Listen to this articleYEAY is a mobile-first video distribution platform. YEAY is also the first global marketplace app that combines mobile, shopping and short videos to help users sell products through their own sales channels. Below is our interview with Melanie Mohr, the founder and CEO of YEAY:
Q: You’ve recently announced $4.9 million Seed founding round; could you tell us something more?
A: It’s an exciting year for us. We came out of beta in January and we’ve now raised seed funding from a really first-class group of angel investors and VCs.
These include René Obermann, the former CEO of Deutsche Telekom, now a partner of private equity company, Warburg Pincus, Elio Leoni Sceti, Chairman of investment holding, LSG, and former CEO of frozen food company, Iglo Group, and EMI Music, and Erhard Schoewel, non-executive board member of COTY and former Executive Vice President of Reckitt Benckiser in Europe.
The round was led by Grazia Equity, one of the leading VCs in Germany. Mountain Partners also invested, who can help us scale the international market thanks to their global reach.
We plan to use the investment to continue innovating and adding more features to the app so that we can gain even more traction with the teenage market, otherwise known as Generation Z.
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Q: What is the story behind YEAY, how did you start?
A: It all started when I read an article about TV shopping. It’s amazing how successful this format is for a certain age group — thousands of products selling every hour.
I woke up the next morning and came downstairs to find my teenage kids on their mobiles making Snapchat videos. Watching videos, making videos, it’s second nature to them. But they are never going to sit through those long TV shopping ads that their parents or grandparents might have. They live in a world of instant and short form.
I wanted to see what would happen if you merged the worlds, short form video, shopping and mobile. And that’s how YEAY was born.
Through the course of my career I must have produced more than 100 TV shows including everything from music videos and documentaries, to kid’s entertainment and prime-time TV. And I’d already moved into the world of mobile video a few years back. I had this moment with a tech guy in the US who pointed at the phone in my hand and said, “Melanie, this is the video distribution platform of the future.” After that I launched a creative lifestyle platform for bitesize mobile videos.
So by the time I launched YEAY I really got video, I knew what worked, on TV, film and mobile.
Q: What makes you stand out from your competition?
A: YEAY is different by its design and its architecture, we really have a very different UI and UX to our competitors. From the start I knew that I wanted to build a mobile marketplace for people to sell and buy with video. The use case, the design and the whole user experience were all created from the start to focus on video. It wasn’t an afterthought or an add-on.
YEAY was also designed to support vertical video from the very beginning. At the time back in 2015 only Snapchat was designed to play vertical videos. But my kids will never turn their phones horizontally, unless perhaps they are lounging in bed. Most of the time we’re on the go and that’s exactly how YEAY was created – an on-the-go mobile experience.
We also went global from day one – which is rare for a marketplace. We launched out of beta in January in 18 languages and we’ve already had downloads in more than 160 countries.
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Q: Who are the primary clients of YEAY?
A: Anyone can sell and buy on YEAY but our main audience are teenagers between 13-18 years old. On the other hand we also have big established brands selling on our app. And in the middle we have emerging designers, artists, and independent shops selling everything from fashion and beauty to sports and tech, from all over the world.
It’s really interesting to see teenagers living up to their reputation of being entrepreneurial. We’ve got 14-year-old CEOs and teenagers selling their own brands, designs and merchandise. What an exciting time to be a teenager.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Mobile shopping is on the rise. And Generation Z are fueling it even more than millennials. We want to be the leading mobile commerce platform for the next generation of shoppers.
And we’re always going to be mobile-first, but we are exploring more omni-channel options, for instance integration with Apple TV, and iMessage. We do already have iMessage integrated into our app to broadcast our videos, but extending this to incorporate Apple’s recently announced peer-to-peer payment solution could help to create an exciting and seamless process.
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