Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:30:45 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[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you see a kitchen that was designed in the eighties or something like that, and you're like, man, this looks like an outdated kitchen.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 That's a hallmark mid twenty twenties site design that will feel outdated at that point.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. [00:31:33] S1: Yeah. And and establishing that brand book early on. That's one thing that I regret that we didn't do earlier for our own company was establishing a brand book, deciding on what is the brand, what is your font, your... Really your design system. Mhmm. Companies should do that earlier for sure. [00:31:50] S0: Alright. Well, thank you, SentientOS. [00:31:52] S1: Let's do another one.
00:31:52 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:31:52] S1: Let's do another one. [00:31:54] S0: Alright. CeraNovus, institutional intelligence and decision infrastructure. Yeah. Don't really know what that means, but, CeraNovus is your AI operating partner. It reads every record your company produces, finds the operational inefficiencies nobody's tracking, and warns you while problems are still small. Okay. I don't know. This is I think the copy could be improved here. It's very generalized. It's very vague. I'm kinda like, is this something I need? I'm not really sure. It does everything that my company wants and finds inefficiencies. It's a decision infrastructure. I don't know what that means. So I think something that would be helpful is just getting to more specifics or more specific language around who should use this and why. Because right now, I think it's it's too unclear. [00:32:39] S1: I was... It's interesting to me. Like, the... There's so much padding. Right? Like, there's just a lot of white space. But this is Yeah. This is what they call above the fold. Right? [00:32:46] S0: Mhmm. [00:32:46] S1: Before I scroll, it's such an important section, the hero section of the landing page. And yet, immediately, my eyes, I'm, like, looking at white space right now. Right? Unfortunately, this is also kinda like a classic vibe coating smell. This... [00:33:02] S0: Small all caps. Exactly. [00:33:05] S1: Yeah. And again, it's like, okay. Is there anything inherently wrong with small all caps? Not necessarily, but when I read it, every claim cited, years of history alive from day one.
00:33:05 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:33:05] S1: Yeah. And again, it's like, okay. Is there anything inherently wrong with small all caps? Not necessarily, but when I read it, every claim cited, years of history alive from day one. [00:33:17] S0: Nothing installed. No interviews. But I still don't even know what the product does. [00:33:21] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. [00:33:22] S0: I didn't even know it was gonna be something that was installed. That was not my assumption to begin with. [00:33:26] S1: So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like, nothing installed where? Like, am I dealing with hardware? [00:33:32] S0: Oversight over the operations. It finds the inefficiencies. Foresight with receipts. Yeah. I just need specific examples. Like, as we're scrolling, do they give specific examples? Start with the problem on your desk, enterprise, middle market, private equity. Yeah. It's... This is, like, who they go after. And... Which is this is not helpful because it's about them. It's not about the user. Right? The user doesn't care who they go after. The user cares about they have a problem that they want solved, and can CeraNovus help solve this problem for me. [00:34:06] S1: Right. It's almost... Like, right now, I have to think through, am I enterprise middle mark? Like, who am I? Yeah. Let's pretend I'm secondaries or I'm continuation vehicles. I have to look at this, But I had to, like, click to decide who I am. You're making me think. You know? [00:34:22] S0: Too much work. [00:34:23] S1: And, again, to your point, what I really wanna see are the solutions.
00:34:27 · Aaron Epstein
[00:34:27] S0: Yeah. You know, this is a trend that I see with vibe coded sites. And, especially, we see this a lot in YC applications. One of the things that we see is, it's it's almost like it makes a slide deck for the company that's kind of pitching the company, almost to investors a lot of times, or, like, the the models think that is the intended audience for a startup or a startup website. And sometimes it is. Like, investors will look at the thing, but, that's not who you should be speaking to and who you should be targeting. You should be talking about your product, who should use it, why, why it's valuable, what problem it solves for them, social proof of, you know, other people that use this that are like those users and how much it's helped them. These are the things that I think real users wanna find rather than a pitch deck about who they target. And, yeah, here's the four guarantees. And it's like, I don't even know what... I still can't even figure out what you do. One thing that's interesting I noticed, because we just talked about this, there's a link at the top that says trust and security. And that's not something that you normally see, in a main navigation of a site. And, you know, coming off the discussion we just had around maybe companies should put more emphasis on this, it's actually interesting to see them doing that and putting it up there and having an FAQ. What data do we collect? Where does the data live? I would not be surprised to see this become a more common pattern that we're gonna see across, AI sites trying to talk about the product and get people to entrust them with lots of sensitive information.
00:36:00 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:36:00] S1: Totally. [00:36:00] S0: Well, overall, I feel like the style is very clean. It's it's very fresh. It's very modern. So from a visual perspective, I think it looks very nice from a copy and, you know, overall description, and are you communicating what the product does into your users? I'm still very confused on what it actually does and who should use it and why. And so I think there's a lot [00:36:23] S1: of room for improvement on that. Totally. And what I would encourage all kind of founders to do something that we did in the early days is you should go to your users and ask them, what do you think of this website? Try not to make it clear that it's your website because they're gonna be too nice to you and not tell you the truth. But, you know, you need users to tell you if it's resonating with them. [00:36:44] S0: That's the ultimate test. [00:36:45] S1: That is absolutely the ultimate test. We're just two people that are here behind some cameras. You know? Talk to your users.
00:36:45 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:36:45] S1: That is absolutely the ultimate test. We're just two people that are here behind some cameras. You know? Talk to your users. [00:36:52] S0: Alright. Let's do another one here. Slashy, your intelligent inbox. So first of all, their logo kinda confused me a little bit. It looks like s slash ashy is what it makes me think of. So I get that it's clever, and it's got a slash in the slashy. But if I had just seen that without the context of, like, slashy.com, I think I would have thought this was s slash ash... Ashy. Okay. Your intelligent inbox, slashy drafts replies in your voice, schedules meetings, and handles follow ups so you spend less time managing email. Okay. Cool. So it's like a new email product, and they've got a demo here that's pretty big. It's cool to show a demo, but there's so much going on. There's so much text in the demo. It's hard for me to mentally orient around what's happening and what it wants me to take away from this. Mhmm. So I see Pied Piper metrics before Thursday. I see something happening in an agent in the bottom right that it keeps flipping over to, but it's not slow enough where I can get my head around what it's actually typing, what's happening, and what the product is doing here.