Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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.
00:49:44 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:49:44] S0: Well, so my first company, Modulz, was working on designer developer handoff. Mhmm. And we built Radix UI along the way. It was, like, one of our side projects that just kept going. And, you know, Radix became this default React component library. Mhmm. One was this was pre AI. So everything was harder. Designer developer handoff was harder. Two was we really listened to both sides at once, and we got very confused. Because designers want engineers to change, and engineers want designers to change. And they will tell you the other team will use your software. You can't build software that way. And so we learned some hard lessons about making something people actually want, and that I think I've been able to apply at Paper. But we did make... I mean, Radix has amazing product market fit. We just didn't see a way to build a venture scale business around it. And so we thought, let's just make it free and give it away, and then come back with something next time. And so that's been cool. I mean, that that worked out really well. We sold this company to WorkOS, which is an amazing, often identity company. We use WorkOS for Paper. And then a couple of years after that, I just wanted to start back into creative tooling again. [00:50:40] S1: And are there any lessons that you took from that experience that you're applying this time?
00:50:44 · Stephen Haney
[00:50:44] S0: You can way overcomplicate product building. You know, the make something people want is a great phrase. And and really, a lot of times when you... With your product, it's like, what does my company need next? What would be, like, the best thing that possibly could happen to my company right now? At the beginning for us, that was being part of the conversation, having Twitter followers. Well, let's go do things that get Twitter followers. Let's go on a podcast. Let's talk to users and then represent their values outwardly. So a lot of times, it's actually very simple. And I think we make it too complicated, and we're trying to have these brilliant strategies for our companies. And it's like, what do you need next? And just do the most straightforward thing you can possibly do to get there. And don't be scared to do things that sound hard. Obviously, you got to do them. So that's the philosophy we've taken. Bottlenecks first, huge philosophy I really believe in. For us right now, the bottleneck is early adopters are using Paper. The people that are more maybe not an early adopter type are very used to what they're doing now. And they're missing features like comments and components. And so now our bottleneck is actually features again. And so now it's like, well, that's what we gotta go do next. And release that bottleneck to the business. Another just like a tactical thing is just talking to users every day. It's so, so important. I had a rule. The first year of the company, had to talk to a designer every single day. Mhmm. And I did it all the way through