Scheduling a meeting shouldn't take longer than actually having the meeting. Yet we spend so much of our time playing calendar battleships. Back and forth our emails go, trying to find that one precious hour where fates, stars and calendars align.

Calendars are great for remembering meetings, but they don't help you arrange meetings. That's why we've integrated Tungle.me into Rapportive. Tungle.me makes scheduling easy.

To schedule a meeting with somebody who uses Tungle.me, just click "Schedule" in their Rapportive profile. Their calendar will appear, showing only the times when they're available. You propose some times, enter a topic, and you're done.

If you already use Tungle.me, we've done some magic: your account will automatically show up in your Rapportive profile. Just make sure you've made your Tungle.me page searchable, which you can do from your Tungle.me account settings page. If you want to use Tungle.me to help you manage your calendar, you can sign up at http://tungle.com.

Why wasn't it always this easy?

We accidentally got 10,000+ users in 24 hours, and funding from Y Combinator just a few days later. This post tells that story.

We were determined to take part in Y Combinator, so we spent weeks crafting our entry and polishing Rapportive. At the start of March, we were finally ready. We held our breath and clicked "Submit". We looked at each other, relaxed, and slowly started to breathe again. A few hours passed uneventfully. We were in no way prepared for what happened next.

Somehow, the press had found us. TheNextWeb ran the first piece. ReadWriteWeb picked it up after that. Then Lifehacker. Then WebWorkerDaily. We had headlines like: "Stop What You Are Doing & Install This Plug-In." Our twitter account was aflame with thousands of mentions in just a few hours. We had accidentally launched.

We saw our user count grow from 5 to over 10,000 in 24 hours. I had a case of beers in my drawer in case we ever needed to celebrate anything. We drank all of them.

I stayed awake for two days straight: the emails didn't slow down, the tweets kept pouring in, and new Skype chats would appear as soon as I'd finish old ones. But we were determined to quickly respond to every single last email, tweet, and chat, so we soldiered on.

The next day, investors from across the world started contacting us with offers of funding. These weren't just any old investors; these were some of the best angels and venture capitalists in the world.

We didn't have time to wait for the normal Y Combinator interview, which would have happened a month later. I contacted Harj, Venture Partner at YC, and they offered to do the interview over Skype. (I vaguely knew Harj from our university days — it's a surprisingly small world.)

A few days later, Martin, Sam and I were huddled around around a laptop talking to pg, Jessica and Harj. They weren't quite as huddled, so we spent most of it talking to pg's legs. We talked for half an hour, but I felt like it passed by in an instant. A few minutes later, we had our answer: Y Combinator would fund us!

We celebrated in the traditional British manner. When we were next coherent, we booked a fundraising trip to the Valley.

Lessons Learnt

We did several things that worked well during this phase:

• Offer surprisingly great service. Most companies deliver terrible service, and users have come to expect it. Surprise them. Make it abundantly clear how users can contact you. Monitor all your channels. Respond to people as soon as you physically can. Thank everybody and go the extra mile. I personally find that it really helps to smile, even when the user is thousands of miles away and on the other end of a tweet. We use a shared Gmail account for email support, and CoTweet for twitter. Our YC batchmates rave about Olark.
  
• Use a feedback forum. Make the forum really easy to find. Include links to it from your product. Make the links especially visible when the product isn't working properly. If your forum provides single sign-on (so users don't have to create new accounts) then use it! We use UserVoice and have fallen irrevocably in love with it.
• Release early. We didn't choose to release early: it was a complete accident! But in hindsight it turned out to be very useful. Our feedback forum rapidly filled up. We quickly learnt peoples' likes and dislikes, and prioritised building what people want. If you don't release early, then you might build the wrong thing and you won't find out until much later. Even if you build the right thing, somebody else might build it first and steal your thunder. So get out there.
• Be ready to scale. You never know when traffic will hit. Now I realise that "be ready to scale" may sound like classically bad advice, but cloud computing has changed the economics. You can be ready by simply choosing the right hosting provider. 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.
• Build for the press. It turns out that Rapportive works exceedingly well for technology bloggers, because they spend so much time corresponding with people who have significant online presences. It is not worth building functionality only for the press (unless, of course, they are your target market), but it is worth being aware of this effect.
• Build early. This advice is specifically for companies applying to Y Combinator: start as early as you can, as the deadline will come soon. The most impressive thing you can do is make something that people want.

One of our favourite books is Founders at Work, a collection of interviews with founders about their early days. We're now collecting stories of our own, which we will post in a series, Rapportites at Work. This post is the first of the series.

Update: It turns out @plc tipped @zee, which sparked off all the press — thanks Pete :D

Jobs: We are looking for a talented developer to join our team.  Could it be you?

Email can be a pretty painful experience. We all get a ton of emails; some of them are personal messages from real people, some are notifications sent by a service, some are newsletters. Some are important, others less so. Some are from people or companies you know well, some are ones you barely know.

What we're trying to do with Rapportive is to make email a better place. Part of that is to help you figure out what to do about a given email, and to help you do it. And a quick look at the feedback forum shows that our wonderful user community has plenty of ideas on how to make email better. This blog post is the story of one of those ideas.

One of the most popular ideas on the forum has been "Display an informative and helpful profile when companies email me". To give a bit of background: when you get an email, Rapportive tries to find the sender on various social networking sites, and gives you a summary of that person — their photo, location, job, recent tweets, LinkedIn profile; whatever they have chosen to make public.

However, that only works if the sender is an actual person.

We looked at our statistics, and saw that about 10% of profiles looked up by Rapportive users are for senders like noreply@example.com, support@company.com or notifications@someservice.com. (That's counting distinct sender addresses, not the number of times they looked up, which is probably even higher.) For these profiles, we simply had nothing to show — pretty lame. That had to change.

So we built a bit of cleverness into Rapportive: when we spot an email address which looks like one of the above, we grab a copy of the website of the company sending them. For example, if the email came from noreply@apple.com, our servers will go to www.apple.com, pick the parts which seem the most interesting, and put them in your sidebar in Gmail. Before and after this change:

• When you get an error notification from a company, click the "Support" link in the Rapportive sidebar to go directly to that company's customer service.
• When you get a message from a service you use, go directly to their blog to check if they have said anything about the upcoming feature you are waiting for. Or maybe they have some interesting upcoming events?
• When you get a marketing mail from some random company and you can't remember signing up to their newsletter, check their website summary in the sidebar to decide whether it's interesting to you or whether you want to unsubscribe.

If you send emails using an address like noreply@yourcompany.com, check out the advice from Ben Chestnut at MailChimp — do you want a more personal or more corporate feel? If you want to edit the profile for an email address, Andy Gambles describes how. And if you don't like what Rapportive has done for your address, just drop us a note at support@rapportive.com and we'll change it for you.

By the way, if you're technically inclined, we even made some of the code behind this feature freely available. And if you're a talented code craftsman and these sound like interesting problems to work on… we're hiring :)

We've got lots more exciting features coming. Follow us on Twitter for updates!