yaM Labs

Legally the company is registered in the USA, but software developers are in Russia.

Strategy and product

The idea of developers consists that that from the point of view of IT for meetings is made little – people continue to use paper notepads or boards for drawing, and according to the results of a meeting they should perform "double entry" - to kill information in Word or e-mail. The yaM program (yet another meeting, one more meeting) should save users from it. Work with it is carried out via the web browser, the interface is similar to a virtual notepad with tabs.

yaM allows to plan a meeting and messages of a note, contains tools for SWOT analysis, brainstorming and decision making. The application also contains a virtual board on which it is possible to draw, as during the normal presentation, and a chat. Any change concerning the user is automatically displayed in his browser, without updating of the page.

yaM can be used both during the internal meetings, and in virtual space. As Gaverdovsky explained CNews, holding 4-5 meetings in a month using the application will be free, and it is necessary to pay for bigger number. The monthly cost of use of the application, according to him, will be $10-12.

Gaverdovsky will explain a rate on the market of the USA with the fact that in this country about a half of working time of managers leaves on meetings: "In the USA the culture of cloud services is better developed. Users are afraid to leave the data in a cloud much less. Besides the American users have more devices for access to network and higher than the level of penetration of online meetings".

"The Russian users, certainly, too will be able to use a product, however its promotion in Russia is not provided in the marketing budget", - the head of yaM Labs adds.

Competitors

Main competitors of yaM Labs Gaverdovsky calls:

• MeetingSense,
• MeetingScience и
• LessMeeting.

He considers competitive advantage of the startup an opportunity for work in real time during the meeting.

History

• Work on the project began in October, 2009.

• The first beta of a product appeared in the summer of 2010, the second – in November of the 2010th.

• For March, 2011 the open application version is available. According to Gaverdovsky, for March, 2011 there are about 800 registered users, and to summer of their 2011 there will be about 20-30 thousand.

• In March, 2011 it became known that the Russian company yaM Labs raised funds ^[1] from Foresight Ventures venture fund^[1]. The received $500 thousand are going to direct a startup to debugging of software for "cloud" management of meetings and its promotions in the American market. Before appearance of the investor development was conducted on own means of founders, including Gaverdovsky. Jointly they invested the amount, comparable with investments of investors, in the project, but nevertheless there are less than $500 thousand.

Notes