Yapp highlights outside coverage tied to startup building and founder visibility.
The post adds another piece to Yapp’s broader brand and leadership story.
Readers interested in startup media mentions and founder journeys will benefit most from this update.
Maria Seidman runs startup Yapp, an app for iOS and Androids that allows users to make mobile apps for events, gatherings and groups from the basement of her Manhattan home. Six full-time employees and a few interns work in the “sequestered space.” The setup allows Seidman to juggle leading a startup with caring for her baby and young son. Previously a media executive, Seidman became pregnant while starting Yapp so being at home makes it easier to intertwine her life and work and “build something in our own time, in our own space.”
Yapp highlights Maria Seidman in a Tech Cocktail-related feature as part of the company’s founder story.
The post reinforces Yapp’s visibility in the startup and tech community.
Readers interested in founder recognition and Yapp milestones will benefit most from this update.
CEO and Co-Founder Maria Seidman was featured as one of Tech Cocktail’s 15 Female Entrepreneurs You Should Know About (But Probably Don’t). We heartily agree.
Yapp reflects on its first year through a founder’s note about growth, learning, and momentum.
The post gives readers a more personal look at the company’s early journey and values.
Readers interested in startup stories and Yapp’s beginnings will benefit most from this piece.
Dear Yapp Community,
A year ago today, on lucky November 13th, we took the covers off our beta, and waited with baited breath to see what would happen if we gave the world a free and easy to use tool to enhance their lives by creating mobile apps. And wow, did you create.
We have been excited and humbled by the life events, business functions, teams, groups, classes, trips, and the many other ways you have found to make Yapp a part of your lives. From birth announcement apps to in-memorium and everything in between, tens of thousands of apps have been published into YappBox and that number grows every day. We’ve worked with organizations doing amazing work in the world and individuals doing spectacular things for their families and communities.
Our customer support line has been busy. Some of you have called when things weren’t working. We’ve tried our best to fix and improve the platform every day and commit to you to keep doing so. Some of you called just to say how proud you were of your app creation. We’re here to cheer you on. Some, to just tell us their Yapp story or to give feedback on how we can improve – we so much appreciate those calls and emails. With others, we’ve worked on a more customized basis – from custom themes and pages to white label apps – and have been proud of the work we’ve done to make the Yapp experience just right for you.
For our team, it’s been an amazing year of learning and growth. We’ve shared that learning with interns, apprentices, and the tech and entrepreneurial communities we belong to. As founders, we are blessed everyday to work with the smartest, most high integrity people we know. Our team is committed to our mission of empowering people to better connect through mobile and works tirelessly to do so.
Over this past year, we’ve made sharing easier, introduced new page templates and themes, improved the app’s overall performance, made preview from the web possible for those that don’t have an iOS or Android device (yet), improved the usability of the editor and mobile apps and more.
While we are the mobile experts, you have taught us a great amount about needed features, usability improvements, and how your and your communities interact on mobile. Armed with this learning, this next year will be filled with even more exciting features.
Happy 1st birthday Yapp – thank You for making great apps.
Yapp highlights outside coverage tied to startup founders and parenthood as part of its brand story.
The post adds a human dimension to Yapp’s leadership narrative through media recognition.
Readers interested in founder journeys and startup culture will benefit most from this article.
Watch CEO & Co-Founder Maria Seidman chatting with Angie Hicks of Angie’s List, Robin Chase of Zipcar and the Wall Street Journal about motherhood in the middle of the startup atmosphere: http://on.wsj.com/YATiTq
Yapp explores the growing wave of app creation and why more people want tools that make building apps easier.
The post frames app creation as a broader shift toward accessibility and no-code thinking.
Readers interested in app trends and digital creation will benefit most from this article.
This is a post by our CEO, Maria Seidman, based on a burst talk she gave at xconomy mobile in NY
I am not a technologist. English was more my thing in college so that is why I’ll start with a quote from the playwright George Bernard Shaw who said that “life is not about finding but life is about creating.”
I thought I’d take my five minutes to talk to you about creating and the future of the app creation economy.
Today, there are ~ 700,000 apps on each of the iOS and Google Play app stores. The majority of these were custom developed. According to Vision Mobile, the average cost of development of an iOS app is $27k and for Android it is $23k. This cost is only going up – fragmentation is getting worse (there were 4,000 device/OS combinations for Android alone) and design and maintenance (currently at 25% and 10%) will continue to grow.
That is why Cross Platform Development (CPD) tools like Phonegap, Appcelerator, Unity and hundreds of others have fiercely multiplied over the past few years. These cross platform tools take HTML5 and wrap it in mobile specific native functionality. This enables developers who don’t know how to code for iOS and Android to rapidly deploy apps across multiple platforms. Phonegap alone accounts for 4% of the apps on the app store and my estimation is that ~10% of the apps in the store use one of these CPD tools.
These dynamics will continue to play out, but they only point to a continued growth at the current pace of apps (the number of apps grew 40% last year). I would argue, however, that we are about to hit a hockey stick in the number of apps created. This thesis is at odds with many industry commentators who believe that apps are temporary and compare them to AOL vs. the open web.
Speaking of the web, let’s take websites as an analog. There are ~ 620M domains online today. Yet 60% of those came online in the last 2 years alone. While the web is thought of as a ’90s phenomenon, the reality is the hockey stick is now.
At the beginning, the web was a one to very many medium. One website (e.g. AOL) reached millions. Then came the marketing phase where companies and brands went out and hired Razorfish or Sapient and spend millions to create a website. The modern web (web 2.0 and up), however, is where the explosion really happened. I would argue that this was because the web went from a one to many communication, to personalized (Facebook), customized (iGoogle, MySpace, Tumblr, etc.) and created (WordPress).
Back to apps. In 2008, it was really big brands and garage developers that started on the platform. It was a one to (not yet so) many platform if you think about the early apps. Quickly every brand felt they needed to be on the platform with marketing or brand extension apps. Today, any successful app is by definition personalized. It’s not about the weather – it’s about the weather where you are standing right now. It’s not about news, it’s about your Twitter feed, curated news. Some apps have also introduced customization – Instagram isn’t about photos – it’s about customizing your photos with a filter. What about creation?
As the concept of “democratization” moves down the long tail – app creation for developers (CPD tools), for companies, for SMBs, and now (with Yapp) for consumers – we will begin to see the the real dawn of app creation as we enter the next phase of the app creation economy and a movement along the personalization, customization, and creation continuum.
With hundreds of millions of apps, finding them will be the next big challenge.
Yapp shows how people can create their own iPhone and Android app without traditional development barriers.
The post emphasizes how no-code app building makes mobile creation more accessible to more users.
Readers curious about easy app creation will benefit most from this article.
Today Yapp, an app to make apps, is coming out of that private beta stage and is available for everyone to use. And unlike some of the other app-making solutions it’s really easy to use and requires little-to-no technology know-how.
Yapp highlights Maria Seidman’s perspective on the rise of app creation and no-code accessibility.
The post connects Yapp’s mission with a broader shift in who gets to build technology.
Readers interested in founder insight and app creation trends will benefit most from this article.
Yapp has been around for a little over two months, offering consumers an easy way to create and publish mobile apps based around events. But the vision is much bigger than some conference or your weekly book club — eventually Yapp will allow any consumer to make almost any kind of app to broadcast as they please. It’s founder Maria Seidman’s big bet on trends.
Yapp highlights a founder-focused story that adds personal context to Maria Seidman’s leadership journey.
The post contributes to the brand’s human story through media and personal milestones.
Readers interested in founder narratives and startup life will benefit most from this piece.
Pooja Sankar and Maria Seidman are both first-time founders and CEOs of young, venture-capital-backed tech start-ups. And they’re both pregnant and due this summer. Talk about doing it all.
