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Yipit in 3 Days 06/14/2011
 
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CC: yipit
FACTS

Launched Feb 2010
Raised $1.3M in Series A (three months after launch)
Seven people currently on the team
Aggregates 500 daily deal services that can be customized according to preferred interests/locations
Co-Founder, CEO: Vinicius Vacanti
Co-Founder: Jim Moran


SIMPLE PRODUCT

Yipi's first version took one year to build. Their second version took three months. Their third version took three days.


PROVE OUT YOUR #1 RISK

Yipit’s biggest risk: “are we actually building something that will make people click and open their e-mail to see?"

Longer Read: The Shortcut We Took to Build Yipit in Three Days

Shorter Read: Yipit wanted to find out if their idea was good or bad by proving out their #1 risk - would people actually click and open their e-mails to get customized local daily deals The only people who could answer this question were potential users (not friends and family who praised their idea). In order to get potential users, they had to build a prototype that could take months to build. Yipit decided to take a shortcut by cutting their list of features to a bare minimum and creating a simple prototype as fast as possible. Realizing the crawler they needed to build to aggregate deals would take weeks to build poorly and months to build correctly, they decided to collect deals manually so they could immediately see if people liked the idea or not. Yipit ended up building their product in three days. Four days after that, they signed up 2,000 users. The idea was tested, put into market and received accurate feedback in just seven days. 
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