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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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CC: netted
After thoughts:
  1. How long have you been thinking about your product? Months? Remember: people aren’t going to sign up for your service because you have spent nine months building it. They sign up because you have a killer feature, and you won’t figure out what that feature is until you test your product.
  2. Don’t be afraid to take short cuts (manual) to just get product out there
  3. Write down what you think your three key risks are (these are usually not tech risks, but customer risks - e.g. ultimately they don’t want X, or they won’t pay Y for it)
  4. Remember that the media emphasizes the dramatic, so don't always use their "facts" as a comprehensive representation of your full market.


GET HONEST FEEDBACK

"The people who helped us the most were the ones who were brutally honest. And it sucks. It feels like a punch in the stomach. But it gets you moving," says Vin. Helpful responses Yipit got:

          - your site sucks; you should think about Groupon
          - your deals are stupid
          - your deals suck; why aren’t they like Groupon? Groupon actually saves you money
          - your business model is terrible; you’re never going to get bars to show you their deals; if you want to  
             compete with Groupon, you’re literally going to have 100 more deals than Groupon


THE SEED STAGE BUSINESS MODEL IS IMPORTANT TOO
YOU'RE NOT JUST TRYING TO CHANGE THE WORLD

Yipit started out as a happy hour service. But the challenge with their business model was that it took a lot of work to just cover one city, and it would be really expensive to expand. Plus, all the money between customers and bars would never be exchanged through Yipit. When they finally switched to becoming a daily deal aggregator, the affiliate model they used allowed money to actually flow through their company, which in turn allowed them to launch five cities in three days.
 


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