Yo | Hacker News Reader

Yo

techcrunch.com

171 pointsrahij99 comments

> Without ever having officially launched, co-founder and CEO Or Arbel managed to secure $1.2 million in funding from a list of unnamed investors, except for co-founder, angel, and Mobli CEO Moshe Hogeg, who participated in the round.

Stuff like that really gets me. I see tons of start-ups that would have a fighting chance given that sort of investment and then lame stuff like this gets funding. Of course they're entirely free to spend their money any way they want, but was there really no place to spend that better?

Congratulations to the Yo team for furthering the research to the origins of the term 'dumb money'.

I guess if you timed it right you could use Yo to communicate in Morse, but that seems to be a waste of bits considering that each packet will activate a very large number of bits being sent where one would suffice.

1-bit communication can get a lot done.

Not sure? (don't do this) Try calling your local emergency service (911 in the US) and hanging up.

No, really don't do this, you could get someone killed like that (priority traffic causes tons of traffic accidents annually, if they follow up on a 9/11 when there is nothing wrong you are in very hot water, and rightly so).

There are a lot of situations where one bit communications can make big changes. Sending a voltage down the wire to the 'launch' relay on some missile will do a lot worse. In the end, any actuator anywhere is going to respond to just a single bit changing state. So we're in violent agreement about that.

But to reduce the available bandwidth to nothing when lots is available has me puzzled. Twitter found that reducing the number of characters (by necessity, rather than by choice) launched a new medium. I can see how taking that to its logical conclusion (from 840 bits to 1 bit) may create an entirely new mode of expression.

At the same time I fear it will not leave them with a value that is is 1/840th of twitter, that '1' is perilously close to a '0'. In that sense it is like 'pair', which tries (tried?) to be a social network for 2.

Maybe someone should come up with a 0 bit medium?

A technical note: Twitter carries unicode messages; the limit is not 140 octets but 140 code points [0]. This is especially useful when tweeting in Japanese.

I believe there are more than 65536 code points assigned so a tweet should be able to carry over 2240 bits of information -- 2240+ Yos.

---

Incidentally, in Japanese and BEV (probably adopted from jp), the word "yo" has an entirely different meaning.

[0] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Edit: added endnote

A good one, thanks. Yes, that makes good sense. I guess that in some languages twitter really does carry a lot more information than it does in Latin alphabet languages.

If your language would only allow for 140 bytes you'd be really out of luck if your language routinely requires multi-byte sequences in UTF-8.

Hm. You could do a 'tweet compression' trick where you use a fixed number of bit from a subset of UTF-8 that you know is multi-byte (selected for the extra long sequences) in order to put longer messages on twitter, and then use a decompressor to turn it back into ascii.

Already exists! http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~aalemi/twitter/

"YoTor" could push innocuous "Yo" messages out over disposable one-time use IPv6 addresses, and all of the side-band message data could be transmitted in the IPv6 address. "The source address is the message."

What is the number 840?

6*140. But as your sibling comment points out twitter is not based on octets but on code points so there is actually a lot more information in there. I made the assumption that the limit was the 140 byte limit from GSM messages with a 'payload' of roughly 6 bits per character position but as was pointed out it is in fact now 140 UTF-8 code-points.

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/counting-characters

Yeah, I'm familiar with tweeting in Japanese, and how much more information you can get across in a tweet, which made me question the number. However, I'm still not sure why (in an imaginary world where twitter doesn't encode in UTF-8), it might be 6-bits. 7 or 8 I can understand. I'm just curious of what your thinking was, not trying to do any one-upmanship.

Well, 'ascii' is ' ' to 'del', above that I can't even type on this keyboard with any reliability so that gives an upper boundary for me of 96 characters. Of those the actual information is carried mostly by the letters, A-Z, twice if you want to count uppercase and lower case for 52 letters, 10 digits, a space. So that's 63 letters. Round up to 64 (maybe add the @ character or the # if you want, those are pretty prevalent in tweets as well). That's approximately 2^6. If you drop the lowercase/uppercase distinction then you can fit all the other ASCII glyphs and punctuation marks in the second half of your imaginary 6 bit code. You can't enter anything below <32 in a tweet, other than a linefeed.

Can't wait for the Facebook clone. They should call it "Poke". Oh wait.

"Like" would probably be pretty appropriate...

Reminds me of Reverend Harry Powell, an itinerant technology evangelist, con artist, and serial entrepreneur with the words "LIKE" tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and "POKE" tattooed on the other, who would explain this fact to his victims by using his hands in a sermon about the eternal struggle between doing no good and doing no evil.

Metadata/context is data.

> but was there really no place to spend that better?

Maybe. Consider all of the competing opportunities that might be discovered in a short window, like say a week. Out of all of those options, which ones are still early stage, which ones are demonstrating any amount of traction, and which ones have fancypants metrics like "over 5,000 messages sent per day"? (I'm just making that number up. But I'm sure that sort of number was mentioned at least once. Even if they had to squint to ignore the power law distribution.)

edit: and which ones are riding on the news or rumors of a >$1 billion exit (while still demonstrating traction)? (Snapchat/Whatsapp rumors were probably floating around for a bit before they happened.)

How much is traction worth? what about fad traction?

It shouldn't be this hard to tell a fad from a start-up.

i don't know, there's genocide and starvation and plenty of other profoundly disturbing things in the world. whether specific apps are stupid or not, or get funding or not, doesn't even register on my care-o-meter.

a huge portion of the 'technology' industry is just rich/privileged people doing nonsensical things that may make them a bunch of money. whatever.

trying to find or impose some kind of rationality on it is in my opinion pointless, and holding it accountable to some kind of moral benchmark is as sure as anything i've ever seen, to disappoint.

I'm suspicious of the "unnamed investors". Has anyone done any fact finding, I'm betting these guys are just looking for PR, and saying they got 1.2m for a "Yo" app is a pretty good way to do it.

>>"unnamed investors" It's totally possible that these are legitimate, respectable investors, investing on information we aren't aware of. It's also possible (and more likely, in my opinion) that the unnamed investors are a relative of a founder, who invested in this to give them runway to do something else, or to potentially spur interest from other investors or acquirers.

it's their former boss

very interesting. I wouldn't have considered this - I mean it's blindingly obvious whether a company you're working at (or supplying services to, etc) is two kids with an app hiring you, or two kids with an app and 1.2m in cash hiring you. So if they're doing this, it's likely they won't be hiring anyone, meeting with any real investors, or spending money on anything. That severely limits the upside of any PR - and that's bold.

On the other hand if they got some money, just not as much as that, then perhaps they could fluff as you suggest. Is this common in your experience? I've heard some reports of other fluffed numbers on HN, ("turned out not to have raised as much as they claimed") but no first-hand experience of anyone doing this.

Have you considered that perhaps the investors have more information than you, or the founders have an insight that you don't have, or that this is not their final product?

This may all be true. At least they have the M in MVP covered.

I suspect it's the last. They have either great insight into virality, or a second step that looks easier to monetize.

Perhaps, and this would not surprise me in the least, it is vanity investing. Something which has some traction, clearly is scratching some itch, and is under valued relative to that traction. Here we are in June, a couple of months from April and it has 50,000 active users. With a bit of virality that gets to maybe 250K or 300K. Conceptually simple (probably not patented or otherwise circumscribed) the team is probably 2 maybe 3 people. So with the two founders and maybe an employee, its an easy Acqui-hire at $3M. So you put in your 1.2M, get prodded, sell for $3M and double your money in what, 6 months? A year? And I agree with your 1+M$ is nothing to sneeze at, a lot of good can be done with that. Welcome to the gangsta school of high tech investing :-) If you have the capital to play with you can lay down bets like this, and it is exactly like laying down a million bucks on the 'pass' line at the casino. If they get an acquihire you get your money + 100% back, if they manage to keep the shine and traction going maybe you get back 2x or 3x your money, or maybe they fizzle and fade and people move on and you are out a million bucks. I was familiar with a guy who was a 'player' and he mortgaged his house for nearly a million dollars and put it all into a 'winner' startup/concept which, in his case, did not win. It was an "interest only" note with a big payment at the 5 year point, at which time he turned the house over to the bank. Very sad.

I will take exception though to the 'dumb money' comment. It is dumb to gamble, but even smart people do it, it is a risk/reward trade-off. Smart people can look at the fundamentals here and see there is a possible 'flip' opportunity, high risk, high reward, short time to closure. The trick will be to see in 3 years if it hasn't flipped or exited by then. But that only tells you the payoff. I bought a $66M lottery ticket the other day, 'dumb' ? Sure it was $2 put at risk. I chose not to buy a $2 soda. Probably not a smart allocation of capital, but the soda would have been turned into piss in short order, the lottery ticket has potential right up until the drawing :-).

I'm guessing that with $1.2M in funding, the valuation is more likely to be something like $12M? So a $3M "aquihire" might not be such a good deal...

As long as we are guessing ...

Well there is a seedier way think about it, and I don't like it but I recognize that it is not uncommon.

I would not be surprised if some investor gave the company a 'high' valuation (ie lead the round), invested in their preferred shares, and demanded a 2x or 3x liquidation preference. Let's say you are right and that I am right and there are 3 employees, and lets guess that they are sharing in say 80% of the "equity" but there shares are "common" not "preferred." The employees and founders feel awesome! "Look its worth $12M and we are millionaires!" and they go about their business trying to make it more awesome and cool. Except they can't make it more awesome enough and they need more money. The original investor says "Oh sure, I'm in but I don't want to lead this round." and the founders go out stumping for money, but they can't find anyone who agrees with their original valuation much less an even higher one. What to do? what to do! And the money is running out, and there are people to feed and spouses or significant others who are getting worried. And the "Blam!" the investor mentions they could use an exit to his pal a BigCorp who offers to buy them out in an acqui-hire "terms of the deal not disclosed" and the founders are hired and given 'earn out' packages that force them to work at BigCorp of 3 maybe 4 years, meanwhile our investor clears their liquidation preference, doubles (or maybe triples the cash) in their pocket and if they are participating preferred takes another bite at what ever is left over for the common stock.

Ok so all this evilness speculation speaks poorly for the folks who just invested $1.2M in Yo. Neither I nor probably anyone else really knows what they saw in the company to make them feel that they could get their money back, but it is critical to remember that investors are in it to make money, if the founders get some too that is a "nice to have" but isn't essential. This lack of alignment gets sometimes missed when people like Jacques are wondering "What the heck is going on here?" An investor doesn't care if its a 'down round' if they are getting 2x their money back in under 5 years. Using the rule of 72[1], getting double your money in 4.8 years is a 15% rate of return. A "win" in anyone's book.

[1] https://www.directinvesting.com/drip_learning_center/rule_of...

> I see tons of start-ups that would have a fighting chance given that sort of investment and then lame stuff like this gets funding.

What makes you think this is an either-or proposition? There's a glut of capital chasing startup opportunities today. No entrepreneur is entitled to money, but every entrepreneur can compete for it. Sure, some entrepreneurs are better connected than others, which often makes fundraising easier. But at the end of the day, why should investors be implicitly blamed for a failed startup led by an entrepreneur who was unable to convince said investors to provide his or her company with funding?

Sales is an integral part of building a successful business, and if you need capital, you had better be prepared to sell your company to the people you're asking to provide it.

> Congratulations to the Yo team for furthering the research to the origins of the term 'dumb money'.

Even if you subscribe to the notion that there really is "smart money" and "dumb money" when it comes to angels and venture firms, let's not pretend that there isn't such a thing as "dumb entrepreneurship." Entrepreneurs who start businesses without lining up the capital they need to execute are taking a risk. In many cases, especially among young entrepreneurs, that risk is not at all calculated.

On this note, it's sad that so many startup entrepreneurs bet the farm on day one by putting themselves in a position where they believe they need to sell equity to raise capital. There are a variety of ways to fund a business and early on, selling equity is often one of the least attractive despite the sex appeal that Silicon Valley has given it.

I just...what? I don't understand.

It's basically begging for you to switch apps after you get the "Yo" push notification. I can't really imagine a conversation which goes like this:

Me: Yo

Them: Yo

Me: Yo

Them: Yo

...

What I can imagine is getting a Yo from someone, switching apps, and being like "what's up? [p.s. dont fucking Yo me anymore. Just message me using a real app.]".

That "wut" app is similar in that you can't have a real conversation with anyone in particular, but it can at least be used for sharing secrets or something. I guess. Yo doesn't have such a use case that I can see.

They could maybe pivot it to act like tinder where if both of the parties yo eachother then it goes to a separate section of the app where they can actually IM eachother. But...idk. That doesn't seem particularly interesting/differentiating either.

I must be naive/short sighted.

A very large amount of my phone messages are actually null-content messages: my phone is very often a "I'm here" when picking someone up, or "let me in" or "done shopping, waiting for you" if I'm grocery shopping with someone.

Basically any time someone says "message me when..." there is no conversation when I message them. There is just a contentless phone call or text message. This is filling a communication niche that isn't well supported by the existing methods.

That said, I'm still not willing to install a new app just for that, but that doesn't mean there isn't value there.

That's fair. I think you did just find a use case for it? But I think the very fact that you won't install an app just for that (rightfully so in my opinion!) by definition means there is no value there.

I don't think it is fair to say anything I won't install has no value, I won't install WhatsApp or Snapchat either. Pretty much 0% of all apps that have enough value to raise $1m seed funding provide enough value for me to install them.

The existing method, of course, is a standard SMS message that says "Yo". I've sent plenty of them.

presumably the value of the OP is that it reduces that friction of opening your SMS app and typing "Yo"

Given that a "Yo" usually follows a more detailed text message like "Text me when you're downstairs," I think the total finger-on-screen time would be higher to open the Yo app and search for the right contact.

I assume that Yo has another plan that they haven't gone public with yet, since "Company that just says Yo raises $1m" is more newsworthy than "Company to solve problem X raises $1m." They'll get people to download the app and then add the new functionality with an automatic update.

Because the app magically sends the Yos without having to be launched? Facebook messenger has the thumbs up as a single press, as the send button turns into that with null content.

It's the equivalent, in those cases, of a missed call or "prankie" or whatever people might call them where you live.

"Prank me when you get close and I'll meet you out front."

I could see the Tinder-style pivot actually making this an interesting app.

As it stands, what this app fails to do is establish a channel of communication. If I message a friend on Skype, I know that we're most likely going to converse over Skype. Same with email, SMS, phone call, etc. With Yo, however, they have to choose some method of communication which may not be ideal for me. Furthermore, given that there is zero metadata regarding the "Yo", they have no clue how urgent it is that they get in touch over some real communication channel. The only context that one can have around a Yo would have to be established before-hand (over a medium for real communication).

In fact, since there's no metadata (besides the identity of the sender), Yo is actually less useful than a beeper.

>As it stands, what this app fails to do is establish a channel of communication.

This might be the allure. Its a message without baggage. There's no guilt for failing to say "hey, how are you man?" No shame in saying "yo" and getting on with your life. Because it lacks the ability to "establish a channel of communication," it inherently removes social pressures to extend the communication to a degree one or both parties may not want at the moment.

That's an interesting theory, and something like that could have a place somewhere. It's unfortunate that one has to establish the grounds for such a relationship beforehand, by convincing someone to download this app that allows pinging between them and exactly one other person (until this app gets more traction).

Have you ever seen late night TV ads for a golf club that allows you to piss in it? I never understood Instagram and Snapchat and the likes. I don't use it and I find it's ridiculous that there people who use it. But apparently there is whole mass of 17 yrs olds who live on this crap. It's similar to whole mass of 65 years old craving for pissable golf clubs. These kind of things either will inspire you to make more things like that or just brush them off as side effect of huge human population where even 0.01% of market is pretty big number.

the pissable golf clubs were on Shark Tank once, and they're not doing all that well.

Still going though https://www.uroclub.com/

I'm actually kind of surprised at the large numbers of HNers running to defend this thing, and those that expressed the equally valid opinion that this app is garbage have been downvoted into oblivion.

In this thread I've seen lines like: "Filling a communication niche", "It reduces that friction of opening your SMS app and typing 'Yo'"

What a surreal thread. It literally could have come straight from a script from HBO's 'Silicon Valley'.

Yeah, hilarious. Shit like this makes me wonder if we have reached "peak human" on this planet. Even raising a hint of suspicion at an obviously idiotic allocation of capital is regarded as "hating" or "not getting it". I can imagine aliens watching the spectacle of our civilization from beyond our view and wondering how we justify allocating 10x the NIH cancer research budget to stuff like whatsapp, snapchat, etc and having biochem/physics phds having better job prospects driving for Uber rather than advancing science.

I'm not what's more disturbing. The fact that it secured 1.2M or the mental gymnastics that people are doing to justify the existence of this app.

This.

Not sure if this is a typical forum comment or an observation on the meaning that can be given with a single word.

  the meaning that can be given with a single word.

Very little in this case. There's a reason simple "This" comments are discouraged on HN. Having said that, I do agree that single words can contain a lot of meaning at times. This just ... isn't a great example.

Agreed.

Tens of thousands of people are finding some use for it, even if it's just novelty.

I could imagine yo'ing my wife to say "Thinking of you" while at work, or my brother to say "Not up to much if you want to Skype", etc.

I think they could easily start with something curious like this and then slowly extend it to something else (e.g., single word/term conversation elements where you get more choices the deeper the conversation goes).

How many naysayers were there (and still!) with something like Twitter? Yet I use Twitter many times each day.

Yep.

everything needs to be justified

It's Facebook's "poke" feature (which I honestly love) in 2014. There's nothing wrong with it, but I struggle to find anything novel about it.

The innovation, such as it is, is to get a zillion people to install an app that gives the company a direct line into your notification bar. Think they'll never put an ad there?

well they're not allowed on iOS so no

Poke is for attention whores. Excuse my slang. If you have something to say then say it. Otherwise what's your need to get someone else to initiate conversation?

The onboarding process was really jarring. I expected to be able to use it instantly. Instead, I had to wait ~30 seconds while my username was registered, and now I'm sitting on my hands waiting for some SMS with a code that will allow me to login. Also, there's no easy way for me to use the app with other people without inviting them first (which, given my circle of friends and family, would have to be preceded by a sales pitch on why they should download this stupid thing in the first place).

As an app that prioritizes ease-of-use and fast communication, Yo really falls flat on it's face.

I'm not going to comment on the potential usefulness of this app, because I'm sure others will and I don't think it'll yield any particularly interesting discussion. References will be made to Snapchat and WhatsApp, the word "bubble" might come up, etc.

That's weird I didn't have to do an SMS code on Android.

You presumably gave the app permission to (among other things) read all of your texts when you installed it.

iOS's sandboxing mechanism doesn't expose text messages to third-party apps.

It doesn't have that permission on Android to read texts.

The SMS piece is a server issue with all the traffic they had today. It should be instant but it's been delayed all day for people, was fine when I first signed up. Once it does, your phone number will be verified and it'll connect people in your phone book like Snapchat, Whatsapp, Secret, etc.

One of the author's jibes at Facebook is that it "causes depression among its users".

But what about TechCrunch itself? I would bet money that there's a correlation between TC readership and depression. Reading about pointless apps is a waste of anyone's time and will make you feel worse in the long run.

Technology has a tendency to distill everything to its essence. This is just another step towards a world in which the number one film in the country is called "Ass" [1].

I'm 50/50 on this happening within a decade.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

New startup idea: an app that only lets you say "hey" to people. It's called Navi.

I can't wait until the hackathons where everyone makes Yo clones unironically. It's going to create an innovation black hole.

>New startup idea: an app that only lets you say "hey" to people.

"It's like Yo, only with 'Hey' instead of 'Yo'"

It's "Yo" for "Hey"

Scott Brown would have something to say about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNkMwnsWdjc

Whether intentional or not this is essentially the "Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" of app development.

The Sokal App-fair.

I'm hoping that this app and the investment are really some kind of performance art project.

Excerpt:

“It’s really lightweight,” said Arbel. “You don’t have anything to open. The Yo is everything, it’s all there is. You don’t have a badge you need to remove or any hidden content. Just a Yo.”

Words fail me.

What this is, I believe, is a tell-tale sign of the second bubble.

Ridiculous as this sounds, there's a very interesting conversation happening on Twitter with Marc Andreessen about this apps' uses.

Apparently, the "missed call" phenomenon, where people will call someone else and hang up, is incredibly popular, especially in other countries (e.g. Bangladesh). It's a free way to communicate 1 bit of information, which in many cases is enough if the people know beforehand what they want to communicate. E.g., "come downstairs", "call me back on another line", etc.

I think one article mentioned that missed calls are 70% of the traffic of cellular operators in Bangladesh!

When I was in high school our local mobile networks brought out a feature called "Please call me" in which you used USSD to send an unbilled notification for another number to call you - you only got around 20 per day but that was more than enough. Most people seemed to use it to notify their parents that they were ready to be picked up from a prearranged place much like you're describing with missed calls.

The "missed call" is not a phenomenon. Most cell phone callers (not the receivers) in the developing world are charged by the minute for each call. Hanging up before the call is answered incurs no fee. This is simply a way to save money.

Yo is ridiculous and doesn't necessarily solve any problem that is not solved with existing messaging apps.

The co-founder of Yo could sell ice to Eskimos. That's my kind of sales guy on my team.

In Europe and a lot of developing countries, where missed calls aren't charged for - this kind of 'nudge' communication is pretty common. I have no idea if it'll work in the US but it's certainly valuable when both parties already have known context, e.g. 'I'll missed call you when I'm outside'

1693 words about an app that doesn't say much.

Please, please, please somebody buy this company for $10 million. This is the best chance in human history to bring Poe's Law to its absurdist conclusion.

I think your shooting too low. Million is so 2013. $10 Billion minimum!

What sparked my interest is that indeed there seem to be some words that are like a swiss army knife in possibilities. Yo is a prime example. It can mean hi, okay, no thanks, what's that, hey, a warning and the list goes on forever.

Trying the app it said to me that I could connect to Facebook through my settings. The app didn't have settings.

sad trombone

Don't snort the 1.2 million at once, yo.

Seeing all these deep critiques/breakdowns of this product makes me feel like I'm in 10th grade english class again.

By far, this is the dumbest article I came across. Couldn't read it after first few lines. But god! This was huge article on an app that sends two words! :D Hah! Although comments on the article tickled me a bit.

Facebook renames poke->yo, and eats their lunch.

I don't know why I'm having a crack out of this. It's just so silly.

A harbinger of a tech bubble?

This just needs 1 more feature: the ability to reply "lo".

They should've got to Aaron Paul before Microsoft did

I just Yo'd about 15 times back and forth with a friend.

He just texted me "What's Up"

Mission accomplished I guess?

Everybody is laughing now but soon they launch:

Yo, buy this! Yo, emoji pack, Yo, plus! Yo, for enterprise.

Then suddenly their the next whatsapp.

"Yo Glass!" + "Gee, Yo Location" = "Yobiquitous Computing"

Ortega y Gasset was right.

Yo is already used by Yeoman, though...

Yooooooooo If you know what I mean...

WAT?

Yo :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com