What we talked about
Welcome back to The PreVetted Podcast, where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world.
Show notes
Yasin Abbak joins the PreVetted Podcast for episode 10.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:01.029) Welcome to PreVetted Podcast, a blend of tech and leadership. Our goal is to explore the journeys and stories of our guests, revealing valuable insights about engineering and business and sharing them with our community. Our guest today is Yasin Abbak. He’s an entrepreneur with a background in finance and he launched multiple successful startups and companies. And we’re going to talk in more detail about that.
So you’re welcome to join us. Hello, Yacine. How are you doing today?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (00:34.744) doing very well. Thank you. How are you?
Federico Ramallo (00:37.831) doing great. Thank you very much for joining.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (00:42.084) Thank you, thanks for having me. And I’ll get to the details of multiple successful startups. There were some that were learning experiences along the way. So hopefully we continue on a more upward trajectory of everything I do from now on, but have some more stories too.
Federico Ramallo (00:51.091) Ha ha ha ha ha!
Federico Ramallo (00:58.162) Great, great, yes. I was reading about all the startups that you started and exited and I have to say I admire your trajectory and everything that you achieved.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (01:13.422) Thanks man, appreciate that.
Federico Ramallo (01:15.045) Yeah, yeah, it’s a, it looks easy on the, you know, on the CV, but then it’s sweat and pain and, you know, commitment and yeah, sheer commitment, right?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (01:28.548) The CV is the interesting part. You just take the highlights and pop it in. Yeah, worst part of it is just living through it to get that one bullet point highlight on the CV.
Federico Ramallo (01:35.143) Right.
Federico Ramallo (01:43.293) Yes, yes, it looks easy from the outside. yeah.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (01:47.908) I mean, I wish I had it easy. Let’s hope for easiness moving forward.
Federico Ramallo (01:54.26) Yes, yes. I mean, I am an entrepreneur as well. You know, I founded multiple companies, you know, maybe not as successful as yours, but anyways. But the it’s I think that there is some some level of, you know, of stubbornness of, know, we’re not we’re not going to get into this is going to be painful, but we still getting into it. Right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (02:23.61) yeah, I think you have to be a little crazy. I think you have to be a little crazy to be a first time entrepreneur. I think you have to be a lot crazy to be a second or third time or fourth time entrepreneur.
Federico Ramallo (02:36.255) Right, You went through, you survived. Right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (02:40.356) You know what you’re signing up for. You know what you’re about to go through and you do it anyway. I think that’s crazy. I really think that’s crazy. I think I’m a little crazy.
Federico Ramallo (02:49.045) Yes, yes, I feel the same way. Yes, I agree with you. Yeah. And congratulations on winning the Star Wars Battlefield last TechCrunch 2024.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (03:00.228) We got an award, we didn’t win the entire battlefield, but we did get an award, we were recognized, which was nice. Thank you.
Federico Ramallo (03:06.238) Right, you were the top 20, but then you got another award, right?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (03:09.22) We got a Spirit of Tech Crunch, a Spirit of Disrupt Award, which was nice. That was a personal call out for me, which I feel honored by. yeah, when we went there, we were mainly focusing on…
Seeing what else is out there, connecting with other entrepreneurs, you know, we’ll get into our product, I’m sure, with what Groupups is doing, but it’s not like our audience is there, but I think it’s super important to be connected in with others that are building and showcasing what you do on a stage, especially one as big as TechCrunch is important, it’s helpful, is great brand building, so there are huge benefits that come with that. But you don’t go there to necessarily win the award. I think you go there to
be around really incredible people that are also doing things that are incredibly difficult but are being pursued by ambitious people. And you hope that through osmosis you can become better and more like those people and maybe you can be a part of them becoming better too.
Federico Ramallo (04:11.606) Yes, yes, I agree. So let’s get into a little bit about your latest startup where you, you know, you, that’s how I met you through Groupups. What does Groupups do for, you know, people that don’t know you guys?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (04:27.448) Yeah, group ups, what we did was we created a platform, an experience for people that are buying really complicated things where nobody is an expert essentially on what this piece of equipment that you might be buying. Nobody’s an expert on that. So in dentistry, which was our launch market, for example, these big X-ray machines that take 3D images of the skull of the face of the mouth. Who’s an expert in buying this thing? Nobody.
Even a dentist, the dentist doesn’t know how to buy it, what these things should cost, what brand is appropriate for them. They’re overwhelmed. Buying big equipment in general is overwhelming even for somebody who is a procurement specialist, a buying specialist. Because guess what? You’re not buying this thing every day. It’s not like you’re familiar, very familiar with this thing. So what we did was we took a look into a few industries, including dentistry, and we learned that not only is the process overwhelming, but the pricing is all over the place.
There is no pricing transparency. Think of these things as call for pricing type stuff.
where the MSRP doesn’t matter. Nobody actually pays the MSRP. And behind that is what are people actually paying? Okay, well, you don’t know. And the way that we solve it is we do 95 % of the work that the salespeople who are experts at selling the equipment, who you have to buy from, what we’ve done is we do 95 % of their work with AI. And in five minutes, we know exactly the type of equipment that somebody should be buying in an unbiased brand neutral way.
And because we’re doing this so often on behalf of individually owned businesses that are very hard to sell to, so your customer acquisition cost is high, what we do is we’ve done all of their work and we drop this hot lead into the lap of a salesperson and say, here you go, all your work is done. Voila, give us a good price.
Federico Ramallo (06:22.648) Right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (06:23.31) and they’re happy with it. So they give us a better price. We do their work and the buyer is happy, the seller is happy. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
Federico Ramallo (06:32.869) Right, right. Part of the challenge, as you mentioned, is the complexity of the equipment and then that your buyer is a non-technical person. So if you talk technical, then you’re screwed, right? But also they need to understand some of the intricacies of the equipment, right? Yeah, it’s…
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (06:53.956) Yeah, and we try to make it relatable. mean, look, we don’t know, you might not know an x-ray machine, even if you’re a doctor or a dentist. But what you do know is cars, you see cars every day, you probably go to work in a car. Okay, so let’s step away from x-rays. What kind of car are you buying? Are you looking for a BMW or are you looking for a Toyota? Because they’re different.
You might not know all the intricacies and all the differences, but that gives us a good starting point. Cause if you’re not shopping for a BMW motorcycle, because you have a family and you need seats in the, you need car seats. Well, a motorcycle doesn’t match what you need. It’s not suitable. You wouldn’t know that if it weren’t cars. Imagine you’d never seen cars before you’ve never bought one before. So we make it really easy and relatable and easy to understand for this, this complex stuff. We make it accessible so that they can understand it a bit better. We say, aha, you’re asking for a
Toyota sedan. You’re not asking for a luxury vehicle. You’re not asking for a motorcycle. You want something reliable. Great! Here are the options. By the way, this is the best pricing that you’re gonna get on this. Here’s who to buy it from. Cut out all the complexity.
Federico Ramallo (08:05.959) Yeah, yes, I understand. Yeah, the way that I try it, because I am on both sides, right? I’m a software engineer and I’m an entrepreneur. So sometimes I have to talk about business to non-technical people, technical stuff to non-technical people. talking about black boxes, I know how it works, but they don’t…
they don’t care, they don’t have the attention to get into that so what they want to know is what does that box do, right?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (08:46.456) Yeah, they want to know the value that they’re getting. They’re not as excited about what backend looks like or what code base you use. They don’t care about that. What does this do for me? What value do I get? For us, it’s pretty simple. You get better price and it’s brand neutral. It’s a better experience. You don’t have to talk to salespeople.
Federico Ramallo (08:49.435) Yes. Yes.
Federico Ramallo (09:06.695) the
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (09:06.884) For you, it’s, look, it works. It accomplishes what you’re wanting it to accomplish. You don’t care that I wrote it in X, Y, Z language. This is the value that you get. Yeah, I think it’s very similar with what we do.
Federico Ramallo (09:18.437) Yes, yes, I agree. And why are you focusing on dental equipment? Are you planning to go to other type of verticals in the future?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (09:30.916) Yeah, we’ll go to other verticals, but the story with dentistry is actually a pretty fun one for me to tell. So before we launched Groupups, the original version of this company was called The Convoy. And the idea was get small businesses that are independently owned discounts on services and on software. Because we would be grouping together their buying power and giving access through a lower customer acquisition cost to the sellers to access our audience.
We had a bad go to, we had a decent go to market strategy, but it wasn’t gonna work. It was a horizontal platform, horizontal approach to marketing. We said, okay, if this isn’t going to work, but we know that the thesis, the problem is still the problem to solve, we have to solve it a different way. And as I’m going back and forth with maybe what industry to verticalize into or what pivot we need to make on the product, I go in for a root canal. So I had just moved to North Carolina from New York.
And I go in for a root canal and the dentist knows me or knows of me because he used my last app. And he said, Yassin, what are you doing now? I saw you sold your company. My friends all used your app. said, first of all, that’s pretty cool. I’m like this tiny, tiny celebrity in a really small niche industry that it’s kind of weird if somebody knows who I am. That’s like a one in a million occurrence for me. It happened to be my dentist.
And I said, well, here’s what we’re doing. We’re getting discounts for small businesses on services, on technology, on software, things like that, including for offices like yours. What do you need? And he’s like, my God, I need this.
You have no idea. He walks me over to his X-ray machine. That example I was giving earlier about the big X-ray machine that goes around your head. He walks me over to his X-ray machine and he goes, Yassin, it took me three months to negotiate this thing down. I got it down $12,000, but here’s the thing. I don’t have three months. I’m running two offices. I’m a business owner. And the other thing is I don’t know if the 12,000 is real. I have no idea what it really should cost. I have no idea. Nobody knows.
Federico Ramallo (11:17.93) Yes.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (11:38.572) So maybe I got 3000 off, maybe I got, maybe the 12,000 is real. I doubt it, but I supposedly got $12,000 off. I said, that’s very interesting. So there’s no pricing transparency. I’m an arbitrage person. I have a finance background. So I’m thinking, where are the imperfections here? And I say, okay, let’s get my root canal finished, but I’m going to go to a trade show. So I go to a trade show in Miami and I start talking to the salespeople that are, I get friendly with them.
Federico Ramallo (12:00.811) You
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (12:07.364) And they start talking about, yeah, they sell the same stuff to veterinarians, but for less, for less money. I said, wow, ha ha, cool, why? Well, dentists make more money. And then I find out that they call it the dental tax because dentists don’t know any better. I said, aha, imperfection, arbitrage opportunity. These are buyers that are fragmented from each other. There’s no pricing transparency because of that. And they have no leverage. They have no buying power as a group.
Federico Ramallo (12:23.531) Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (12:37.26) I went back to that dentist. He ended up becoming my first dental investor, my own dentist. And he said, Yasen, I think if you do this for dentalists, this can get really big. I said, I agree. This is a massive market to start in, but it also opens up the door to answer your other question into medical equipment more broadly.
because a lot of the same players, lot of the same manufacturers, a lot of the same distributors that are in dental are in medical. So we used it as a wedge to get into medical equipment. But the reality is we’re not building a vertical specific platform. We are.
in a specific vertical, but the tech that we’re building, the approach that we’re building, the process that we’re building, it’s applicable to really anything where there are large dollar amounts being spent on pieces of equipment that not everybody is an expert in and really can’t become an expert in.
Federico Ramallo (13:30.176) Right, right. And they don’t have the visibility or the bandwidth to become an expert in. Whether how the machine works, the specifics and the technical specifications, but also the value on the market.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (13:48.312) That’s right. With AI, you don’t need to be in the dark anymore. You do need to know how to use the AI to get to the right types of products, but you also don’t know, you don’t have pricing transparency. So we have a database of all these prices from across the country that all of these independently owned buyers are sending us. I know what the prices are across the board. Nobody else has this. So we’re using that as intelligence for the benefit of the buyer.
Federico Ramallo (14:09.836) Right.
Federico Ramallo (14:17.773) I see very interesting. It’s the way that I see, you know, going back to we’re talking about, you know, building startups. As an entrepreneur, we have to have this balance of stubbornness and sensitivity, right? On one hand, it’s stubbornness because, you know, sometimes the word is saying, you know, that’s not going to work, but you have to be stubborn enough to
punch through that, right? But then sensitive enough to see how, you know, what are the problems? What are they, you know, what people tell you because that’s where you get the feedback on where things are going to work, right? So it’s a selective stubbornness, selective sensitivity, I guess, right? It’s very tricky, very difficult to do it right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (15:09.774) think, look, I’m not saying I’ve always done it right. In fact, I’ve certainly done it wrong in some instances. I think the trick is, if there is a trick, at least what has worked for me is just being honest with yourself.
If you’re constantly saying, we doing this right? Are we testing this like scientists and being non-emotional about if this is working or not? I think that helps because in our case, you that first iteration of our product wasn’t working. And it’s not because the product was bad. It’s because the market or at least our way of getting to that market wasn’t working. Okay. So we need to adjust. We need to pivot. My thing has always been be a cockroach. Be hard to kill.
Well, the easiest way to die is to let yourself get in the way of succeeding, of living by being stubborn in the wrong way, like you mentioned, but being, as you called it, sensitive, sensitive enough to say, yeah, this isn’t working out. Let me be honest with myself and say, it’s not working and make the adjustments that are needed. It’s really hard to do when you’ve taken money from family, friends, investors, people that you know, and you care about. It’s hard to say, Hey, I got this wrong.
But when you’re honest to yourself, you can be honest with them and they get it and they’re okay with it. And it allows you to actually preserve their money and preserve your own company and cockroach down as I call it, just be hard to kill.
Federico Ramallo (16:34.694) I love that phrase. I’m going to start using it.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (16:37.796) make startup cockroaches across the world.
Federico Ramallo (16:41.094) Right, right. Yeah, I think that’s, I mean, there are unicorns out there, right? Start-up unicorns are there, which is great. great. If the market opportunity that you got in, gets you there, that’s great. I think that it’s much higher probable and much more likely to get, to,
to grow towards what the market is responding, right? And then you can see how big that opportunity is going to be, right? And do your best to try to get there. there, Try to find what is the most efficient way to grow rather than trying to aim to a unicorn, an overbuilding overgrowing to then eventually failing if it’s not a…
A unicorn, right?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (17:41.112) Yeah. And I’ve made, by the way, I’ve made, I’ve adopted the wrong mentality thing in, in fire lives. Even in this company, I’ve adopted the wrong mentality. And this is not my first company. It’s not my second company. And I still adopted the wrong mentality. It’s hard to adopt that mentality all the time. But if you keep coming back to center and you, you’re honest with yourself, like we talked about, and you identify what’s not working openly and honestly, and you’re not.
to precious over being correct, you can get to the right solution. You can get to the right place that you need to be. But you know, the path to unicorn, I think is really… it doesn’t start at the finish line. I think a lot of people build, to your point, as if they’re a unicorn already or with a unicorn mentality. But imagine getting ready for a marathon and all you did was train for the last mile.
What about the first 27 miles or however long a marathon? I’ve never won one, I never will. But what if all you did was train the last mile? You’re not gonna survive the marathon. You have to prepare for that last mile, be open to it. But I think a lot of people take that unicorn mentality the wrong way. You can’t get to mile 26 without getting through miles one and four and 10 first.
Federico Ramallo (18:54.823) Right.
Federico Ramallo (19:03.805) It’s that phrase of, know, a 10,000 miles trip starts with one step, right? And then another one, and then another one, Yeah. I prefer to drive to the US rather than fly, right? It takes longer, it’s more expensive, right? It’s a less efficient way to go, right?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (19:11.907) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (19:33.396) It’s a 36 hour driving to get to the Bay Area, for instance, from Guadalajara.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (19:40.74) I was just looking up how long it takes to get from Guadalajara to the US, 36 hours to the bay. That’s a long one.
Federico Ramallo (19:47.382) Yeah, yeah, it’s 2000 miles. Yes, yes. But it’s, you know, for one, on one side is to do something extraordinary, right? That’s one part of the thing. The other one is, you know, to challenge myself to do something difficult, right? But it’s, you know, but it’s also, and in that process is like, you know, basically you start driving, okay, how can I do the next tower?
And then how can I the next tower? If you think about the whole trip, then yeah, it sounds impossible. And it’s what you’re talking about. I’ve done it like 10 times already and enjoyed it very much. Because I get into this zen, it’s me, myself, the road. It’s a great place to just go through ideas.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (20:43.822) Do you do this alone by the way? You’re doing this alone? Wow.
Federico Ramallo (20:47.255) Mostly yes. I’ve done it on different vehicles, different situations sometimes with other people, with my family.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (21:02.66) That’s a lengthy one.
Federico Ramallo (21:04.684) Yes, yes. Yeah. And one time I did it from La Paz to Guadalajara on the road because I have my dog with me and they wouldn’t let my dog go through the ferry. So I said, okay, I’ll drive it, you And my wife said, good luck and flying, you know. La Paz is south of Baja. The southern…
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (21:25.686) La Paz, Bolivia?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (21:31.212) Okay, in Mexico.
Federico Ramallo (21:34.273) point of Baja.
Federico Ramallo (21:39.032) it’s yeah so I kind of did the Baja 1000 which is a race you know off-road race but you know with the comfort of a vehicle so it’s not race it’s know it’s like you know going on the road and things like that right so it’s a kind of cheating but anyway yeah yeah
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (22:01.688) Nice. Sounds fun. Sounds like it could be fun.
Federico Ramallo (22:05.527) It is fun.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (22:08.886) I imagine like startups, it’s probably not always fun. Not every part of it at least.
Federico Ramallo (22:12.439) Hahaha
Yeah, and you have to go through different risky situations. You you could run out of fuel, the truck could break, you know, there’s so many things that could go wrong. So yeah, it’s like a startup in a way, right? That, you know, if you do all all those things right, if you prepare for all the things right, then, you know, you’re going to go through, through it successfully, right?
Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about your other startups. Tell me a little bit about how you founded Fantasy Life. How’d you got into that?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (22:53.668) Yeah, so Fantasy Life’s story actually starts with my first company, which was right after I left Morgan Stanley. I started this company called Paired Media. And we did well. We did half a million in sales, just me and my business partner over 18 months. It was a brand new product. It was in the physical world. I can get into what we did, but it’s not too important to the story. The end of it was that we were onto something, but it wasn’t going to scale without capital. We weren’t going to get the capital. We hadn’t proven the business enough.
to warrant any sort of injection of capital. The type of business we were building, was honestly more like a private equity backed business where you would have more cash, potentially more cash flow, but it needed a larger injection of capital. And we had created a new market for the thing that we had produced. But at the end of the day, with me bankrolling it and it just being me and my business partner.
it wasn’t going to scale to where we needed to go. So we unceremoniously shut it down. But we had turned some heads, especially some impressive people in New York. Gary Vee and his brother, A.J. Vaynerchuk, they had noticed what we had done. And they said, we really like what you did.
more so we like you and your team. We think you guys have done an incredible job. We want to introduce you to an opportunity. There’s this celebrity, I don’t know if you like sports and I’m like, yeah, I like sports. I said, okay, well there’s this guy, he’s the biggest name in fantasy sports, Matthew Barry, he’s at ESPN. He’s looking for somebody like you to start something with. And I said, okay, let’s chat. So we talked, turns out he was building a community of some sort. This is back when social media wasn’t as
I guess robust as it is now, there was still some green pastures available to innovate in. And I said, okay, this is neat. This is a good starting point. And I sat back and I learned about just social in general. it wasn’t really until, honestly, it’s where I cut my teeth when it comes to tech, building tech, how to build tech, how to recruit for tech, what types of metrics are important in consumer facing tech. And this was a mobile app.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (25:05.636) And it was the first time I was working with any sort of influencer of any kind. The money that we had raised was from a lot of other influencers who were big in sports, and this is a sports tech company. But we took this little social community and we realized we had a lot of levers that we could use to generate top of funnel acquisition of users.
Now every business in my opinion has three categories of activity, three activities that fall into one of three categories. A, R, I call it arm, arm of the company. A is to acquire customers. And we had a good engine to at least acquire early customers, early adopters. I said, great, that’s a perfect testing ground, but it doesn’t stop there. can’t just acquire them. What if you’re throwing a party and you invite everybody to your party and you acquire them nicely, but your party sucks.
you’re not going to R retain them. They’re not gonna stay with you. They’re gonna leave, they’ll never come back. So okay, we have A figured out, we have acquire figured out. Now if we can figure out how to retain them, now people will stay with us and we can’t retain them unless we acquire them. So it goes in that order, A acquire, R retain. Now we have a way, we have a proving ground of sandbox to play in to learn how to retain these users.
And we realized that, again, this comes back to me being an arbitrage person, we realized that something of significant value to this specific audience was information, and it was speed of information. In fantasy sports, this started off as a fantasy sports platform community, there’s a big advantage to knowing things before others know things.
And the way that we launched what was essentially our big feature that made the company is a fascinating story. We had the fastest breaking news alerts in the industry. And it was a game changer. It made a huge difference for people. The way that that started was I remember exactly what I was wearing, remember exactly where I was, and I remember what the next 16 weeks of my life looked like.
Federico Ramallo (26:45.756) I see.
Federico Ramallo (26:57.041) You
Federico Ramallo (27:05.542) Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (27:14.092) I was wearing these blue shorts, football shorts from my high school. Casually on a couch in my living room in Jersey City, New Jersey, right across the river from New York City. My wife is in the next room, has no idea what the Pandora’s box I’m about to open. I look down at my phone and I see somebody sends out an alert, a breaking news alert, another app.
And I said, I know we can do that faster. And I’m looking at my data. I’m obsessed with the data. I’m a data person, analytics, Arbitrat data, data is everything. I’m looking at the numbers and I’m saying there’s gotta be a way to create a more engaging platform. Because I’m thinking R, I’m thinking retain, retention. How do I retain these users? We’re getting them in. How do we keep them?
and we have a good product, people are engaging with each other, but I needed something, a topic for them to talk about in a more substantial way to increase a metric that was important to us, which is time spent in app. How do we do that? Well, I said we can do the alerts faster. Now, before I tell you how we did these alerts, the way that I build technology, because I’m not developer.
I’m not like you, I don’t build things. I build things, I just don’t build them the same way that you do. The way that I build is I validate whether an idea should be built or not. And my goal is always to build something that is so successful manually that I have no choice but to build the tech, because I validated the business case for it, the use case for it. Well, this next thing that I did, did all of that at the drop of a dime.
Federico Ramallo (28:22.366) Right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (28:49.506) I said, I can take a look at data that’s out there and immediately surface it to my users knowing that there was high intent of taking action on this info. Let me try it. Now, we don’t have a front end anything. There’s no admin console. I’m logging into our server. And I’m about to send a push notification to, I think at the time we had maybe 50,000 downloads that were still on the devices. I’m sweating.
I’m thinking, okay, I’m gonna copy and paste this. I’m gonna give proper attribution to the reporter. I don’t even remember what our first news alert was, but what I do know is that the, I think the reporter that broke the news didn’t have a lot of followers on Twitter. He broke the news on Twitter. And we took that reporter who had maybe like a few thousand followers and blasted his message out to tens of thousands immediately as it happened.
Nobody else knew it was happening. Nobody else has alerts turned on for this person, but I knew that this was significant for my audience. Immediately, I’m watching the numbers rise in my analytics dashboard. Everybody’s jumping in. People are like, where do I talk about this? Our product wasn’t even ready for people to talk about that notification. It just went to the top of our newsfeed. No reference to the notification. In fact, if you clicked on the notification, you lost it.
because now you’re in the app, the notification didn’t even go anywhere. MVP, right? Okay, but I proved that people are willing to jump in. Aha, that dictated the next 16 weeks of my life and my developer team’s lives. We immediately needed to fix the experience for when we send out the next thing, but it also meant that I couldn’t stop what I was doing. I overnight, out of nowhere, signed up for 16 weeks of me monitoring my phone and my laptop.
live from 6 a.m. until 2 a.m. for 16 weeks. Nobody really knows this. They thought it was all technology that first season and it wasn’t. I would take my phone and I would put it into a Ziploc bag and I would put it on my shower caddy when I took a shower. I showered once a week.
Federico Ramallo (30:46.368) Wow.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (31:01.315) for those 16 weeks, but you could actually play with your phone if it’s in a Ziploc bag. And as I’m monitoring, hoping that nothing happens while I’m in the shower, if something broke, if news broke, I would have to log into my server from my phone and immediately send out this notification. It was very manual process. I did not need glasses before that season. My wrists didn’t do these things where they crack before that season. I gave up my body for that season, but the thing is,
That one action and the subsequent 16 weeks of our lives made the company. We finally went from acquiring to retaining and our numbers are app metrics. We’re in the top, I believe it was top 0.1 % of app metrics in the app store because of that.
Federico Ramallo (31:49.664) Wow. Right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (31:50.562) Yeah, it was phenomenal. It changed the business around. And then that informed our, and I didn’t tell you what is yet, so acquire, retain. Finally, you have the right to monetize. And it allowed us to pivot some focus to monetization efforts. But that made the company, that one random decision that nobody prepared for.
that we made on a whim and it made the entire company up until we exited. That was the feature. It made the entire company, honestly. Eventually we automated it. That was not sustainable to do the way I did it the first season. We built tech around it to make it much simpler. But that was the story of how that phenomenal feature came to be. It was the literal body sacrifice of me and my team to get that thing out there that first season.
Federico Ramallo (32:43.46) Right, right. The way that I describe that usually is, know, sheer commitment, right? You have to be crazy enough to get in 150 % to do whatever it takes to, you know, get the application and the startup successful. yeah. Yes, yes. Very interesting. Yeah, I am.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (33:01.026) I did tell you I was crazy.
Federico Ramallo (33:11.821) I used to, as a software engineer, used to get too focused on the how, how to build stuff, right? we can use this tool and this database and this, whatever it is, right? And I used to not think about what the people want. So it took me a while to get to the…
what’s in it for me as a user, Kind of idea. and I think that’s what I struggle the most with, you know, because as a software engineer, it’s, you know, you’re socially, what is the word, you know, you’re socially crippled, right? In a way, right? You’re more focused on the things than people. So it takes more effort to actually…
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (33:42.841) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (34:10.882) interact with other people, right? That’s what I’m trying to say, right? So, you know, I’m an introvert, you know, so it takes a…
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (34:26.668) It’s not your initial mode of thinking. Your initial mode of thinking is probably not about how are people receiving this. It’s probably more tinkering and what can this thing do functionally.
Federico Ramallo (34:28.902) Right. Right.
Federico Ramallo (34:39.526) Right, right. on my, this was before my first startup, was, I participated in a, I was 15 years old and I participated in a junior’s achievements program called The Company. Basically, you know, they invited teenagers to build a startup, right? 30 people, they put them together. Basically we built the first tech,
tech company on the program. basically we, you everybody was selling, you know, they had a hot dog stand or, you know, or jelly, whatever, right? You know, small products. We build the first tech company. We build something similar to eBay back in 1999, right? You know, you probably know about Mercado Libre, it’s the eBay of Latin America, right? So we,
we built something similar right before they launched it. So yeah, it was very extraordinary at that time. And I remember sitting there at Microsoft offices because they were the sponsors. they put the place, the office, they showed their office for the, that was a venue. And I remember,
sitting up there and thinking about, know, like, I’m an introvert, I have difficulty talking with people. So at that moment, I made the decision to break that, you know, I am going to, you know, stop being introverted, right? You know, kind of thinking it to myself, right? And, you know, they had 400 people, they chose 60. And then from those 60, they built two companies of 30.
And then we were chosen for incubator, right?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (36:43.332) At 15, 16 years old? I don’t know what I was doing at 15, 16, but it wasn’t that.
Federico Ramallo (36:46.589) Yes, yes.
So they wanted to buy the company for $70,000 back then, right?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (36:59.246) Hold on. You’re 15, 16, and they’re going to buy your company for 60, $70,000.
Federico Ramallo (37:06.41) Yeah, I mean we had 60 shareholders, know, 30 were the kids that were building this and then the other 30 were, you know, parents that bought the shares, right? So the incubator basically wanted to hire the tech team. So I became the de facto CTO, right, of the tech team.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (37:17.923) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (37:32.52) We learn how to code, how to build the stuff, and we launch it.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (37:36.674) And how old were you when you became the CTO? okay, so you were more experienced by then. You were 15 and a half. Okay, got it.
Federico Ramallo (37:40.202) 15 and a half because yeah.
Federico Ramallo (37:45.096) Of course. And from those 400 people, then basically they hired me at Microsoft. When I went to the interviews, I asked, hey, where are the other candidates? There were no other candidates around me. So basically they built up a position just for me. I didn’t know that at that time. I learned that eventually. So that was fun. And I learned a lot.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (38:08.93) That’s very cool.
Federico Ramallo (38:14.698) going through that, right? Yeah. So I went from startup to enterprise in a year.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (38:23.512) Man, I’m trying to remember what I was doing at 15, 16. I was probably just focused on like how to not be awkward or something or… I don’t know, but good on you, man. That’s a cool experience.
Federico Ramallo (38:31.212) Right.
It was a great experience. So very interesting. didn’t know about the ARM framework. I don’t know if it’s called framework, acquired retained monetization.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (38:50.476) I have no idea. This is something I made up. This is something I’ve always used in my life. But I do use it. use it when I mentor, when I talk to other companies, when I advise companies that I’ve invested in, like my own companies. do use the, I suppose it is a framework. I don’t know. I’m sure other people use similar frameworks, but I don’t wanna, it’s not like ARM is something you’re gonna be able to Google and find a lot of results on. This is just what I use.
Federico Ramallo (38:57.117) You
Federico Ramallo (39:19.724) Right, right. Well, I learned that I’ve been doing stuff without knowing what I was doing, what the name of what I was doing. And then eventually it was like, I’m doing CTO type of activities. am doing, I’m an entrepreneur because somebody made me realize what you are doing is building companies. So then you’re an entrepreneur. And I was like, OK, yeah, it makes sense.
You just invented a framework. Congratulations.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (39:52.836) Thank you. it’s an old framework. I’ve been using it for like 10 years. Maybe I should have put it out there somewhere back then. I’m actually going to see if there is a known framework that accomplishes the same thing.
Federico Ramallo (40:06.124) Right. It’s not only new, it’s proven.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (40:11.3) At least anecdotally and at a micro level with my company, it has helped my own thinking.
Federico Ramallo (40:22.894) So I wanted to ask you a little bit about exiting startups. I haven’t experienced that myself yet. How do you know when is the right time to exit a startup?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (40:39.256) man, I don’t know. Anybody that tells you they know the answer to that probably doesn’t know either. Who knows? Look, I think the right thing to do is you, especially if you have investors, you have a fiduciary and in my opinion, a personal responsibility to do what’s right by them. And to do what’s right by them, you need to listen to what’s out there to be able to do what’s right for their money.
alongside what they invested in, right? So they know there’s inherent risk involved. So, you know, we’re going to do some things that are not proven yet, that are maybe unconventional. That’s all part of the game. And some of it can lead to their investment becoming zero. But you have a responsibility to them to…
do what you can for them to earn something off of the money that they invested. And the best way to do that is to build a revenue generating company that can be so profitable that you IPO and everybody’s happy, everybody buys an island, right? That’s the, and hopefully donates the majority of their money, but that’s their personal decision at that point. That’s what I would hope to do. But I think you need to listen to these offers at least if they are coming in.
Federico Ramallo (41:45.615) Hahaha
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (41:54.628) I think most offers coming in are probably a waste of time in general. But if you haven’t sold a company, at least for me, it was helpful to understand the process and what that actually looks like. Because just like raising capital, you don’t really know what a qualified conversation is.
So you learn by doing, you might talk with an investor and you think, they’re definitely interested. They asked for my deck or they said, let’s talk again in two months. And you get caught up on that. Getting acquired, I think is the same thing. And it’s not like I’ve been a part of 20 acquisitions or something. It’s been like one and a half. I sold my company and I was on the founding team of another company that sold. But I wasn’t part of that, the other company, the Event Technology Company. I wasn’t there at the negotiating table.
So that one, you know, I don’t know how that deal was exactly structured. So my experience is being on the selling of my one company, but I also did for that first tech company that I talked to you about, the one, the paired media. I also structured a deal to be acquired. And here’s how that one worked.
There was a person who ran an agency in my industry. Not a marketing agency, they were an agency to manage…
spend in the vertical that we were building in. He invited me to his office because he really liked what we had built. He said, this is really cool. I think we could build a big business out of this. And I said, aha, so do I. He said, why don’t we chat? I said, look, I’m looking to raise capital so that I can build this thing up and out. I think this can get really big. He said, I have a different idea. Why don’t we roll you up, have you be CEO?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (43:45.868) and buy a bunch of different companies, but it’ll all be under your umbrella. That deal, after that idea was presented to me, that idea was presented at the end of the work day, his work day, 5 p.m. I stayed in his office until 2 a.m. and we just structured the deal. We just sat there one on one.
Federico Ramallo (44:02.139) Wow.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (44:06.05) Now this isn’t a publicly traded company. He was the main decision maker at his company. It was a sizable company, but we sat down one on one. We got to know each other. We ate dinner, which was great at the time because that was my first company and I was broke. So he bought, which is nice. And we stayed up until 2 a.m. in his office in the middle of Manhattan, structuring what this deal would look like. Who else we would look to acquire?
Federico Ramallo (44:23.589) Ha ha.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (44:34.052) what our evaluation was or wasn’t and what our expectations could and should be, what the commitment post acquisition would be. And I thought, wow, I had structured a whole exit in an evening. And the truth was, yeah, we actually did structure like 85 % of it. Now,
I went back to my partner and I was like, look, I think this is an opportunity, but I think we can go bigger than what he’s envisioning. And in my head, I had a dollar amounts that I wanted to sell for, or I was going to see myself as a failure, which is a really immature way to think, by the way, I disagree with myself completely now. But we ended up walking away from the deal. But I thought I knew how to structure a deal now.
I was like, okay, I’ve been through this once. What I didn’t know, and I didn’t learn until I sold my last company was there’s so much more that needed to be done. Now, again, it’s true. We did like 85 % of the deal, 5 PM to 2 AM. We ironed it all out. But then there were lawyers, there were employment agreements that we needed to think through. were, what does that non-compete look like? There was a lot of legal that we hadn’t thought through yet, but conceptually we had figured out what this thing could and should look like. So, you know, I’ve been at that
table a few times including with suitors that wanted to buy the company that either we ended up walking away from or they walked away from the deal as well and it wasn’t going to make sense and we ended up selling to what I think is an awesome company led by a really solid team with the company that I sold my last one to but there were a lot of stuff that I hadn’t before that I had to learn about. What I do know is this to your original question of when do you know how to sell your company?
You don’t know. At least from my experience. I’ve never scaled a company to, you know, a hundred plus people and I’ve never sold the company for over like for nine digits. But they were sizable enough where I have some experience. My level though.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (46:35.38) is very specific to the level of exit that I’ve had. I imagine that this is far different for people doing much bigger numbers or selling to publicly traded companies. We did have a bid come in from a publicly traded company. That was a different process. It was much lengthier, for example. So there’s a ton that I don’t know. But I will say, when it comes to answering the question of how do you know when to sell, I think the answer is you don’t. You just kind of go with the flow, which you need to get really good at as an entrepreneur.
to what the market is saying. You are curious and you want to find out more and learn more about your own market because you always come in almost like as an outsider there’s always more to learn and having those conversations with potential buyers is a part of satiating that curiosity. Learning more. Being curious so that you constantly are gaining more knowledge.
And I think at some point it feels right. The numbers make sense. Both sides have to feel like this makes sense. The buyer’s not going to buy unless they have full commitment that this makes sense for them and that the team is the right team to bring into their umbrella. Everything’s got to match up and I feel like that happens very rarely. But you should have the conversations in the meantime so you can learn more so that you’re prepared when the opportunity is correct.
Federico Ramallo (47:54.101) Right, right. you know, adding to your question to your answer, sorry, I think that if somebody approached you to try to buy the company, then you should explore that till the end, rather than saying, no, no, we’re not selling right now. Right. And then you can learn, you know, whether it’s going nowhere or somewhere. Right. You can learn.
get the experience and then you can decide whether it is worth it or not to sell it. To exit.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (48:28.29) Yeah. You’re also going to come across reasons why they’re going to walk away. Most of them are going to walk away. We were in a position twice now at the start of this company to actually buy two different companies. One was a pure tech company. One was not a tech company. There’s a dance. There’s a dance. And we came close to wanting to pull the trigger on both of them, but we ended up walking away as well.
Federico Ramallo (48:35.541) Right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (48:54.754) And that’s the majority case of buying and selling companies. I think, again, very specific to my experience, but I think the majority of them end up, nothing ends up happening. And then you need to be prepared to feel like you’ve just wasted a ton of time. So you do need to be very judicious about how much time and effort.
Federico Ramallo (49:01.431) Right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (49:15.938) your spending with that potential suitor and along the way being very honest with yourself so that you don’t get too overly ambitious that it’s going to happen. You might accidentally disincentivize and weaken your team by getting their hopes up on something. For example, I’ve had a friend tell me that that he wishes he didn’t tell his team when they were being potentially being acquired. Everything changed for him, including the work ethic of the company. Things changed. So,
Federico Ramallo (49:26.744) Right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (49:45.25) These things end up being a waste of time most of the time or on paper they end up being a waste of time. You might learn a lot in the process, but it’s not guaranteed. you can’t let the company fall to the wayside, for example. You need to make sure that you’re, you have to assume and act as if it’s not happening up until the money is in the bank.
Federico Ramallo (50:10.297) Right, right. I see what you’re saying, Sometimes when people talk about the value for a startup, I remember Austin Powers, when the bad guy says, $1 million. You were talking about you had a number in your head. I always think about that. Entrepreneurs have this.
whatever number that is not connected to anything in reality, right? And yeah, until you go through the process and then you realize, okay, there’s a more scientific way to evaluate the company, right?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (50:41.346) Mm-hmm. That was me.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (50:52.322) Yeah, yeah, my number in my head was five times higher than the number that was being offered. The correct number was the number that we were being offered. I was wrong. By 5X.
Federico Ramallo (51:01.124) Right.
Federico Ramallo (51:06.331) Hahaha
Right.
Yeah, it took me a while to realize that, you know, and I say this with love, right? Nobody cares about our startups outside of us, right? So we put a lot of value in it, right? We put a lot of love and we value the company, but people that don’t know us, they don’t know us, right? So, you know.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (51:35.896) Yeah. Especially with start. So like if you’re so I was listening to you listen to the acquired podcast at all.
Federico Ramallo (51:45.179) I think I listened to one episode, yes.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (51:48.226) Okay, so anyway, they were recapping the, they had a special guest. believe she was the COO or Chief Legal Officer at Zillow. I draw a lot of comparisons between my company and Zillow actually for a number of reasons, but between Zillow and Trulia. Their business models were far more mature than most early stage startups. mean, both of them were poised. One was a public company. I can’t remember if Trulia was a public company or not at the time, but they had numbers that they could actually go on.
So then it became a lot of the song and dance was the numbers side was already taken care of. So it didn’t matter. They, if they didn’t matter if they did love or didn’t love their company any longer, they had a value on the company for early state, for very early stage before there’s repeatability and business model. And it’s not like an aqua high or it might be an aqua higher. It’s, it’s, there’s much less math involved. There is math involved, but it’s not.
Federico Ramallo (52:45.509) Right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (52:48.376) I think that’s when people really don’t care about your startup. the view of the founder versus the view of the acquirer, there could be a big mismatch. And I witnessed that in my example when we were on the selling side with that first company that I tried to sell, but also on the buying side.
in both instances, one more than the other, the value that the entrepreneur put on her business was much higher than what the math shook out to be. But she didn’t care as much about the math. I did, as the buyer, but I didn’t care about her startup in the way that she did. Wonderful company. I would have loved to have bought it just for probably half of what she wanted us to buy it for.
Federico Ramallo (53:34.878) Right, right. Yeah, and that’s what I usually talk with my people about, about that nobody, you know, loves our company as we that were involved because, you know, we get involved into it. you know, our perception is affected by that. Yeah.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (53:57.624) Yeah, it’s our identity in a lot of ways too. So it’s almost like putting a value on your identity.
Federico Ramallo (54:00.775) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (54:04.512) it’s so difficult to get the touch of, yeah, you you and your company, you know, are the same, one and the same or different. Yeah.
So I have one last question before we wrap it up because we’re already over the time. I wanted to ask you about your experience at JP Morgan Chase. What was the most surprising lesson you learned as VP?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (54:33.476) Can I give you the most surprising lesson I learned while I was at Morgan Stanley? Because they had just gone through, so, Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney had kind of had like a somewhat forced marriage where this is back in 2009 when the economy tanked and we had the financial crisis. Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney were kind of like, I call it an arranged marriage by the government in some ways.
Federico Ramallo (54:38.248) Sure, yes.
Federico Ramallo (54:54.503) Yes.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (55:03.56) I joined years after they had actually, I believe maybe a full year after they had actually merged, but I realized that companies that big, merging together was a lot slower.
than I would have expected. And there was so much opportunity for me to come in as a 20 nothing year old and say, hey guys, this doesn’t make sense to me. Why are we doing it this way? They’re already doing this thing really well. You guys are doing this thing really well.
Federico Ramallo (55:20.122) really?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (55:34.648) there is a major redundancy and with a little, I guess at the time, a little millennial thinking, we could probably get things to work a lot more smoothly than how we’re doing it now. Why don’t we run this exercise? And I kind of became an intrapreneur. I created my own business model that kind of loops together and interconnected these disparate things at Morgan Stanley.
to generate value for the company and for the teams that I was kind of connecting together. So I ended up accidentally doing the work of, I guess, like an integration specialist post merger.
And it was a really good model. But the surprising thing to me was how, I guess, because they’re such big companies and they have so much more going on than just immediately what’s in front of them, that they’re, I think it’s difficult for large companies post merger to really understand how to best integrate disparate parts of companies, of those two companies. So, you know, it’s…
That was surprising to me because to me it was so obvious that we should be doing X, and Z. So much so that I just did it. And then others followed and sued and it made a lot more sense and those different entities started working a lot more closely together.
Federico Ramallo (57:01.847) Wow, I haven’t thought about that. Yeah, they can be merged on paper, but not on people.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (57:07.044) and process as well and maybe it’s because it was a forced merger. call it, again, I don’t know if it was a forced merger, but I call it a forced merger. The opportunities for integration were, for easy integration were far greater than I thought they would be by the time that I joined.
Federico Ramallo (57:09.613) Right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (57:29.506) maybe because of the sheer size of the companies, nobody really put two and two together. It took an outsider way of thinking to say, this doesn’t make sense. And it might be because I was younger than everybody around me. I joked that I was 20 nothing years old. Everybody else, this is a more mature industry, they’re not looking at it through the lens that I looked at it from or through.
Federico Ramallo (57:48.141) Hahaha
Federico Ramallo (57:56.056) Right.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (57:56.388) So I just said, this doesn’t make sense. And that mentality, by the way, has followed me throughout my entire entrepreneurial journey. I’ve never really innovated as an insider. I’ve always come in as an outsider and said, okay, I like being an outsider. What about this status quo doesn’t make sense? I don’t just accept the status quo. I say, this just logically doesn’t make sense. Okay, there’s probably an opportunity here. Let’s make that happen.
Federico Ramallo (58:26.147) very interesting. I haven’t thought about that way.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (58:29.55) interesting to me at the time. don’t know if it’s actually interesting. Maybe to some people, I guess, but yeah.
Federico Ramallo (58:37.776) Yeah, I always, you when I work in different big corporations and, you know, whether as an employee, as a vendor, as a, different relationship, but I’m always amazed by how, you know, how inefficient they are, right, on running things, right? And there’s this status quo that it’s accepted and, you know, it is how it is because
historically it’s how it’s been, right?
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (59:12.75) Yeah, I think in another life I would have loved to build a career as innovation specialist at large organizations to usher in needed change. Like right now, how to implement AI internally at these large companies, where the opportunities actually are. I feel like I could probably make more money just innovating those companies than if I had a unicorn exit myself.
because there’s so much value that they’re just not going to get because they just don’t know how to make it work at a big organization. But we’ll see. There is good innovation happening, good adoption of AI at these large organizations. I just think it’s not really.
Federico Ramallo (59:48.549) I
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (59:59.852) It’s elementary innovation. I think they’re barely scratching the surface of what they could be doing.
Federico Ramallo (01:00:06.511) Yeah, they’re using AI on a very surface level. Yes, I agree. I agree.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (01:00:10.424) Yes. Yeah. It should look that way to the end user.
In my opinion, for a good user experience, should look like it’s elementary level so that it’s accessible, so that it’s easy to use. But I think the inner workings of the company are just barely scratching the surface of how much AI can revolutionize what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, how much value they can provide to their customers and to society and to their shareholders. I just think there’s a of value being, a ton of unmet value.
Federico Ramallo (01:00:48.104) Very interesting. So I think we should wrap it up. We’ve been a little bit over our time. I appreciate and I apologize for spending more time that going over time. Great. Great. Yeah, I’m glad that we talked and I’ll send you some information about the Mexican market on the…
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (01:01:00.324) No, no, no, all good, man. This is fun. Thank you for having me.
Federico Ramallo (01:01:14.299) medical industry. you know, hopefully that helps you guys. Yeah. And, you know, we’ll be in touch and thank you very much.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (01:01:17.913) Thank you.
Yasin Abbak | GroupUps.com (01:01:24.324) Thank you Federico. Take care.