Did you build your house, bake your bread or make your shoes?  No, most likely not.  You left it to professionals that can do it better, faster and cheaper.  You wouldn’t consider doing these activities yourself because it is a poor investment.  Not a monetary investment but an investment of your most valuable resource, time.  Why run a Startup different from the way you run your life?

Being lean is key to the success of any startup.  At Yapeo being lean means being smart with resources.  It doesn’t mean keeping under a certain dollar figure or spending 80 hours a week doing everything yourself.  To stay lean at Yapeo we follow our rule of  (  )Source It.  If we can’t (open, out, crowd …)Source It we don’t do it.  Following this single rule makes us lean.

(Out)Source It

Could we build our own system for catching metrics, mass email distribution or A/B testing?  Sure we could, but it takes time and expertise that we don’t have or want to invest in.  Leaving these tasks to experts not only allows us to focus on our core business it allows us to get better results.  I don’t know everything there is to know about the backend of A/B testing and all the statistical components.  By utilizing a service like Optimizely we are able to quickly test layouts, copy, colors or position.  I don’t have to worry about sifting through raw data and developing a method to analyze the results.  With Optimizely we log in and see what works and what doesn’t.  Services like this are not that expensive especially if you keep an eye open for deals at sites like AppSummo .

(Open)Source It

Utilizing open source software, platforms and applications is the heart of running lean.  Take advantage of the expertise and community validated software available in the open source community.  Need a video conversion tool? Use ffmpeg like we do or as discussed earlier (Out)Source IT to a service like zencoder, don’t waste your time writing it yourself.  The best software in the world is free and/or modifiable.  As a startup founder you have to be a programmer, designer, accountant, marketer, customer service, tech support, public relations and about 100 other functions.  Don’t consume yourself with building blocks of code.   At Yapeo we take what we feel are the best open source components and put them together to form the most kick ass classified system you ever saw.

We are working hard to change an industry, not writing code for coding sake.  As a bootstrapped startup resources are quickly exhausted.  A monetary infusion, from say the AppSumo Lean Challenge, means more outsourcing which frees up time to focus on customer needs which will eventually generate more resources.  Running lean means we can do more with less, pivot to meet user demand and leverage technology to make classifieds a fast, easy, fun way to buy/sell online.