Paul, Conspire co-founder and CTO, here. Thanks a lot for the feedback.
I understand granting "manage my email" access is a big step. Unfortunately, Gmail/Google Apps IMAP access is currently all-or-nothing. All we need to understand the network is read-only access to message headers--not including subject line--but we're forced to ask for everything.
Paul, while we have you here, a question: The obvious trope is that we are the product, that somehow Conspire will make money "off our backs".
I think it might alleviate some concerns if you shared at least some notion of how you intend to monetize, e.g., selling anonymized marketing data, and, perhaps more importantly, how you will NOT monetize, e.g., never offering "recruiter" plans where folks get access to our stuff for a fee.
You don't have to say what you will do, but knowing what you will NOT do may allay concerns.
We will not spam your contacts, sell your or your contacts' email addresses or personal data, or otherwise sell data about you to third parties.
Down the road, we will offer premium plans with professional search tools. An example use case is if you want to reach CIOs in northern California at companies greater than 100 people, we will identify those people and tell you the best person in your network to ask for an intro. At the moment, we're focused on growing the size of the network and making it valuable for users.
One other subtle point I wanted to mention: We don't expose email addresses via the product. The only people you can email are those for which you already have an email address. The same is true for people trying to contact you. So you won't get a bunch of spam recruiter emails.
Great post and great advice. Being selective about candidates is a fine line, though--everyone falls short on some index of ability. Good hiring is about finding people who are good on most indices and then cultivating the others.
I understand granting "manage my email" access is a big step. Unfortunately, Gmail/Google Apps IMAP access is currently all-or-nothing. All we need to understand the network is read-only access to message headers--not including subject line--but we're forced to ask for everything.
The new Gmail API, https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/, adds a read-only (but not a read-only-headers) permission. We're looking forward to making the switch, but right now the performance difference between the Gmail API and plain IMAP is prohibitive. More on that here: http://blog.conspire.com/post/100016691078/why-we-arent-usin....