Maria Seidman is the CEO and co-founder of Yapp, an award-winning platform where anyone can create and instantly publish a mobile application for your event, group, or promotion. Before founding Yapp in 2011, she ran mobile for Warner Bros. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children, one of which was born while launching Yapp. She is passionate about women in technology, mobile trends, media, and entrepreneurship. Seidman was named Entrepreneur Magazine’s Emerging Entrepreneur of 2014.

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Key Insights from our Conversation

• Maria starts off with how her frustration of not being able to know to code paved the way to her passion in making software that users love to use to enhance their lives.
• About a women’s retreat that inspired her to create Yapp, at what point she decided that it was worth the investment and the process she went through in creating the app from validation to looking for a technical co-founder.
• Maria walks us through her choice of approach and steps she took from conception of idea to coming up with a prototype.
• The timelines and phases Yapp went through and some of the mistakes that they have learned the hard way. She also shares that, if she can start all over again, she would start on the mobile side and emphasize user testing and market research before building a single line of code.
• Solve the problem really well for a specific user and start from that ? Why Maria’s advice can save you tons of time, money and effort.
• The transition she went through from working in an organization as global as Warner Brothers, the hustle she needed to employ when running her own start-up company and the pros and cons that went with the change.
• The initial hurdles they had encountered before they gained traction such as building their reputation and finding early adopters; and even the current ones now that they have scaled.
• The steps they implemented to get through their challenges and the iterations they did to optimize adoptions including efficient prioritization. She also talks about scaling customer acquisition and the roadmap for Yapp.
• Yapp’s ideal audience and the coolest things that they are working on right now.

Rapid Fire Questions

• What is your definition of innovation?

Innovation is solving problems in a completely new way that makes it better for your users.

• Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why?

Execution 90%, Idea 10%. Ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s getting to the execution which is really difficult.

• What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far?

Listen to your customers and solve very specific problems. Make somebody’s life better and the rest will come.

• What is your favorite business book?

How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything by Dov Seidman

• What is your favorite digital resource?

News Aggregators such as Pocket

News Apps on iOS

Chrome Extensions

• What is your favorite app and why?

Yapp as it democratizes technology.

Slack