potential to build a lot of tools that can be very useful.

We have built GrexIt (http://grexit.com) which allows Google Apps mail users to store email discussion from their inboxes to a shared area, where others who were not a part of the discussion can see them. This helps our users very easily create a knowledge base out of their work email. Some of our users are also now using GrexIt as a collaboration tool.

Education can be huge. It IS huge.

I looked at Metallica and Dylan, and looking at the Qwiki was a very enjoyable experience - way more juicier than reading. It could have gone even further if it played some tracks in the background :)

The online tech space/startup is a tool of wealth creation, and wealth if handled conscientiously can solve a lot of problems. The way I think about it is, it gives me a chance to do very well for myself in terms of money and influence, and maybe later, I'll put this to good use to work on these problems directly.

As for direct effect of tech venture on these problems, the effect is only of a trickle-down magnitude.

I live in India, and yes, I do. For anyone conscientious here, this is a very common feeling (Even when we have earned whatever we have most scrupulously)

For me, I worry more about some people not getting an opportunity to do well. The fact that there were many kids born at the same time as me who did not get the opportunities that I did pains me more than me having stuff that many around me don't.

Would agree to that, but would still use it.

From what I have been able to understand till now, its some kind of voodoo magic that increases chances of getting into YC.

Joking :)

Everything that can increase one's chances of getting into YC seems to be founder qualities (thats what I can make out from what has been said on this by YC in various posts). YC saying what stage a company is in impacts their selection would be a paradigm shift in how it projects itself and its selection process, imho.

Why would you even want a non-tech founder. All the value-add an MBA can bring to a small tech startup, namely: (1) contacts (2) presentation skills (3) networking (the human kind) skills - can be acquired by more tech guys if they really put their head to it and put in a sustained effort. A tech-startup would be much more flab-free if a tech guy takes up this role, imho.

I don't know why Apple would want to do that. How Sony looks at hardware, software and their product line-is is something I'd call very 'traditional' - (1) hardware is important, just patch in some software that can make users manage to us the hardware. (2) Build so much stuff that everyone can find something in the line-up that suits them (3) Keep the content business and delivery far off from the products.

I see fundamental differences between the two companies. What Apple gets by buying Sony is control over a brand that is instantly identifiable across the world (come to India to know what I mean). That might probably be of huge value to Apple, as Apple is definitely not seen as a 'people's brand' around here.

My basic thumb rule is, does a spend now help the cause of my larger plan in life, or goes against it. So, spending on a new experience would make more sense for me than saving that money and investing it into something, as I've figured out that my experiences have been my biggest investments.

The question is how to make an objective judgement on whether a spend is beneficial in terms of the larger plan or not. For myself, I have learnt to do it over time, and know where to draw the line. (Not that I don't make on the spur expenses, but have noticed that these days, my thumb rules applies itself 'in the background' even when I am making an on the spur purchase)

Very useful. Promptly bookmarked.