Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:44:13 · Stephen Haney
[00:44:13] S0: Well, one is design tools are really hard to build. Mhmm. You know, you can't vibe code a design tool at the level of a Figma today. Maybe you can eventually. And so it takes a lot of a lot of really precise, really careful work. It's very multidimensional Mhmm. In terms of the systems. And so we just have to be really careful. And we wanna make sure our experience... You know, designers need a 120 FPS. It needs to be fast. It needs to work every single time. And the agents just aren't there for that yet. The other thing is a small elite team. Right? So 12 people to keep the talent bar extremely high. I think when you're building companies, that's how you should try to do it these days. Mhmm. And use the agents to accelerate the the people. But if you have less people, you have less communication burden. You have less of these other costs to go through. One example of how we use agents, is Agu, our brand designer. He's a brilliant brand designer, great at visuals. He codes a little bit, but I don't think he'd call himself a programmer. And he made our entire website in about a week before this last launch Wow. Including shipping it, including all of the animations. Mhmm. And he designed everything in Paper. And this is the kind of design... You wouldn't wanna do this with prompting. Right? You need this... He has he has shaders in the background subtly coming through, these motifs. He did everything in Paper, and then he just prompted... And this was, you know, six months ago now, so different models. He just prompted the animations on top of his of his Paper file. It's like, know, take take my Paper designs, turn it into a code base. This is the Next.js site, and put it together for me. No one else looked at this. So Agu did this end to end in a week. Because he's a designer, he puts in these Easter eggs. There's little, like, fun extras.
00:45:38 · Aaron Epstein
[00:45:38] S1: And it's all just interactive.
00:45:39 · Stephen Haney
[00:45:39] S0: It's interactive. And this is something he would not have done. He wouldn't have had the time. Yeah. I'm sure he could have... You know, skill wise, he could have got there. But, like, he wouldn't have the time to do this. So I think that's really, really cool. And and so I think a lot of times, it shows up more not in our core product where we're actually pretty human based still for precision reasons, but in all the other stuff, all the videos we need to make, all the marketing site, all of that other stuff where we can, you know, have agents help us help people go faster. So we do quite a bit of that. And then, of course, the coding agents. We do use Cursor extensively. We use Claude Code extensively. We use BugBot for our PR reviews, which has been really helpful. It's a little too pedantic sometimes, but it still catches catches bugs, which is good. There's a little bit of a FOMO right now with with agents, where it's like, oh, every company is shipping without looking at their code. Are you are you going too slow? You know? We are kind of taking the approach that quality software takes time. Mhmm. And we have competitors that have every single feature, but they don't have the attention or people don't care. And for whatever reason, whatever that is, it's like people want paper to be better. They don't want the competitors that have every single feature to be better. Mhmm. And I think that it's because we care, and we're putting in that precision and that care about these things. So even if we're moving a little slower, people still care more about it. And so I think that quality matters
00:46:51 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:46:51] S1: Yeah. [00:46:51] S0: Still, thankfully. [00:46:52] S1: My sense from talking to a lot of designers is that you guys are almost building kind of a groundswell movement, like a cult movement of people that are now using Paper as the new cool thing that a lot of designers are using, and it's it's the new modern way to work. Was that intentional? And what are the things that you're doing to try to get more users to grow, to get some mind share? Like, you seem to be one of the only companies. Figma obviously has built this huge behemoth and gone public, and, you know, all the Fortune 500 uses them and and and all this stuff. But it feels like you've started to to crack some of that, certainly within certain user types. And how have you gone about doing that, and and what's been most successful for you there?
00:47:37 · Stephen Haney
[00:47:37] S0: Yeah. A a huge part of that is is, like, being very values aligned with the market. Mhmm. We we didn't have a product for the first year, and we still got to about 25,000 Twitter followers just by talking about our values. I'd go on podcasts and be like, I really like design. Do you like design? Then we get into the topic and talk about typography or whatever. Being values aligned with your market, they will forgive so much about your product missing things. They'll wait for them to come out. They'll root for you if they can tell you're authentic. And if you're building design software, it really matters. It really matters. Maybe not for all software. But for design software, usually best product, most authentic product wins. And so I think for us, it's just, again, company of 12 designers and engineers, and just live our values, and people really resonate with that. And by the way, the product is really good too. I think that part's important. You've to get there. But I think that's part of it. And then there's a market clock. Every company hopefully, we have this problem someday. Every company eventually goes upmarket, and you just stop being as cool when you do that. You're selling to enterprises. You're not underground at the cool events anymore. So I'm really honored that we are part of the community. And to your point, I think you saw Ramp has been releasing the data of actual Ramp subscriptions on their credit cards. And they released an AI you can chat with about the Ramp data. And if you ask it about design tools, it's Figma, obviously. Sketch is there. And then Paper is right there with Sketch. And so we're the first company since Figma has come to make a dent in that market at all. And it's growing very quickly, which is really encouraging. It's really exciting. Because you don't know when you start a company how it's going go. You have no idea. Like I said, there was months where I was like, nobody's going to care about this. And to now have so many cool people, people that are way cooler than me, that care a lot about Paper and are wear... Like, wearing our merch and stuff. It's, like, so much fun to see. And, honestly, it's the best part.
00:49:15 · Aaron Epstein
[00:49:15] S1: That's very cool. And this is not your first company. This is your second company. Right? And it seems like even before you had a product, you have gotten yourself out there and your vision and your values, and you become the ambassador. And that's what people were buying into before you had a product and certainly in the early days of of having a product, and that's what's been successful is you, and getting that out there. And how is that different from... You you know, you built another company before this and, like, contrast the the two.