Yapp has been around for a little over two months, offering consumers an easy way to create and publish mobile apps based around events. But the vision is much bigger than some conference or your weekly book club — eventually Yapp will allow any consumer to make almost any kind of app to broadcast as they please. It’s founder Maria Seidman’s big bet on trends.
She dropped by the studio to tell us about where she sees app creation (rather than consumption) going in the next few years, and being 36 weeks pregnant, she also filled us in on what it’s like to found a company while a baby grows inside of her.
Once upon a time, there were far fewer websites on the Internet, simply because not everyone knew how to build one. Only the brands with enough money to hire developers and designers could be “online,” until platforms like WordPress and Tumblr made website creation super easy.
Seidman sees the same transition happening with apps. There are over 650,000 apps on the App Store, but building an app isn’t nearly as easy as using Tumblr to build a website. Yapp is meant to help bridge the gap between today and tomorrow by letting anyone be an app publisher.
Of course, Seidman warns that Yapp isn’t for making the next Instagram or Angry Birds, it’s about letting anyone have a way to broadcast themselves through a mobile app, just as they would with their personal website.
Another topic of discussion was her pregnancy. I hate to get all “Women in Tech” (seriously), but starting a company while starting a new life seems like an extra difficult form of multitasking. Seidman said she never felt any hesitation from her co-founder or investors, but that she believes it may be an issue for some female founders, and that it’s important to have a conversation around the issue as women begin to found more and more companies.