Remote Team “High-Res” Communications: Justin Mitchell of YAC Chat

Today on the show, we have Justin Mitchell. Justin is the founder and CEO of YAC Chat, a voice collaboration tool for remote teams. He’s also a founder of SoFriendly, a software development company based in Florida.

We’re going to dive into how Justin got his first startup gig in high school, how YAC Chat got their traction via Product Hunt Maker’s Festival, the importance of high-resolution communication in remote teams, and the role of voice in the future of remote work and everyday life.

It was a fun chat with Justin. Hope you’ll enjoy it too!

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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:

01:28 — How Justin got his first startup gig in high school
06:06 — What is YAC Chat?
07:46 — Why voice communications are better than written documents
12:44 — Using voice for async communication and clarity
26:33 — How YAC Chat launched via Product Hunt Maker’s Festival
33:29 — Why Silicon Valley companies are doing themselves a disservice by not hiring outside the valley
37:04 — Why remote work can create a ‘disconnect’ between the CEO and CTO
41:12 — Why high-resolution communication is crucial for remote startups
45:23 — The role of voice in the future of remote work and other aspects of daily life.
48:50 — Using voice communication to increase accessibility

Mentioned resources:

Full transcript:

Jovian: Hello, world. Welcome to the fourth episode of Outside the Valley, a podcast where we interview remote startup leaders, workers, remote work advocates, and companies who thrive outside of Silicon Valley. This is a podcast where remote companies share what works and what doesn’t, so you can do it right. Outside the Valley is brought to you by Arc, the remote hiring platform that enables companies to hire remote software engineers and teams easily. I’m your host, Jovian Gautama.

Today on the show we have Justin Mitchell, the founder and CEO of YAC Chat, a voice collaboration tool for remote teams. The YAC on YAC Chat is an acronym of Yelling Across Cubicles, YAC, which we’ll talk about in this episode. Justin is also the founder of a software development company called SoFriendly, based in Florida.

We’re going to dive into how Justin got his very first startup gig in high school, how YAC Chat got traction on Product Hunt’s Makers Festival, the importance of high resolution communication in remote teams, the role of voice in the future of remote work and our every day life, and much more. I had a blast with Justin and I hope you enjoy this episode. Here we go.

So to kick things off, Justin, can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your company, starting with SoFriendly?

Justin: Sure, yes. I’ve been involved in startups for years now. I got hired in high school, in 11th grade actually, for my first startup. I got hired initially actually to do IT work for them and then didn’t do any IT work. I immediately became a designer there. Overheard a conversation about them needing a UI design, I raised my hand and said, “Hey, I’ve got a pirated version of Photoshop on my computer.”

Jovian: Wow.

Justin: And boom, I became their UI designer, which is not typically how you kind of fall into that career. But from there, I kind of fell in love with that process of building out UIs. We bought me a license for Photoshop and the whole creative suite. I learned kind of on the job on the spot, which was really awesome. And from there, that company, I kind of popped around to a couple of different startups with that CEO. We built some products together.

And when I was 19, I was fortunate enough to have my startup, my idea, my product actually come out as a startup. And we IPO’d, which is crazy at 19, right? Like, what’s the likelihood that your first try IPOs? So, from there, I took that exit opportunity with the startup and launched SoFriendly.

And I learned a lot at that startup, especially just about how different companies kind of approach product development. And one of the things that I identified was especially a very engineering focused company. They’re building things that they think are really cool, that they think is a great idea. But they haven’t necessarily talked to their users. They’re not asking their customers what they want, they’re not user testing it.

And so, SoFriendly is this kind of call to action for startup founders to build things that are so friendly that their users just fall in love with them. So, the company exists and the agency as a whole started on this kind of call to action to say, look:

If you’re going to build something, build it beautiful, build it amazing. Talk to the users, put it in front of them, ask them questions.

Do all this up front work instead of just launching something and then you finally get it in front of a user and they’re like, “Yeah, we didn’t ask for any of this. We don’t want any of these features. These don’t make sense to me. I would never use this product.” Right? And then you just wasted all this time and money.

So, a lot of what we do as an agency is push back and say, “All right, so that’s your idea. Let’s validate it. Let’s talk to your customers. Let’s figure out what they want. Let’s put it in front of them. Let’s do some user testing.” And you wouldn’t believe the difference that it truly is in the marketplace.

I think a lot of people would look at that and say, “That’s obvious. Everyone should do that.” But in agencies in particular, especially when you think about the offshore agencies that people typically go to, it’s, “Sure, I’ll take your money,” right? Like, “You want to pay for this. I think it’s a dumb idea, but I’ll take your money, no worries.”

And we really wanted to be different. And that was that idea that, “Hey, we might even say no to you.” We might say, “Look, we really don’t think this is a good fit. We think you should go back to the drawing board a little bit. We’re more than happy to help you.” Right? And we even have specifically kind of geared towards low end packages where we’ll say, “Look, we’re going to help you build this out before we actually build it out. We’re going to help you build a plan and put together a requirement.” So yeah, that kind of leads into everything we do and we build.

And what’s cool about SoFriendly is a lot of times we will identify kind of a hole in the market and we’ll fill it. So, we had a site called Syrup For Startups that was just discounts and deals for startups and entrepreneurs, you know? 50% of time tracking, 10% off your invoicing software, 20% off QuickBooks, just different things like that because we said, “Hey, it’s really expensive starting a business. Let’s do a discount site just for startups.”

And so, we launched that. And we started building out VR products and we saw that there was a need for good VR design tools. So, we build that called Draft XR, which is actually coming out soon for Adobe XD. So, there’s all these different things that we do. And I know we’re going to talk about it in a second, but that’s where YAC came from, right? It’s this I identified a problem. We talked to our customers, we saw this issue. And then we just built a solution for it, which is what we’ve always liked about SoFriendly is it wasn’t just an agency, it was always kind of this entrepreneurial design agency combo.

Jovian: Right. Yeah. Yeah, since you mentioned about YAC, which is actually the main reason that we have this interview because I really want to learn about YAC Chat, the tool, and how it enables remote teams to work better together. Hey, that’s a good tagline.

Justin: Yeah.

Jovian: So, for the listeners here, can you share a bit more about YAC Chat and what does it do?

Justin: Yeah, sure. So, like I said, SoFriendly typically identifies a problem and then we build a solution for it. And what we saw especially in our agency clients was meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, right? Just tons and tons of meetings. And so, what we typically saw as an agency in our time is lots of waste time, lots of downtime, meaning we’re not actually working. We’re scheduling a meeting, we’re in a meeting, we’re going to our next meeting, we’re getting off of a call. And the interruption in flow there is huge, especially for a designer or developer.

And so, we wanted to do was not say, “Cut off meetings,” because meetings and hearing someone’s voice and talking to someone is so important, especially in a remote team. What we wanted to do was find a way to kind of have the best of both worlds, which was to say, “You should still communicate and we think it’s very important to get on a phone call and actually talk something out.” But at the same time, a 20 minute or even an hour long meeting is so disruptive to your day to day work.

And so, we tried to find this balance between is there a way that we can have you talk to your teammates, talk to your clients, talk to your customers, whatever it might be, but it not actually interrupt your flow, but it not also cut down on that kind of personal connection. And so, that’s sort of the genesis of YAC was this idea of, we need to keep you out of meetings. There’s a time and a place for them. But we need to find a middle ground between Slack and a phone call.

Jovian: Right, yeah. That totally makes sense. But I’ll be very honest with you, when I first came across YAC Chat, I actually couldn’t think of a specific use case on how I personally would use it because in my mind, right, when you’re working async, especially when you’re working in distributed teams, you want to have written documents that you can always revisit, right?

For example, if I leave a voice message to my CEO, for example, in my mind, it’s a risk that he or she will probably forget about it. Am I thinking about this wrongly?

Justin: No, so it’s like a 50-50, right?

So, what’s interesting is right now we’re talking about async is we’re thinking, what’s great about it is it’s respecting each person’s time. And what’s awesome is that from an emotional perspective, I get my opportunity to speak. So, if I’m upset and I need to say something, I get to say it when I need to say it. I don’t have to wait for them to become available.

I don’t have to ask them for a calendar invite. I just get to say it, which is really powerful in terms of allowing me to speak my voice and being able to feel like I was heard, right?

On the flip side of that, the documentation side of it I think is almost like a completely different use case and we’re building things out for that. So, let me cover kind of both sides of it. So, what we’ve seen from a team building perspective is somebody gets upset. They go on a rant inside of Slack.

What typically happens is the next time you come into work the next day, that’s now just staring at you in the face, right? You just said a bunch of incredibly mean things. You were upset, you were angry, you were ranting, and all of your curse filled rants are now just in the Slack channel, right?

And so, it’s kind of cemented there and it is void of emotion. It doesn’t really tell the person how you really feel, they just know that you’re upset and you’re saying things that maybe you don’t even mean.

When you do it over voice, you’re much more careful about the way that you say things, emotion comes through much better.

And so, the person on the other end can truly understand, “Wow, this person’s upset. They’re not just being a dick right now. They’re truly hurt and I need to hear them out.”

So, that’s kind of one side of it is the importance of voice in culture, team culture, team building, something that you miss out on when you have a physical office. You can walk over to that person and you can talk to them and say how they feel, right? When you have a remote team, that thing’s just not there. And what typically happens is like, “Hey, can I call you?” “No, I’m busy right now.” “Well, what about in 30 minutes?” “Sorry, I have another meeting,” right?

And so, what we wanted to do was build a tool that allows you to immediately kind of get your voice out and be heard in that exact moment. And what’s great is that on the other end, I can respond to it at my leisure whenever I have time, as needed, right? Sometimes it may not even require a voice response. I could say, “Hey, just so you know, I got your message. I’ll write you an email up tonight when I’ve cooled down,” right? But the ability for me to be able to vocalize how I’m feeling is super important.

Now, to your point about documentation, that’s where we’re building in things for transcription, right? So, this idea that if I needed to save something, I could say, “Hey, send that to Slack,” or, “Download that transcription,” and then it’s searchable and it’s stored permanently. And that way, things aren’t being missed, because one of the things that we see YAC as is kind of your replacement for Sticky Notes, right?

So, I know my wife, when she’s at work, she works at Marriott. And what she typically does is she’ll write up a sticky note for something she needs one of her team members to do. And she’ll walk over and just stick it to their computer screen so that when they come back in from lunch, they’re like, “Oh, okay, cool. That’s a thing that I need to accomplish,” right? And so, we’re trying to replace that thing that again, you get in a physical office that you don’t get in a remote team that essentially would just get lost in Slack.

I know you mentioned before our call that a lot of people are saying that Slack is very noisy. I think there’s a time and place for Slack. I don’t think we’re trying to replace Slack at all. But typically what does end up happening is some requests get sent, “Hey, I need you to take care of this.” Then it just gets buried in all kinds of lines of text and all kinds of other conversations, or it was sent in a DM and then another conversation was started in a general chat. And it’s like, “I missed my DM,” right?

Jovian: Right.

Justin: And so, what we’re trying to do is cut through all that noise and be like, “Oh, this is important. It’s on YAC,” right? Like, “This is a voice message that someone sent me. They took the time to actually record their voice. I should listen to this.” And then, yeah, if it’s something like a task that you need to do, we’re building in functionality to actually snooze. So, you could snooze a YAC and have it come back to you in like an hour so that you can pay attention to it again, almost building it like a tasks list, voiced based tasking, right?

But then the other way of course is send to Slack, boom. Click a button, it sends the transcription and the audio file. Now it’s searchable and it’s in your kind of team archive. So, does that clear it up for you?

Jovian: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. And I can also see myself when I want to express something, if I need to say it out loud, it probably forces me to organize my thoughts a little bit more compared to just typing on Slack, right?

Justin: Yeah, what’s interesting about that is we’ve actually seen that be one of the biggest features that come out of YAC.

Jovian: Wow, okay.

Justin: It’s happened to myself. Actually, just literally the other day, I was on with one of our designers who’s in Mississippi. And she said, “Hey, I really need to get on a call.” And I said, “Hey, just use YAC. That’s what it’s for, right?” We’re even still training our own team members to try and think in terms of, “Let’s go async. We don’t always have to get on a call,” right? It’s going to be a culture shift.

But she started using it and she’s talking to me trying to explain this issue. And at the very end of the recording, she goes, “You know what? Never mind. I really just needed to talk it out. Sometimes I just need to hear myself speak the whole issue out, and then I can figure it out.” She’s like, “I already got it. No worries.”

Jovian: I can tell-

Justin: It’s that powerful.

Jovian: I can totally see that. I probably want to say something, and then when I listen to myself again, hey, this sounds really stupid. I probably don’t need to say this out loud, right? I sound really stupid. And probably I found a solution on that. So, yeah. I can see it. And I can also see the future where we don’t … Like, and big companies like Hot Jar or Zapier, as far as I know, they have this SOPs on how to ask for things or how to write on Slack. I can see when it comes to voice, it’s probably, “Okay, when you want to say something, here’s how you want to say it so that it’s easy for the other party to digest.” Okay.

Justin: Yeah, we’re also adding this functionality of being able to YAC yourself.

Jovian: YAC yourself. Yeah.

Justin: So that even if there’s not a specific person that you need to say something to, you could record kind of a voice memo to yourself, snooze it if you wanted to listen to it later, or simply just record it for almost journaling purposes.

And again, it’s the idea of once you vocalize a problem, you hear it out loud for the first time, your brain starts to process it in a different way. So, you have this opportunity to come at it from a different angle. You’re hearing it kind of outside of yourself for the first time, so you can think about it as almost like a third party in a weird way.

So, YAC has almost become this tool for just problem solving in general.

Jovian: Right. That’s kind of similar to … A popular writing tip is write like you talk, right? Write like you speak. So, it kind of also helps you to articulate things better. I want to get back, you mentioned that you guys built YAC because the problems that you see on your client side and for your own team’s side. Is there any funny of weird anecdotes that make you guys think, “God, I wish we have this thing.”

Justin: Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest one is kind of what I said at the beginning is typically what we would see happen is a client would want a certain … let’s say we have five tasks for them. Well, they’d want five meetings for that day to go over all of those five projects, right? And the laughable thing for me was always like, when do you expect us to actually work, right? Are we supposed to do nine to five meetings, and then after 5:00 PM is when the real stuff gets done? It’s like, no, this is our time that we’re supposed to work. So, when do you expect the work to get done if we’re on a call with you all the time? Right?

And it’s because I think a lot of companies … We’ve already had to combat this enough. And I’m sure that even in your own business you’ve seen this where a company says like, “Hey, we need to hire a team, or we need to hire a dev or a designer. But we need them on site.” And you’re like, “No, no, that’s the beauty of the internet is you can work remote.”

But most companies are set up to expect and understand what an on site employee does and there’s accountability for that. And I think what happened with remote work was that most companies said, “Fine, we’ll do remote work. But now we need extra accountability. So, we need to know that you’re working all the time.”

And the way that that came out was, “Let’s just put everybody in meetings all day long. Let’s constantly check in with them. Let’s have a really active Slack chat,” right? So, “Let’s constantly be talking because I don’t know otherwise how to know if you’re online.” And the problem there is that’s actually just distracting and incredibly non-productive, right?

So, what we wanted to do was build something that, again, it’s laughable in my opinion, but most companies are saying, “No, no, no. I need constant communication.” Okay, right. But I need three hours of uninterrupted work where no one bothers me. I can turn Slack off, right? And no one’s interrupting me, right?

And so, we built a tool to kind of fix that, in my opinion hilarious setup, where clients hire somebody and then never give them enough time to actually work. So yeah, that’s … What we’ve seen typically is we get hired and they’re like, “Well, why isn’t it done?” And we’re like, “Oh my god, man. We’ve been a call with you for the last four hours. When was the work supposed to get done,” right?

Jovian: Yeah. And that makes sense, especially when working with remote developers or remote freelancers, right? You want constant communication. But also other than the fact that you also want to have less meetings.

Ideally, if you are a freelancer, you have to report back to the clients, “This is what I did today.” And I think there are some freelancers that prefer to say it instead of just writing. You’ve been writing code for the whole day. I don’t want to write another passage of reports or work reports to the client. I just want to say, “Here. Here’s what I’ve done before. And if you have any questions, do let me know.”

And when you ship the transcription feature, it’s probably like killing two birds in one stone. I can totally see that. Right. Cool. And I want to just move back a little bit to the event that started the journey for YAC Chat. So, you guys started the whole thing from the Product Hunt Maker’s Festival last year, right? Last November?

Justin: Yeah, no. So, in November our product that launched at the Maker’s Festival. It was the first one, so it was the first time they’d ever done this. It’s interesting to see kind of where it’s gone since then and kind of the process. It was crazy. There was so much confusion and so much disorganization on that first one.

But the one thing that we saw immediately off the bat was remote tools was one of the categories. And so, I don’t know what it was about that category that just sparked this. But as soon as I saw a category for remote work, I was like, “I know exactly what I want to build. I know exactly what I want to build.”

And so, over the course of Thanksgiving break, we actually build the very first version of YAC. And at that time, it actually was called Yelling Across Cubicles because the goal there was to, again, emulate that idea of like, “Hey, man. I need your help. Could you just come over to my desk for a second?” Right? Which is something that you have in a physical office that you miss out on in remote work, you know?

When you are a remote worker, it’s … I would say relatively difficult to get ahold of someone. And when you are getting ahold of someone, it’s usually interrupting their flow. And so, what we wanted to do was try to emulate this idea of just kind of shouting across the cubicle row and saying, “Hey, dude, I have a question for you,” right? And so, the first version of Yelling Across Cubicles, or YAC as it’s now known was actually synchronous. So, it was realtime. It wasn’t async. But what it was is you would click a button on someone’s face and your voice just immediately came out of their speakers.

So, instead of calling and dialing and all of the stuff we’ve gotten used to with the way that voice communication tools work today, there was no rooms, there was no dialing, it wasn’t a call. It was just, I click a face, audio comes out of their speaker. And they can reply or they can not reply, right?

It was almost like an intercom, if you want to think about it like that, like an old school, “Hey, Peggy, could you please come into my office really quickly?” And again, it was to emulate that idea of maybe they’re not at their desk, right? And you just yelled into a black hole. And it was this idea of emulating real life. And it’s interesting how it didn’t work out in terms of us shifting obviously over to async.

But the reaction to the app as a whole was incredibly good. People love it. It’s had tons of downloads. Obviously we ended up winning that category, which was really great. And I wouldn’t say that I didn’t expect it, but I certainly didn’t expect the reaction.

People were … If you looked at the whole list of everyone’s upcoming projects, we had massively more email signups than everybody else. It was like that … It took that hacker space kind of project and people reacted to it like a real product, right? They looked at it and went, “Oh, okay. I would use that. That seems like an actual thing instead of something somebody threw together over a weekend,” which was literally what happened, right? We used a bunch of off the shelf technology like Talk Box and [crosstalk 00:22:06] and we just put something together really quickly and it worked and it was functional. And there was no signup.

I know we talked about earlier about how being an agency, what that transition to a startup looks like. And one of the things that I think bleeds really heavily into the way that we build our products is for the hackathon in particular, we knew we only had a very limited amount of time to launch something, right? And we knew we just needed … One of the things that I always tell our customers is that the least amount of features that you have, like if you have actual less features, it gives them less opportunity as a customer to complain, right?

So, your users have less to complain about if there are less features. And one of the things that we always do is say, if you’ve got six features on your list, launch two of them and do 100% accuracy. Like, these are just the most solid features in the entire world, right? Because if those two features are just 100% solid, then their users don’t have something to say about the other ones which may seem half baked.

So, at that time, we didn’t have authentication. You couldn’t log in on multiple machines under the same account. We didn’t have usernames. You just got a randomly generated six digit code. So, all these things that were kind of like hacks just to get this thing out and ship it and to ship this product. And I know Justin Jackson, one of the things that he said that I think is really cool is, “You never learn if you don’t ship,” right?

So, it was this idea of like, I have this idea. Let’s throw it out into the marketplace. Let’s make it as scrappy as we can possibly do it and just see how people react to it. And people loved it. And what was interesting about that was the downloads that we got, you know? We had downloads from Roche Healthcare, which is like an enterprise healthcare company that I never in a million years would think would download a scrappy little hackathon project. I figured they’re using Link Chat on their Windows ME machines. I don’t know, that’s just the perception that I have of an old school healthcare company.

But no, they saw the promise of instant communication without all the extra crap that Skype and Slack and all these other tools give us. It was just pure unadulterated voice, boom. That’s my coworker’s voice. I just want to speak to them for a second, and never again, right?

So, it’s this idea of blips, in and out, really quick voice communication. So, we had really healthy downloads, lots of good signups. We eventually launched a website for it. Yeah, the original launch didn’t even include a website.

Jovian: Really?

Justin: Yeah, no, we didn’t even have a website for it. We just had a place that you could download. There was no screenshots or advertisements or anything like that.

Jovian: No landing page or anything?

Justin: No. No. It was just like, here’s the link to the actual product. So, people started signing up for the early access list because after we saw that kind of growth, immediate growth, what we did was we said, “All right. Let’s invest some more time in this,” right? Like, “Let’s polish it up a little bit.”

We did a complete rebranding of the logo, complete rebranding of the UI. And none of that stuff was launched yet, but we were just kind of updating the existing app to make sure that it was stable for everybody. So, yeah. I mean, the hackathon is kind of what started it all. It was the poke that we needed to just say, “Hey, here’s a subject line, write up a paper about it, right? I was like, “Okay, I got it.” I don’t know, there was something about it that just immediately popped into my mind what I wanted to do. And we built it out. The reaction was really great. We saw all kinds of different industries using it. And yeah, that’s kind of what kick started this whole thing.

Jovian: Yeah. Getting back into what you mentioned about how transitioning from agency startups is actually helping a lot in terms of your decision making, right? In terms of shipping. So, yeah, I definitely agree with you, I think for all startups, you’ve got to ship fast. But I have my hypothesis that when you start up as a software development agency first, this mindset is more amplified because the ‘ship fast mindset,’ you have to transfer it to your clients, every new clients, “Okay, do you really need these 10 features? No, you only need two.” And then, a couple of weeks later, you do the same thing again. You say the same thing again.

And getting back to your early beta users. So, you wrote a blog post on Product Hunt about the story of the launch of YAC Chat. And you wrote that early beta users for YAC included CVS, Bleacher Report, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Invision, CBS, and many more. How did they find you?

Justin: You know, I’m going to be frank and say I have no idea. One of the things when I was talking, I did a couple of different interviews, and one of the things I’ve always brought up is it’s really cool to ride somebody else’s success train, right? And Product Hunt obviously has a good healthy newsletter audience. They have lots of visits to the site on a daily basis. And that was audience metrics that we just didn’t have to build, right?

So, there’s this kind of marketing hack in participating in an event like this because I don’t have to worry about building an audience. I don’t have to worry about building an email list. I didn’t even have to worry about sending an email, right? Product Hunt took care of everything for me.

And what’s unique is most of Product Hunt’s audience is immediately the audience that we’re catering to anyway. They’re a lot of remote workers, a lot of design and developers, a lot of product owners with smaller teams, right? You’re not looking at … Even though we’ve had people from Google download the app, your typical audience member on Product Hunt is not like a massive company like Google, it’s a smaller product startup. And those are the people that we want to target with YAC.

So yeah. I mean, literally, we just kind of put this thing out. We’ve never ran a paid ad. We’ve never put paid ads out there. We did I’m sure Tweets and a couple of posts on LinkedIn and stuff. But overall, it was a mention in the newsletter was huge. I think when the first makers festival newsletter was released, they kind of said, “Hey, voting has started. Here’s a couple of our favorites.” And Yelling Across Cubicles was listed, which was really cool. Obviously the guys at Product Hunt said, “Hey, we think this one has some promise.” So, I think that was a big part of it.

There was a medium post that was written about some of the top products that we were mentioned in. And then of course there was just the upcoming page and the voting page itself. And yeah, we just had literally at one point in time when this thing launched, we were getting an email signup per minute for three days. So, just constant, constant signups. And I’m doing nothing, right? We were just sitting there enjoying free traffic. So yeah, I mean, advice to other startup founders is definitely to try and find something like that. It might not be Product Hunt. But it could also be another event.

Recently … We’re talking on Zoom, right? But recently Zoom had some amazing news come out about them, where they basically installed a Trojan on everybody’s computer, right? So again, that’s an opportunity, maybe for us, but maybe for a voice or video chat app to say, “Hey, we’re a video chat app that doesn’t install Trojans on your computer,” right?

So, riding kind of the train of an exiting event or another company that’s already doing all this marketing is a huge way to get users. Yeah, it’s interesting because we just haven’t put money into marketing yet and we already have a very healthy user base of teams that have signed up on the early access list. It’ll be interesting to see how we transition into just enjoying free traffic to actually having to pay for traffic. But yeah, it’s been really awesome so far being able to just kind of utilize existing audiences and existing newsletters and not have to worry about trying to market it ourselves.

Jovian: Great. I want to talk more about your team and how you guys are hiring. So, previously you were on a podcast called Makers Weekly, am I correct?

Justin: Yeah.

Jovian: By the way, for listeners, if you want to learn more about the tech stacks for YAC Chat, go listen to the Makers Weekly episode with Justin. Justin just break down the whole technology using Electron, Talk Box, and I guess you guys used a bit of React on the development. So, worth listening. Go listen to that, after this podcast of course, don’t run. So, yeah, one of the quotes that I pulled from there is you mentioned about … Sorry, actually let’s just start, can you share more about your team structure now? How many core team members do you guys have now? And how many remote team members do you guys have?

Justin: Yeah. So, we started as just … There’s three co-founders here, myself, Jordan, and Hunter. And Jordan had actually been working out of our Orlando office on the SoFriendly side of things for a number of years now. Hunter actually moved out to LA and had been working remotely for a little bit. So, he actually just recently came back to Florida. Inside of our Orlando office, we actually have one core team member that’s here in the office every day. And then, everybody else is kind of a mix. Inside of the Orlando office here, we actually just have one designer that comes in every day. And then we have a mix of people that are kind of half remote, half in office, kind of come and go as they please.

One of the things that I always wanted to do as a founder, especially with the agency, was to not put pressure on people to have to come into the office because I do believe that I can successfully run a remote team and not have to force people to be in the office nine to five. That’s just not the culture or the environment that I wanted.

So, we do have people that just kind of show up. Actually, we used to do free food on Thursdays. So, everybody shows up on Thursday, right? But we do just have this mix of people that work from home say 75% of the time, even if they already live in Orlando. So, we still consider them part of our remote team. Outside of the team here in Orlando, we started out with a guy that was in Guatemala. He actually moved to Seattle. Then we had somebody in Cambodia, somebody in Mexico. We have a very large offshore development team in India as well. So, we’ve got kind of people spread across the entire globe. Inside of our US team, we have somebody in Mississippi, somebody in New Jersey.

And what’s great about that from a hiring perspective, and I talked about this on other podcasts in the past is this idea of not limiting yourself. What we’ve found is that when you immediately as a company say, “I have to hire somebody in this town, this city, this state,” whatever it may be, not only are you limiting yourself to the people, but you’re also really boxing yourself into a price bucket, right?

And that’s not to say everyone go hire offshore because it’s cheaper. It’s to say that a digital nomad that’s living in Mexico or that’s living in Guatemala has a very different cost of living than somebody that lives in California, right?

And I think especially … It’s interesting, you told me the title of the podcast at the beginning of this. But this idea that there’s so many startups in the Valley. And when they’re trying to hire

I think they’re doing themselves a disservice by trying to hire in the Valley. The cost of living in insane, right? It’s so hard to build a team when everybody has to be making $70,000 a year just to literally survive, right?

And so, what’s great about being able to run a remote team like that, it’s not only being able to open yourself up to amazing skilled people that might not just be geographically located to you, but also being able to maybe hire a couple of extra people because the cost of living for those folks is very different. And so, you can offer very competitive salaries for wherever they might be at currently. And they’re making great money and you’re not losing a ton of money just because you have to have somebody in the office every day.

So, we typically look for people that are digital nomads that love to travel. And we can help with that lifestyle because I think part of that lifestyle is finding a company or a client, you know? If they’re contractor or employee, but finding that relationship with a company that is totally okay with the fact that you might not work the same time zone as them, right? And being able to work around that.

And so, for us, we feel great because we’re able to enable that lifestyle that they want and we’re relaxed and we’re chill.

And as long as they get the work done, it doesn’t really matter when they show up online, right? And the flip side of that is that I get to hire somebody that is exactly perfect for me. And I don’t disqualify them just because they can’t come into the office every day.

So, we’ve had really great luck just hiring on Reddit, actually. And it’s not even … Right? Like, they have Reddit for hire, but it’s not like an official hiring platform, right? There’s no money and process and all that stuff. It’s a community, right? And just being able to go to a community and say, “Hey, I’m looking for somebody.” And someone pops up and says, “Hey, I just finished some client work. I’d love to work on this project,” right? And being able to communicate and say, “Hey, what time zone are you? What hours could you work? What’s your availability look like?” Boom, add them to the team just like that, you know? No complicated interview process even.

Jovian: Exactly. I think the key of all this, like the beauty of hiring remotely is that even if you are a Silicon Valley startup, you can actually find people with the same level of intelligence, same level of development experience, and even soft skills and communication skills Outside the Valley TM. Outside the Valley, wherever they are, right?

Because I think if you’re a Silicon Valley startup, I assume you are great, right? You’re a big company and you have these kind of international opportunities. And I think if you are an international talent, wherever you are, you’re probably based in Asia or South America, you actually deserve to get these opportunities. Just because you’re based in South America, doesn’t mean that you need to have your opportunities limited by that.

Justin: Right, yeah.

I mean, remote work opens up not only an opportunity for you as a company, but it’s opening up an opportunity for the developer, the designer, or whatever the guy is that you’re hiring. They now have an opportunity as a startup that maybe they didn’t have before because of where they were born. And that’s a ridiculous limitation for an amazing employee opportunity, right? Like, you don’t want to limit someone’s employment just because of where they might live.

Jovian: True. So, cool. So, I want to get back to your previous interview on the Makers Weekly podcast. There is this one quote that super fascinating for me. You mentioned that CEO and CTO not being in the same room can cause some kind of disconnection within the team. But when talking about creativity, it’s much better when the teams are distributed. I have two questions about this. First one, how did you realize this? Is there any stories? And the second one, is the CEO and CTO disconnection thing something that can be improved using voice tools like YAC Chat?

Justin: Yeah. There’s many examples. I will try to give an example without blasting anyone in particular. At my startup that I mentioned at the start of the call, it was something that I saw very often where … And I don’t necessarily know that even today with that quote that I would necessarily say that it’s definitely in the same room. Let’s go ahead and abstract that out to on the same page. One of the things that we obviously are building is a tool to help people to not be in the same room.

But the whole purpose of that statement is to say when there is a disconnect between the CEO and the CTO, someone who’s leading the company and especially in a tech company like this where you’re building a tech product.

So, at the end of the day, the product is the company. But you have someone that’s leading the company and someone who’s leading the product. And they might be going down two different paths. You end up at a very different spot than I think both parties thought they would end up.

And so, what I typically saw in my last startup was a CTO who was amazing, incredibly smart, knew exactly what he was doing. But definitely had a different endgame than the CEO had. And that end goal being swapped and not at the same level caused a big chasm in the company, I think, in terms of the direction that it took, the way that it spent its money, the way that we released products, the products that we did release even, right? And it’s funny because that still comes back to my original ask of, “Look, if you’re going to build something, it needs to be user centered.”

What we typically saw was the CEO saying, “Hey, we need to ship product. We have to make money. Here’s our roadmap, here’s our milestones.” And then a CTO that was saying, “This is a really cool feature. This is a really awesome patent. This is amazing technology. Let’s put this technology in the product because it’s impressive.” And the CEO saying, “Dude, I just need you to sell something. We have to make money.” Right?

And so, that issues of the CEO not being able to … I think the issue when I say not being in the same room is almost not even a communication thing. It’s not that they’re not communicating. It’s that the CEO physically couldn’t see what was being built, right? There was a disconnect between the product that was being built and the product that was being sold.

And it’s the CEO’s job to go off and get us funding and ensure the success of the company and keep pushing us forward. And if they can’t monitor what’s actually being built and they’re not selling what’s being built or the CTO is not building what’s being sold, right? Then that disconnect is just going to lead to bad times at your company.

And so, yeah, I definitely think that tools like YAC can fix that. One of the first features that we’re going to be adding back into the app that actually got removed is screen sharing. And this idea that your communication can have context, right? And one of the things that actually got us one of our investors was this blog post written by Tyler [Tringas 00:41:00] talking about remote tools and remote communication. But one of the things that he said in there that I loved was high resolution communication.

And this idea of if you’re going to communicate, make it as high resolution as possible. Include a screenshot, include a screen share. Have a video of you doing whatever you’re trying to explain. Slack just doesn’t cut it sometimes. And email just doesn’t cut it sometimes.

It’s not to say that those communication methods shouldn’t exist, but it’s to say that, look:

If you’re going to try to communicate something, make sure that you’re using as high resolution communication as possible so that the person on the other end has all the information they need, they understand the context, they can see what you’re seeing and they can understand what you’re saying.

And I think a lot of that bleeds into that CTO CEO discussion, which is if you’re not going to be in the same room, you guys need to be communicating in a way that says, “Here’s what I’m building. I’m checking in. I’m showing this to you. What are you selling?” “No, here’s what I’m selling. Let’s make sure that there’s a match up of these two things, right? I’ve told the investors we’re building this.” “Well, that’s not possible.”

That was the other thing that we actually saw a lot of times was a CEO, especially one that’s maybe non-technical a lot of times will tell the investors, “Yeah, yeah, this is what we’re going to launch.” And then the CTO’s over there going, “Oh my god. Why did you tell them that? I can’t build that. That technology won’t exist for 10 years.” Right?

And so, unless you’re like a moonshot company and that’s what you’re working towards, having a mismatch on expectations on the technical side can really, really lead to a lot of problems. And we saw that happen a lot in that startup was the CEO appeasing an investor or answering a question maybe slightly different than it should have been answered. And us getting backed into a corner where now we have to build something that we definitely never planned to build. And I think communication and high resolution communication is the thing that’s going to solve that.

Jovian: So yeah. So, I can see the patterns here. Like you mentioned, early on in the interview, you mentioned about the communication between agencies or freelance developers with the clients. And now it’s basically the same thing between CEOs, CTOs, and other stakeholders within the company. So, I guess basically for YAC Chat, the key is something like get people to be on the same page as soon as possible with less time. So, you don’t need five or six meetings per week to get on the same page. Instead, you just send voice messages.

Justin: Yeah. I mean, the idea … And this is actually what’s the first line in our pitch deck is frequent casual check-ins via voice. This idea of very small interactions just checking in. Like, “Hey man, could you give me an update on this project?” Right? “Yeah, so I just pushed code, and it’s ready to go live. I’ll be testing it in the next five minutes.” Boom, end of conversation, you know? Another two hours go by, “Hey, I just tested the code. It’s good to go. I’ve pushed it live. You can test it. And I dropped the link in your Slack,” right?

So, it’s this idea of using your voice again is going to create more meaningful relationships. It’s also faster, we feel. A lot of times you overthink things when you’re typing something out, trying to vocalize something over text and making sure you don’t have typos, making sure it’s formatted nicely and you don’t look like an idiot to everybody in the group. It’s just easier to just do it over voice sometimes.

Jovian: I honestly can see that. For example, if someone is asking for an update and he or she is using via voice, I’d probably feel more obligated to reply to them, even if I haven’t finished the thing. I’d probably still feel obligated to at least tell them via voice. Like-

Justin: Yeah, a Slack message is much easier to ignore, right?

Jovian: Yes.

Justin: When somebody took the time to actually send you a voice message, you’re like, “I should reply.”

Jovian: Like, voice, Slack message, and then emails. Emails are much easier to-

Justin: Yeah, exactly.

Jovian: So yeah, I want to end it with the big picture of the whole remote work scene. Recently, we have this kind of movement, I guess, of apps and products that help you to work asyncly. We have YAC Chat here, of course. And we have TWIST, which is developed by the Doist Team which created great products like the To Doist, and so on. So, in your opinion, what’s next for async remote work?

Justin: Yeah. I’ll take that even one level higher, and I think that we’re also in a resurgence right now of what I like to call passive entertainment or even passive learning. We see podcasts being very popular right now. A lot of people are switching over to audio books. It’s this idea that you can do things … I mean, it comes down to efficiency, right? Like, I can read a book while I drive, which without an audio book was just previously something that you couldn’t do.

And I think that TWIST and all these other async tools, at the core, it’s the same principle. It’s this idea of you can work and still communicate, right? It’s this idea of being able to do more than one thing at a time because we have tools that will allow us to be more productive. And so, a tool like YAC is not only there to say, “Hey, you can work asynchronously.” But it’s also there to say, you can listen to an update, you can speak an update.

I actually a lot of times will be on a call with a client or a customer or even an interview, right? And a YAC will come in for me. And I will listen to it while I’m on the call and reply just by simply muting my Zoom mic because I’m able to actually communicate with that person just by sending them a quick YAC in the middle of an existing meeting, right? So, it’s this idea of being able to multitask and do more than one thing at a time and it not being a distraction or taking you away from what you’re working on.

So, for us, we see the future of remote work being this idea of you can work mobile, you can work from wherever, when whenever, right? And on top of that, you can consume updates, give your standup, communicate kind of passively.

One of the things that I know that Hunter, one of my co-founders has been talking about is this idea that while he’s in the car, he can just send YACs to people instead of texting and driving which is obviously terrible, right? He can just, “Hey, Siri,” and send somebody a YAC. And that way, he doesn’t have to get distracted. He can still communicate effectively. And yeah, it’s this idea of being able to do things asynchronously and passively.

So, for the future of YAC, a lot of what we’re thinking about is how you consume information. So, we’ve just entered into this last Product Hunt Maker’s Festival as well. We built something that we call YAC Bot. And it’s this kind of chat bot riff, but with voice. We love our Alexas and our Google Homes, but they’re relegated to hardware, and they’re also loud for everybody.

So, we have like an Alexa Echo Dot in the office over there actually. And everybody hates it because I’ll ask for the weather or something, right? Because I need to know some information or when my next calendar meeting is. But it speaks it to everybody, right? It’s not like a private thing.

And so, we’re trying to take that concept and actually embed it inside of YAC. This idea of a very work focused, very asynchronous, passive learning and entertainment system. So, you could have a podcast inside of YAC one day maybe. Right now, we’re adding really simple stuff, like the latest Tech Crunch article or the newest article from the Wall Street Journal, it gets read to you over audio. We’re also thinking about accessibility, right?

So, what’s great about remote teams is that it enables somebody with disabilities to work on your team because they don’t have to show up in an office, they don’t have to work around existing office systems, they can work in their home where their home is set up for that disability.

And what’s awesome about that is with something like YAC, we can help vision impairment by maybe bringing them a little bit more into Slack than they could have been previously.

So, imagine having a Slack message read out to you by the person who actually sent that, right? Their voice even. We’re working with a couple of companies that are replicating voices using AI. So, this idea that now my Slack messages are read to me. Maybe even my email is being read to me. The top Product Hunt product of the day is being read to me.

And so, this idea that YAC is kind of this central repository for business and work and communication, but also just passive entertainment and consumption. And I think that that’s a lot of where remote work is going is this idea that you can just be at a coffee shop and you could listen to the status updates for the day while you’re working.

And the idea of remote work as a whole is this no boundaries. Like, time zones don’t matter. Location doesn’t matter. Language doesn’t even matter anymore, right? We have all these tools that help people communicate.

And I really want YAC to be at the forefront of that by providing additional tools on top of that layer to say, “Look, we’re going to enable you to work better, work more efficiently, communicate better, and communicate more efficiently.”

So yeah, that’s sort of where we see the landscape of remote work, and I think entertainment in general with this resurgence of podcasts and audiobooks and all these different ways that we’re relearning how to consume information as our lives become busier and more chaotic.

Jovian: Justin, thank you so much for your time. And where can we find you online? And how can we try YAC Chat?

Justin: Yeah. So, you can find me on Twitter. I’m @JMitch, J-M-I-T-C-H. Yac.chat for our website. Right now, it’s invite only, so you’d have to either request an invite from somebody else that’s already using it, or you just need to sign up on the website. We have kind of a two-step signup. So, if you do sign up, you’ll eventually get an email with a referral code you can share to other people. We’ll bump you up the wait list.

But there’s also kind of a shortcut key, which is as soon as you sign up, there’s a little link underneath the signup form that will allow you to fill out a full onboarding survey. And that requires some time. So, we understand that if someone’s going to put in that effort, we should automatically bump them up that wait list.

Jovian: That is super smart, actually. Great customer development … not trick. I hate the word trick. Great customer development process.

Justin: Yeah. Absolutely. So yeah, yac.chat and @JMitch, @yacchat on Twitter. Ask us questions, follow us. We’re super involved in the remote work community. So, if there’s a thing that bothers you that you think we could solve, hit us up. We’d love to add it as a feature.

Jovian: Awesome, Justin. Thank you so much for your time.

Justin: Yeah, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it.

Jovian: And that’s it for another episode of Outside The Valley brought to you by Arc. We created this podcast with the hope that with each episode you can learn something new from other remote startup people. So, if you have any feedback or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at Jovian@arc.dev. It’s J-O-V-I-A-N @ A-R-C.D-E-V. Or you can find us on Twitter @arcdotdev. See you next week with another episode of Outside The Valley and ciao.

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