Yam-Innovation: About Us
The Rise of Developreneurs
We are a group of developreneurs (developers + entrepreneurs) who decided after some “traditional” startup building to pursuit a different path of building products and ideas. Our core concept is accelerated bootstrapping. This means that we want to build ideas without getting funded, and each product launch should not take more than a few months.
So why we don’t want to raise money any more? It is not that we don’t like investors, or we had bad experience with investors, or we think this system is broken or something, we just think that with today's low barrier to entry , developers can, and should, take things into their own matter and at least evaluate the possibility of bootstrapping all the way.
0% Fat
When dealing with bootstrap you have to be really careful with your spendings, REALLY creative when it comes to finding cheaper expanse alternatives, and REALLY REALLY fast in identifying what works and what not. There is no room to carry on you dead weight, and there is no time to spend building stuff that do not produce real value.
I am probably on the minority about this, but I feel founders who got investment feel more relaxed about spending and priorities than their bootstrap counterparts. And the more money you raise, the more relax you are. I am probably stepping on some toes right now, and I will not be surprised if I get some comments proving me the other way around, but from knowing both options, and talking to founders who did both options, this is my impression.
Our Mission
We created Yam-Innovtion since we believe in the bootstrap model of creating ideas into products and we want to do everything that make sense for us: our product decisions, our timeline, our budget, and yes, our failures and success. Naturally, this means that we are going to target smaller, less competitive and lucrative markets, where usually backed startups will not pursuit due to the 10x factor exit that implicitly comes along with investors.
We want to create a portfolio of products that are profitable from day one, and can be launch very quickly in a cost effective manner. This doesn’t mean that we will not take investors into our products, it just means that we are not relying on it, and we are probably going to offer something different than shares, since control of the company is out of the question.
Our Values
- Simplicity & Honesty — We believe these two goes together. This is why we decided not to have a website, and only use a facebook page + blog — it does the job in a simple and effective way.
- Give & Take — We think the open source community and the developers community in general, has created tons of reusable source code, frameworks and tools that enables developreneurs likes us, and many more, to create startups in a more efficient and faster way. This is why we think that it is also important to try and give back to the community when possible. It doesn’t mean that we are going to open source most of our products, but whenever we can open source, we will ,and whenever we can open and share an internal tool we built, we will. Moreover, we also think it is very important to share your experience, and this is why we created this blog, and we will try to communicate here as much as we can about our journey.
- Share the success not the control — We believe in the ability of the company’s partners to make the tough decisions to steer the company to success, and this is why we want to separate the tool that provide control — shares, from the mechanism of compensation. This is why we are trying to give compensation for success based on revenues and bonuses, and do not give options and shares, especially when there is no exit strategy in our case.
Contact Us
Feel free to contact us with anything you might want to know, we don’t always answer straight away, but we do promise to try and get back to any relevant or interesting question/comment as soon as we can.