YAP

Maria Seidman left her role as VP of New Business for Warner Bros. Digital Distribution in 2010 and relocated to New York City with her family. While doing consulting work, she identified a gap in the market: professional event organizers (conferences, corporate retreats, association meetings) needed specialized technology beyond what Facebook Events or generic platforms could offer. She found her co-founder in 2011, and YAP launched in 2012.

The company raised convertible debt from prominent VCs early on, though the exact amount was not disclosed. However, as the business evolved and proved its profitability, Maria and her co-founder made the strategic decision to bootstrap rather than pursue traditional equity funding. The product evolved significantly from its original concept into a focused SaaS platform targeting the "long tail" of the events industry—the millions of smaller conferences, association meetings, and corporate events that don't make headlines like CES or South by Southwest.

Maria employed an unconventional and creative customer acquisition strategy born from budget constraints. "In the business, we couldn't afford to go to trade shows as an exhibitor, because you know, that like, it's at you back six grand or more to have a booth," she explained. Instead, she would sneak into events as a cheap or free attendee and carry her cell phone with the YAP app on it, positioning herself at high-traffic areas like bars and coffee shops. She'd demonstrate the app directly to event organizers she met, resulting in several early sales until she was eventually asked to leave venues. This guerrilla approach became a defining part of her acquisition playbook early on.

YAP discovered that its target market was far broader than single-event organizers. While seasonal churn was a concern (similar to Nathan Latka's experience at his SaaS company Hayo), YAP found that many organizations ran multiple events per year. More importantly, customers who started using YAP for a single event often expanded into year-round usage through YAP's internal communications tool, which enabled ongoing employee or member engagement beyond the event itself. This created a "land and expand" motion that reduced churn and increased lifetime value. The company focused on average revenue per user growth and deeper enterprise penetration rather than pure event volume metrics.

As of the interview (2017), YAP had published over 85,000 apps since 2012 and operated profitably as a bootstrapped company with a remote team of five (three engineers, Maria handling product/marketing/strategy, and marketing colleague Omar). The pricing model started at $400 per app per year with volume discounts up to 50-app packages. Maria's vision was to expand YAP into a broader suite of tools for marketing and event professionals to better communicate with their constituencies, though she remained tight-lipped about specific growth metrics, focusing instead on ARPU expansion and enterprise penetration rather than raw event volume.