YAC

Justin Mitchell built YAC as a hackathon project in November 2018, originally titled "Yelling Across Cubicles." The core insight was simple: most workplace collaboration doesn't require synchronous, real-time interaction. Mitchell realized teams could communicate asynchronously via rich voice messages, with screen sharing, video, and transcriptions—preserving everyone's time while enabling conversational, back-and-forth dialogue. Unlike email or Slack, YAC kept communication threaded and conversational, not broadcast.

The product was built in just four days as a hackathon entry, with Mitchell and his team using Webflow to design and ship quickly. The initial version was rough—admittedly "not that great"—but the reaction was surprisingly strong. Mitchell's strategy was clever: he wasn't trying to win on product quality alone; he was "writing on the coattails of somebody else's marketing efforts." The hackathon organizers featured YAC in their newsletter, medium blog, tweets, and Facebook, landing the product on their homepage. That free distribution drove thousands of free signups without any paid ads.

The November 2018 Product Hunt launch of "Yelling Across Cubicles" generated 429 upvotes and resulted in roughly 1,000 signups and ~500 weekly active users. Surprisingly, users came from unexpected places—Roche Healthcare, a large enterprise, discovered YAC on Product Hunt and started using it internally. A second Product Hunt launch in March 2020 proved even more successful: 758 upvotes, 2,500 website visits on launch day, 500 new users that day, and 900 new teams that week. The timing was fortunate—COVID had just forced companies to embrace async-first workflows.

YAC's growth came almost entirely from organic, word-of-mouth channels and Product Hunt's audience—not paid ads or enterprise sales. Mitchell deliberately avoided spending on marketing, preferring creative exploitation of existing platforms. Interestingly, he didn't enforce a paywall; the pricing page showed premium features, but users could access most functionality for free. This strategy prioritized feedback over revenue: Mitchell wanted to understand which features justified payment by observing organic upgrade behavior. About 10% of teams converted to paid (roughly 30 teams, 1,000 seats), paying $3–5 per user per month. Mitchell noted terrible conversion, but justified it: "we have investors, we're looking at getting kind of mass adoption before chasing those paid plans."

Churn was a critical challenge. Users who sent group messages almost never churned, but new users who never discovered group messaging left quickly. This revealed a product-market fit cliff: the feature that made YAC sticky (group messaging) wasn't obvious to new users. Mitchell's team optimized onboarding to introduce group messaging early, recognizing that "this is a weird way of working" that required education and trust-building.

By the time of this interview, YAC had 10,000 active users (defined as every-other-day usage) across 300 teams. About 1,000 of those users were paying customers across ~30 teams, generating an estimated $600,000 annual run rate ($50,000 MRR). The company raised $2.2 million in seed funding and was targeting an $8 million Series A at a $25–30 million pre-money valuation. Mitchell was adding a couple hundred new users weekly and ambitious about hitting $1 million ARR within the first two quarters of the coming year. His focus remained squarely on user growth and adoption—not squeezing revenue—reasoning that once async communication became the norm, pricing power would follow naturally.