Feb 11, 2021 · 21m · top-founders
Yac Is Audio Slack, Hits 10k Weekly Users, Raising $8m on $30m
Justin Mitchell · 14m spoken Nathan Latka · 5m spoken Eric Yuan · 4s spoken Frank Bien · 4s spoken Vivek Bhaskaran · 2s spoken
0:00 / 0:00
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this interview, Yac founder and CEO Justin Mitchell discusses building an asynchronous voice communication platform, detailing its bottom-up growth to 10,000 weekly active users, freemium SaaS model, and upcoming $8 million Series A funding round.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 26.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Nathan as informed peer 6.4 Guest teaching 2.7 Guest disagreement 1.3 Nathan pushing back 3.7
speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 10:27 Defending non-enforced paywalls
Mitchell candidly pushes back against conventional SaaS monetization pressure by explaining why enforcing payment would hurt their essential feedback iteration loop.
Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 16:41 Pressing on viral coefficient metricsLatka interrupts Mitchell's general explanation of organic traffic to demand quantitative proof of viral loops, arguing an audio tool must strictly optimize for a >1.0 K-factor.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 6:13 Explaining the original PH listing nameWhen Latka cannot find Yac's original launch on Product Hunt, Mitchell reveals the original hackathon entry was submitted under the humorous full name 'Yelling Across Cubicles'.
Nathan holds their own ▶ 18:32 Calculating revenue run rate against valuationLatka rapidly calculates Mitchell's implied ARR of $600k from seat prices and compares it directly against their target $25M-$30M Series A valuation expectations.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Nathan as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Nathan pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overview and Core Philosophy of Yac | 5 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Latka introduces the company as an active power user and guides Mitchell through Yac's core value proposition and pricing structure. The dynamic is cooperative and conversational with minimal friction. | |
| Genesis and Hackathon Launch via Product Hunt | 6 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Latka checks Product Hunt live during the recording and questions why he cannot find Mitchell's original launch. Mitchell clarifies that the original hackathon entry was listed under its full acronym 'Yelling Across Cubicles'. | |
| Measuring User Activity and Team Expansion | 7 | 2 | 1 | 4 | Latka drills down into user metrics, pressing Mitchell on the exact definition of active teams versus active individual seats. Mitchell defines their metric around every-other-day usage across 300 teams. | |
| Soft Paywalls and User Feedback Cycles | 7 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Mitchell openly admits conversion is low because they deliberately do not enforce a hard paywall, prioritizing feedback loops. Latka quickly translates Mitchell's percentages into concrete paid seat numbers. | |
| Bottom-Up Adoption and SaaS Pricing Strategy | 6 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Mitchell outlines their bottom-up adoption philosophy and how pricing is pegged below Slack. Latka continues steering the conversation rapidly into year-over-year growth and cohort retention. | |
| Team Composition and Inter-App Virality Mechanisms | 8 | 3 | 2 | 6 | Latka directly pushes Mitchell on whether they quantify their viral coefficient, pointing out it should be a key focus for an audio communication app. Mitchell concedes this is a weakness they are attempting to fix before discussing Series A valuation targets. | |
| The Famous Five and Agency Independence | 6 | 2 | 1 | 4 | During the Famous Five sequence, Latka inquires about the corporate separation between Mitchell's design agency SoFriendly and Yac's cap table. Mitchell clarifies that the agency operates separately without equity claims. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Mitchell: Yac differentiates by prioritizing internal conversational messaging over broadcasting
“The biggest differentiator here is kind of the social graph side of it, right? So instead of this being content that you're creating and you're putting on a help site somewhere, or you're sending in an email, you're dumping into your slack. All the actual comm…”
Mitchell: Yac charges $3 annually or $5 monthly per user
“Annually you're paying three dollars a user. Monthly you're paying five dollars a user.”
Mitchell: Winning a Product Hunt hackathon drove thousands of free users
“They put us in their newsletter. They put us on their medium blog. They tweeted about us, put us on their Facebook. And then we won the hackathons. We were on the homepage of their website and, All of that resulted in thousands of people coming into the funnel…”
Mitchell: Yac built its initial product in just four days
“We paid, I don't know, I guess, contractors and a couple of developers on our own team for, like, four days of work to actually build the product out, but we didn't have to pay for any of this, like, newsletter sponsorship.”
Mitchell: Yac's initial 2018 launch drove 1,000 downloads and 500 active users
“Yeah, so I mean, that resulted in probably a thousand signups downloads, really, you know, it's translated into downloads. You know, I think we probably had at peak maybe like 500 people using the app on kind of a weekly basis.”
Mitchell: Roche Healthcare organically adopted Yac after its Product Hunt launch
“And a lot of them were in, like, weird industries we didn't expect either, like Roche Healthcare, like kind of an enterprise healthcare company, not a fun, you know, remote-first startup. So yeah, they just found out about it through Product Hunt, downloaded t…”
Mitchell: Yac acquired 900 new team signups during its March 2020 relaunch
“When we launched in March, we had 900 new teams sign up that week. So can't tell you what we did launch day, but That week we had 900 new teams.”
Mitchell: Yac has 10,000 weekly active users across 300 teams
“So we're typically looking at like weekly active users. So you're looking at about like 10,000, you know, people that are on the platform. You're looking at probably like 300 teams.”
Mitchell: Yac operates with a completely unenforced paywall
“We don't actually enforce a paywall. So we say we have a paywall, but we don't actually enforce any of it. So it'll say, like, upgrade to get the desktop app. But you can technically still download the desktop app without upgrading. It says upgrade to get, you…”
Mitchell: 10% of Yac teams pay despite its completely unenforced paywall
“So about 10% of our teams are paid, which is great for having zero actual paywall that hits them.”
Mitchell: Yac deliberately prices its monthly subscription just below Slack
“We've even priced this thing specifically around, like, we assume you will have Slack, so we don't be more expensive than Slack. We're going to come right underneath it in terms of a monthly price.”
Mitchell: Yac users who send group messages retain and never churn
“Like if you start sending group messages, you never turn. Like if you're a group messenger, for some reason, that's like a huge sticking point and you just start to stay with the product. If you've never sent like a group message, we definitely see you churn e…”
Mitchell: Yac has raised just under $2.2 million to date
“Yeah, so we raised a little bit under 2.2 to date.”
Mitchell: Yac is targeting an $8 million Series A funding round
“So we're working around kind of an eight million dollar number. We're remote. We're based in Florida. You know, we can do a lot with a little, and so eight million gets us, you know, quite a long way.”