Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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.
00:37:57 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:37:57] S1: That's that's fair. I will say what they're doing well is I know immediately what it is. Mhmm. I know that, okay, this is kinda like superhuman. This is a Gmail replacement. Right? Yep. I actually have this problem my... Myself. My email is overloaded. But, yeah, it's like it... Maybe this would be better as just showing kind of the chat inbox, almost like an animation versus a screen re... Recorded video. I would encourage this founder to get an agency to do a really cool animation that might go here and might actually work better than kinda full screen video right here. [00:38:30] S0: Yep. Replies drafted in seconds. Okay. And I guess it's going through these tabs here on the side. And the problem with these is if you scroll through, it's... You will miss Right. The other ones. And these are just... Seem to be on a timer. Yeah. You can see the line going across at the bottom there, which is cool. But the problem with any time you have tabs is you have to expect that people will not see anything that is behind the other tabs. [00:38:58] S1: Totally. You have to assume that I am just going to see... Well, what's interesting... Wait. Let's refresh this because I think this is always a good thing to pay attention to. Let's pretend we spent time on intelligent inbox. [00:39:08] S0: Mhmm.
00:39:08 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:39:08] S0: Mhmm. [00:39:09] S1: Is the timer going? Yeah. Like, it doesn't look like it. It looks like it's probably actually just starting right when I actually... Which I... When I scroll, which is great. But what's interesting, sometimes I notice on sites that the timer might start going before the user is seeing it. And so you don't even realize this, but everyone is actually seeing snippets Yeah. Even though you might consider it the fourth most important thing.
00:39:31 · Aaron Epstein
[00:39:31] S0: Yeah. I think when we got down here the first time, voice drafts was the thing that was highlighted. And maybe because we're just kinda scrolling back and forth, and so we started the timer without actually reading them. Maybe the other thing that I'll mention here is I can't tell, again, what's happening in the screenshots. And I think if I was, like, really... Okay. AI drafts and what's happening, and I tried to really orient myself and pay attention, I could try to figure it out. But most users are not actually looking at something for the first time and spending that level of depth and scrutiny on what's happening. And so it... It's cool they're showing the product. I wonder if there's a more focused, dumbed down way to actually communicate what is happening with each of these rather than showing all the granularity and level of detail of the actual interface. Totally. Okay. So we got some social proof here. Loved by the busiest people. We've got an investor at Redpoint. We've got a content creator who I I don't know. So... Alright. So some people use this. And and, again, they've got a security link up at the top. They've got social proof here on... Here's people that are actually using this because you're... Again, you're asking them to entrust you with their... Your inbox, and that is one of the most sensitive areas to give anybody access to. So it's an interesting challenge for how can you build that trust and get people to download and start using it.