Lean Engineering Philosophy: Why Yori Won’t Burn Out Like the Others

At Yori, we’ve built a simple principle into our DNA: do more with less. We reject corporate-style IT bloat. No endless approval chains. No armies of middle managers. No departments built for show. Just tight loops, direct ownership, and fast iterations. Every feature connects to our mission. Every hour goes where it matters.

This philosophy isn’t just theory—it’s proven history. WhatsApp scaled to hundreds of millions with fewer than 50 engineers. Instagram had just 13 employees when Facebook acquired it for a billion dollars. Their secret? Lean, focused teams that shipped relentlessly and avoided unnecessary baggage.

Now contrast that with India’s recent “superapp experiments.”

Paytm tried to do everything at once—banking, e-commerce, travel, payments. With huge teams and heavy processes, it ended up confusing users, burning cash, and losing direction.

Dunzo, despite raising hundreds of millions, collapsed under its own weight—oversized ops, endless firefighting, and no real path to profitability.

Even Zomato and Swiggy, still standing today, are trapped in high-commission battles and sprawling orgs that bleed efficiency. They are forced to extract more from restaurants because they are too heavy to stay lean.

Too many startups equate headcount with progress. They hire faster than they build. They scale bureaucracy before product-market fit. And they fizzle out, despite having “tech heavy resources.”

At Yori, we’ve taken the opposite path.

• No dedicated managers for every micro-task. Engineers own their work end-to-end.
• No oversized QA departments. Developers test their own code.
• No compliance theater. We focus security where it truly matters—privacy and encryption.
• No HR, sales, or ops empires before time. We stay frugal until scale justifies it.

This is not corner-cutting. It’s clarity. It’s building a product users love before building org charts that investors don’t care about. It’s the reason we can ship fast, stay aligned, and avoid burning millions on overhead.

For investors, this philosophy means one thing: resilience. Yori isn’t designed to collapse under its own weight. It’s designed to grow lean, survive long, and scale when the time is right. We won’t waste capital proving how “big” we are—we’ll prove it by how far we go.

Superapps are ambitious. Most tried and failed in India. But the ones that survive aren’t the ones that raised the most money. They’re the ones that did the most with the least.

That’s Yori.