Traction is a biweekly podcast where founders share the creative or unusual things they did during the seed stage to make early progress. Everyone knows startups should do scrappy things that “don’t scale” — this show explores what those things actually are. Founders from LinkedIn, DraftKings, General Assembly, The Muse, Behance, InsightSquared, and more have appeared on the show. Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, or Stitcher.

So much tactical goodness rolled into one episode. In the 10th edition of Traction, we hear the story of Vin Vacanti, co-founder/CEO of Yipit.com (daily deals aggregator) and YipitData (analyzes web data for institutional investors). How did both these companies come into being at the same time? The story and Vin’s agonizing decision are both fascinating, along with several other eye-opening things Vin willingly shares, including:

  1. Why he and his co-founder taught themselves to code long before it was common — and well before any tools existed to shortcut your learning the ropes. As a result, Vin has a great framework for deciding if this is a viable path for your product.
  2. Exactly how Vin launched Yipit.com and built his list to the initial 20K and 50K users.
  3. Why Vin decided to pivot the business (read: launch a second startup) and what he learned going from B2C to B2B.

Listeners should also check out Vin’s blog for entrepreneurs, ViniciusVacanti.com.

vin vacanti

BONUS: For blog subscribers only, we’re sharing a special mini-episode with Vin’s framework for non-technical founders to decide whether they need a technical co-founder, featuring a special guest! You can subscribe here.

Listen to episode 10 on iTunes: bit.ly/TractionPodcast

or listen below