Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:25:11 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:25:11] S1: Mhmm. [00:25:11] S0: When you're scrolling. And when you hit a site and it's different precision, you know, it it keeps scrolling after you've stopped touching the mouse or the trackpad. It messes things up, and it feels unnatural. And so please, everybody, please stop scroll jacking. Stop scrolling. Just keep the normal scroll. Because there's some cool stuff that's happening here. Right? Like like, okay. We started out with the laptop screen open. A bunch of things are going into it. Right. The lid closes. And I think it's trying to tell you, like, all this stuff happens while you sleep. The lid is closed. And then you wake up to your finished work, and so it wakes up and here's all the things that it's done. And then it takes you through that. So the visual and the experience, what I like about this one is it's actually reinforcing the concepts that it's trying to tell you about. Mhmm. When it talks about going... When you sleep, the lid closes. The computer is asleep. And then it's like, oh, it wakes up. It does all the work while you sleep. So when you wake up and then boom, the laptop comes back out, we have all the work is done, and it's showing it to us. That's, I think, the best version of an animation is not animation for animation's sake, but animation that actually reinforces the point that you're trying to make and communicate something in a way that just being static would not have been able to do.
00:26:23 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:26:23] S1: Totally. I mean, it's it's definitely helping me understand what this product does. But I would also... I always think when you're you're trying to be too creative for something, that's great on like a product page or a video. Not your landing page. Your landing page, the number one thing you wanna try and get me to do is click this button, download for Mac OS. Right? Now also, just speaking about that button for a second, this kinda glow, another bit of a vibe coding smell. Again, hey, it's definitely getting my my attention. But one thing that I've noticed is AI agents, they love to overdo it on this kinda gradient, on this massive drop shadow. And and again, look, it got my attention, but it's just one thing to be wary of if that's something that you're trying to not do. [00:27:16] S0: Yep. And then what do we have further down the page here? Just see. Recipes. [00:27:25] S1: I think what... What's interesting here is... Again, this is that main CTA. Right? I scrolled through the whole thing and I'm just... I... You really want me to click this button or perhaps even do this homebrew installation, but it's so small. Like, I'm at like 100% and I can barely see it. Mhmm. Right? And like this has this kinda hover effect. I guess this brings me to the GitHub. I can barely read that. [00:27:48] S0: Yeah. It's really tough to read those. [00:27:50] S1: Right. Like free, there's a reason that free is giant on pricing pages. [00:27:55] S0: Mhmm. Yeah. Download for free.
00:27:55 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:27:55] S0: Mhmm. Yeah. Download for free. [00:27:57] S1: Yeah. Exactly. Right. Right? And I swear, it's it's, you know, perhaps it's because of the angle, but it doesn't really matter. I cannot see the word free Right. Right now. [00:28:07] S0: If you have something important to communicate, it shouldn't matter the angle that the user is looking at it. It should be painfully obvious. [00:28:13] S1: Yes. Exactly. [00:28:14] S0: Alright. I mean, I guess maybe, you know, one of the other pieces of feedback for a product like this that runs locally on your machine, privacy and trust is something that's very important. What do they do with the data? I I guess they have an FAQ here to try to answer some of this, but this is actually an interesting problem in new world of AI apps and LMs is they need so much data and so much context to be really valuable. And especially a product like this that's gonna run locally on your machine and have access presumably to everything that's on your computer. And so there's a new bar that needs to be established for trust and privacy and security for all of these types of products. My take is that I actually think the products that really lean into that and go above and beyond Mhmm. To make users feel super comfortable around what is the data we're gonna have access to, how are we gonna use it, what are our retention policies, is this secure or not, all these things, and being very proactive about that are the ones that I think are gonna have more success of getting users to download and try it and spread the word and tell their friends.
00:28:14 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:28:14] S0: Alright. I mean, I guess maybe, you know, one of the other pieces of feedback for a product like this that runs locally on your machine, privacy and trust is something that's very important. What do they do with the data? I I guess they have an FAQ here to try to answer some of this, but this is actually an interesting problem in new world of AI apps and LMs is they need so much data and so much context to be really valuable. And especially a product like this that's gonna run locally on your machine and have access presumably to everything that's on your computer. And so there's a new bar that needs to be established for trust and privacy and security for all of these types of products. My take is that I actually think the products that really lean into that and go above and beyond Mhmm. To make users feel super comfortable around what is the data we're gonna have access to, how are we gonna use it, what are our retention policies, is this secure or not, all these things, and being very proactive about that are the ones that I think are gonna have more success of getting users to download and try it and spread the word and tell their friends. [00:29:17] S1: Totally agree. As someone who applied to YC with a text message analyzer that was open source and read your iMessages all locally on the computer. I completely agree. [00:29:26] S0: And so what were the things when you're working on that product that you thought about that you felt like you had to do in order to get people to trust your product and give it access to all of their text messages?
00:29:26 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:29:26] S0: And so what were the things when you're working on that product that you thought about that you felt like you had to do in order to get people to trust your product and give it access to all of their text messages? [00:29:37] S1: Hero on the landing page was open source completely on device. Mhmm. Right? Communicating that the Internet doesn't touch it in any single way. The... And that's what we learned that people really, really cared about. Right? Yep. And they do it here, know, in on device LLM. Yep. But it's funny like like is the word an relieving necessary? Like it's it's interesting to me. They're like bolding these words. Another sign of AI writing actually is, you can look this up on Wikipedia, is when random words are are bolded. Right? Like... But just communicating those kind of... That that most important thing, is that it's on device. [00:30:13] S0: Yep. [00:30:13] S1: The only thing that kinda makes me laugh is this font. Let's see what the font is. Space Grotesque is is always the the font that is... Oh, instrument serif is another one. Instrument serif... Claude Code loves instrument serif. Oh, which is funny. This kinda reminds me of the em dash. Right? It's like, you can still use the em dash in your writing. But, unfortunately, people are gonna look at it and go, oh, he used AI. Right? Instrument serifs, space grotesque.
00:30:13 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:30:13] S1: The only thing that kinda makes me laugh is this font. Let's see what the font is. Space Grotesque is is always the the font that is... Oh, instrument serif is another one. Instrument serif... Claude Code loves instrument serif. Oh, which is funny. This kinda reminds me of the em dash. Right? It's like, you can still use the em dash in your writing. But, unfortunately, people are gonna look at it and go, oh, he used AI. Right? Instrument serifs, space grotesque. [00:30:45] S0: It's interesting how these things are trends that sometimes are hard to spot in the moment. I feel like we're on it, and, you know, we can spot it in the moment here. But it's like you see a kitchen that was designed in the eighties or something like that, and you're like, man, this looks like an outdated kitchen. But in the eighties, it probably looks like a modern kitchen. And that's what some of this feels like. It's something that feels, like, of the moment now. But five, ten years, we're gonna look back at this. We're gonna be like, oh, yeah. That's a hallmark mid twenty twenties site design that will feel outdated at that point. And so I don't know. I would encourage people just resist the urge to do the default that the agents are spitting out when they're designing or the default fonts or use something that is more unique to you and communicates what you wanna communicate rather than just using the thing that everybody else is using. And that's the way to create more timeless design, I think.