
Yo Raises $1.5M In Funding At A $10M Valuation - peterkchen
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/18/yo-raises-1-5m-in-funding-at-a-10m-valuation-investors-include-betaworks-and-pete-cashmore
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tedks
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.

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seeingfurther
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.

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d0m
Once YO gets to a critical mass, there are a lot of valid and relevant
business models.

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amirmc
From what I've seen and experienced as an end-user, it's just advertising. So
no, I don't think there are a lot of business models. I'd love to be proven
wrong someday.

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alanleblanc
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.

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

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

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wingerlang
Isn't it pretty normal to say "yo!" in those situations anyway? I've never
even heard about this app but I've done this for years.

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

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

Aren't most startups?

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DSingularity
This has to be some kind of joke. Unbelievable.

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

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rezistik
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.

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jgalt212
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.

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opendais
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.

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

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asavi
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.

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

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blubbi2
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.

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cyphunk
unclear, what does this company do exactly?

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

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

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p1esk
Yo

