In 2018, Product Hunt launched their very first Makers Festival. It was Thanksgiving weekend, and YAC team had no idea what would come out of it. However, after a few sleepless nights, they submitted their project and hoped for the best. YAC, originally named, “Yelling Across Cubicles” was created as a walkie-talkie for Mac to win a hackathon in November of 2018. $1.5M raised, 3,000 team signups, and a handful of employees later, Yac is poised to revolutionize the future of work.
YAC is a byproduct of our partially remote, design and development agency based out of Orlando called SoFriendly. So, while it did come out of a desire to help remote teams feel more connected, the team actually started by scratching their own itch. The company has employees all around the world and they found that they felt more connected to employees using voice chat versus just text alone. Their designers and developers felt awkward on camera but didn’t get enough human connection through text. So they invented a way to have a happy medium between a Slack message and a Zoom call.
The response was unreal. The day of the results, they were in Product Hunt’s morning newsletter, on the blog, tweeted out, and posted on Facebook. They had won. Demand for the product skyrocketed and vaulted YAC to new heights. They immediately started working on an update to the app. The team at SoFriendly wasn’t just an agency with a hackathon project anymore, they were quickly moving into a standalone startup with a product to sell. Early beta users for YAC had included CVS, Bleacher Report, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Invision, CBS, and many more. They quickly threw together a pitch deck with all the new data, a plan for the future, and a complete redesign of the UI. Since Makers Festival, they’ve pivoted away from real time calling into asynchronous voice, rebranded and relaunched the website, incorporated via Stripe Atlas, and closed a pre-seed round of investment led by BoostVC, Betaworks, and Earnest Capital.
They are now developing for Mac, PC, and Linux with a mobile extension of the app in partnership with Bose.
