Yo Raises $1.5M In Funding At A $10M Valuation

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/18/yo-raises-1-5m-in-funding-at-a-10m-valuation-investors-include-betaworks-and-pete-cashmore

by peterkchen • 12 years ago

41 48 12 years ago

techcrunch.com

cyphunk• 12 years ago

unclear, what does this company do exactly?

presidentender• 12 years ago

It's Facebook's 'poke' feature, as nearly as I can tell, without the rest of Facebook.

anewcolor2• 12 years ago

"poke" had a more flirty vibe to it. this is more neutral, which is important.

krapp4• 12 years ago

They make an app that says "yo."

Which is a million dollar idea for reasons.

psgibbs• 12 years ago

It's a $10 million dollar idea, they just sold 15% of it.

pauletienney• 12 years ago

I should make a LOL app. LOL is much better valued than YO.

DSingularity• 12 years ago

This has to be some kind of joke. Unbelievable.

jvrossb• 12 years ago

Not a joke. It has a fair bit of utility and 2 million installs.

wfkw874• 12 years ago

Bullshit. It is utility based on installs ? Are you insane or out of mind ? You do realize that number of installs mentioned always inflated , right ? If these scumbags are getting $1.5M what really appears to be a simple text app , I can't wait for next technology bubble burst. Seriously , US is terribly flawed country.

rezistik• 12 years ago

Utility doesn't make money. I'm all for cool apps, what I'm not for is overvaluing and expecting returns on companies with no revenue streams and realistically no way to create revenue streams. Even advertising would be difficult with Yo. The best your band can use it for is to literally annoy users.

tedks4• 12 years ago

I've been using Yo since I first heard about it on Hacker News and it's actually really useful.

Get to someone's house and want them to let you in? Send a yo.

Getting to be lunchtime? Yo your coworkers (Yo widgets on Android mean you can just go across a row and yo each one super easily) and meet up at the usual spot.

Want to meet up with a mentor? Yo them when you get in; if they yo you back they're probably free, head over and talk to them.

Thinking about your girlfriend? Send her a yo to let her know you care.

I really like using Yo; the interface is really clean and it's really fast to get to my yoscreen on Android.

The people hating on Yo just don't understand the way that technology is moving towards ephemerality. There's an art to Yo. It's elegant and simple and beautiful and it's probably worth much more than $10M. Yo has the capacity to change the way humans interact with each other.

arghbleargh• 12 years ago

I won't deny that a lot of times you only need to convey a very short message, but what makes this better than just texting?

afatc• 12 years ago

Its a lot faster, as in less touches

tedks4• 12 years ago

What makes Instagram better than emailing pictures to people?

seeingfurther• 12 years ago

No one is hating on YO, the interface or the desire to send a YO versus a text. They are hating on VC investment in a non-scalable business. Tell me how a 10MM valuation gets to a billion dollar business? Same old SV bullshit.

notahacker2• 12 years ago

It gets to be a billion dollar business after it's burnt through enough cash on user acquisition and PR to convince the acquisitions teams at Facebook, Google or Yahoo that it's an unmissable opportunity worth wasting a billion dollars of shareholders' money on.

People experiencing difficulty raising funds whilst trying to solve actual problems and make a profit in doing so have my sympathy.

d0m• 12 years ago

Once YO gets to a critical mass, there are a lot of valid and relevant business models.

severed3• 12 years ago

Thinking about your girlfriend? Send her a yo to let her know you care.
Yo has the capacity to change the way humans interact with each other.

You could easily put this into the script for a Silicon Valley episode to good effect.

krapp4• 12 years ago

The thing is - nothing you describe in regards to the 'art' in Yo has anything to do with Yo, or anything unique that Yo offers. You want to text 'yo' to somebody? Go right ahead. Nothing was stopping anyone before. Brevity has been the soul of wit for a long, long time, and not having to resort to small, limited texts is a relatively recent phenomenon (that's why acronyms like 'lol' and emoji exist, because characters used to be expensive.)

Will other startups follow and copy Yo? Of course - if this laptop I'm on wasn't such a piece of crap I would be working on my yo clone right now. Does this mean Yo represents something profound? No, just that people smell easy money, and can find utility in silly, banal apps.

[edited because ranting intensified]

tedks4• 12 years ago

Texing "yo" to someone sucks. Texting "yo" to my co-workers sucks. You really want me to go and make some group MMS crap so I can send yo? Yo is way faster and more streamlined than all of those things. That's like saying Facebook is stupid and banal because you could just set up a Geocities page to share your pictures.

Sounds like you've got a bad case of the sour grapes, friend. It's not too late though, the Yo API is really slick and there's a lot of potential for interop there. I'm working on a few Yo-related projects right now.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

   > I really like using Yo; the interface is really clean    
   > and it's really fast to get to my yoscreen on Android.

And this is its value. You like using it so you do. And for everyone who doesn't get this, it is the difference between existing as a product and not existing. You can make a product that turns poo into gold and if nobody uses it, it has no value, it converts no poo.

But if you have something that people like, and it has the added benefit of shining a light on interrelationships between people (only useful if people like using it) then it can be really valuable "Gee Bob sends alice a Yo every day at lunch time, perhaps he is the guy that decides where they eat lunch, and if we get Bob to choose our client's restaurant we'll get Alice for 'free'." Why are companies that all they do is host a 1x1 transparent GIF image and collect sequences of web pages visited by an IP address valuable?

To collect data about people you have to tie into something they do, if they don't do what ever the 'carrier' activity is, you collect no data. Yo's value is that people like to use it.

blubbi2• 12 years ago

I actually really enjoy using Yo. I think it's a great idea. But I don't know how the future of Yo might look like. I mean, implementing features would ruin the whole point of the app. I'm wondering how they are planning to spend the $1.5M. I don't think they need a big infrastructure, lots of engineering resources etc. Since running Yo is cheap and there might be actually useful use cases for it, I don't think investing in it is such a bad idea. I don't understand the people trolling here. Someone invested some time in an app that became successful. That's it.

huhtenberg• 12 years ago

This must be some sort of fiendishly clever scheme for laundering VC money. Unless they are planning to pivot it into the next WhatsApp.

krapp4• 12 years ago

This must be some sort of fiendishly clever scheme for laundering VC money.

Aren't most startups?

alanleblanc2• 12 years ago

I said "Yo" the other day, shortly after signing up for the service. I was walking along the street (on the sidewalk) and a guy was backing out of his driveway in his car, and he wasn't paying attention to me, such that he might have backed into me. I said loudly "Yo" and the situation was resolved. Nothing else needed to be said.

severed3• 12 years ago

That has nothing to do with this app, except the superficial name.

alanleblanc2• 12 years ago

It does actually. the app influenced my offline behavior and it helped me realize that in many situations a "yo" will suffice

opendais• 12 years ago

Does anyone else think this is the perfect example of why Texting apps just need like 3 macros when you have a blank message so you can just tap them?

Hi / Yes / No

That is really all the functionality this provides.

anewcolor2• 12 years ago

hi, yes and no convey very specific things though. "yo" means hundreds of things.

asavi• 12 years ago

The problem is that for the small percentage of texts that you only need to write "yo", there is a incomparably larger percentage that may need more than that. The Yo app removes functionality that native texting (or any number of WhatsApps and Facebook Messengers) already provide. Realistically it's like any other contact application: if you know people who use it you might use it, but I don't know anyone who uses it and I don't use it.

p1esk• 12 years ago

jgalt212• 12 years ago

Yo feels like a sharp stick in the eye to every entrepreneur struggling to raise money who feels like they are working on a real product that solves real problems and has a real market for its services.

Yo Raises $1.5M In Funding At A $10M Valuation

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