Why call it Yachtparty?
About a third of the people we talk to hate the name. They say it represents everything that’s wrong with their sector of the b2b industry.
They say yacht parties are the pinnacle of waste in b2b sales. It’s just C-level people getting schmoozed while the real decision makers are back in the office, actually building stuff.
Uhh, yeah.
When we first started socializing the concept to get feedback, one of our CRO friends said, “it’s probably going to be controversial but hey, this is b2b and people are still hosting yacht parties…” So when we needed to enter a name on the project files, we called it Yachtparty as a working title.
When it was time to decide on an actual name, we got on a whiteboard and said, “let’s pick a name that describes the platform’s benefits.”
We put some names on that whiteboard, even a few good ones, and then someone threw out this gem of a thought-starter: “what if it had something to do with linking business people together?”
Uhh….
It’s been 20 years since a handful of middle aged guys in pleated khakis built LinkedIn and created the most boring platform of all time. And then turned it into another inbox full of cold email from random people.
That’s when we looked at each other and said:
F**k it. Let’s just call it Yachtparty.
The big Y
You’re receiving cold email from prospective vendors as you read this.
We all are.
All day, every day.
It sucks for vendors too. They built a solution — and they need you to know about it.
But you don’t have time to read all those emails, let alone meet with them all. There are 13 times more b2b vendors now. And they’re using automation to send you 14 messages on average.
Here’s some founder math for you:
13x more vendors * 14x more messages per prospect = exponential clusterf**k.
Email has become a tax on innovation. Time to kill it.
What if you could know about all the new innovation in your industry — without adding more zoom calls to your busy day?
That’s Yachtparty.
It’s an app like Instagram or TikTok where you scroll through 30-second videos. But with Yachtparty, these videos are put there by vendors who bid for space in your feed.
Those bids turn into cash — for you, for charity, for everyone who helps the network grow in a sustainable way.
You stay on top of new innovation and earn money for yourself and charity while founders and salespeople generate feedback and meetings.
We believe you should earn cash for your time. Because it’s really, really valuable. And because it’s yours to sell.
Real talk
It’s time we acknowledge that most of us don’t have “meet with vendors who are trying to sell us stuff” in our job descriptions.
So when you ask someone for a 30 minute meeting, you’re really asking them to spend another 30 minutes at the office. Or more, if taking that meeting breaks their flow.
Most of us don’t want to meet with a vendor until we’re pretty sure they’re going to be relevant to our business.
Yachtparty exists to help you get that information up front, quickly. So when you decide to meet a vendor, it will be a good use of your time and theirs.
An easy button for founders and sales teams
Enterprise sales teams report spending $2000-$3000 for each incremental meeting they book. On top of email vendors and outsourced SDR’s, there are the conference sponsorships, the suites, the steak dinners, the 3 martini lunches, golf, whatever. They’re already paying to get your attention.
That stuff can be fun, not gonna lie. We’ve used the whole b2b playbook and it all works to some degree.
But its takes a long time to turn those efforts into new business. Meanwhile, the things that work in B2C, like search and social media, don’t move the needle much in B2B, especially for enterprise sales.
Nearly all innovation in b2b over the past decade can be summarized as “more email,” “automated email” and now “more email, generated by AI.” This lack of innovation is insane considering B2B is 3x larger than all B2C combined.
Slack killed email for internal communications. Yachtparty will kill email for b2b. Whatever’s left after that is up for grabs.
Every YC founder struggles to get enough meetings, even with the best warm intros. Every sales hire struggles to ramp up their meeting count. Every CRO struggles to hire or become an expert on email delivery systems. Every large sales team needs to increase growth YoY, every year.
Not enough meetings = no product market fit and no growth.
That’s why this works. Companies need to keep growing, and to do that they first need a tiny bit of your attention so they can put their solution on your radar.
Yachtparty wouldn’t work in B2C, where ad impressions are measured in increments of 1000. In B2C you have to show many ads to targeted groups of anonymous people in order to make a sale, and that average sale value is usually pretty low.
If you’re selling, let’s say running shoes, you can show an ad to millions of people for very little money. As long as you’re not paying much for those impressions, the math can work out.
Search and social media are the best performing channels in B2C, because they capture intent well and generate fairly high conversion rates.
B2B is fundamentally different.
There are fewer potential buyers for enterprise products, yet the value of a sale is several orders of magnitude higher than in B2C. In B2B, every individual person is valuable, and you often need multiple champions inside a prospect company to get a deal done.
B2B is person to person, not one ad to millions of random people.
To be clear, search and social media do provide some leads for B2B marketers, but ask any B2B sales team about the amount and quality of those leads and they’ll tell you it’s not nearly good enough to achieve their growth targets.
So whereas there are literally thousands of innovative companies serving B2C marketers, helping them optimize every form of advertising ever invented, B2B continues to rely primarily on big sales teams and traditional sales tactics. With more people screening and blocking calls, cold calling has mostly been replaced by cold email, leading to the arms race of email automation we’re all experiencing today.
Maybe Yachtparty is controversial. We don’t care. And neither do you. We interviewed 63 sales leaders before building this platform and most asked how soon they could use it. But my favorite call went like this:
Me: 30 second elevator pitch (yeah, I still got it).
Venture-backed CEO: To tell you the truth, I hate it. It’s not gonna work. Nothing works in b2b anymore. The most effective thing we do is this one conference where we spend $50k and generate maybe 6–7 qualified meetings.
Me: Thanks for the feedback, I knew I could count on you to shoot me straight. I need some people to tell me they won’t use it so we don’t get overconfident.
CEO: Oh, don’t get me wrong. We’ll definitely use it. We have big targets in Q1.
Me: Time to build.
F**k it. Let’s just call it Yachtparty.
We’re repeat founders who have built successful b2b companies together in the past. We’ve taken platforms from 0 -> $100M in revenue and have had a few exits. We’ve personally signed over 30 partnerships worth $10M+ each. Our lead engineer has built 3 platforms from scratch to exit in both Web 2 and Web 3, and led a well known social media engineering team in between.
We have a mogul-sized rolodex of decision makers from tech, legacy media, tradfi, Web3 and a ton of Silicon Valley snobs. And yet, with every new product we’ve taken to market, we’ve wanted a faster, easier way to get in front of potential customers.
Yachtparty is the platform we wish we’d had all along.
Help us make b2b fun again. Request an invite at Yachtparty.xyz. Or better yet, get an invite from someone who’s already on the platform so they can earn even more cash when you join.*
- That’s right. There are many ways to earn money on Yachtparty. Turns out there’s a giant pile of money waiting to be spent on platforms that drive growth for businesses. In this case, that giant pile of money gets spread around to everyone who participates in helping the network grow. Literally everyone. Get involved.
