Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:34:30 · Aaron Epstein, Marvin Schwaibold
[00:34:30] S0: Yes. It's the opposite of progressively disclosing information. Yes. And and maybe as as a positive, one thing that I think is probably good that they do is they're trying to drop you right in the product. I I assume this is actually how the product functions. Yeah. And they're not trying to, you know, tell you about the product and then get you to click a bunch of things and sign up and stuff. They're like, if the moment is people just starting to use the product, let's just get people into the product as early as possible. Yeah. But it still feels maybe like we need a little bit more context to figure out what exactly we should be doing here. Agree. NSEC, Thank you. Alright. Let's take a look at SkillSync. Free local first Mac app that carries your memory and skills across every agent and teammate. [00:35:08] S1: That's nice. Yeah. I mean, at least it's clear, I think, what what the company does. [00:35:12] S0: That's cool. Okay. Yeah. So it's got skills, and they sync. [00:35:15] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's in dark mode. The fonts are, I I would say, are very small. The difference between SkillSync as basically the logo and the first paragraph below it, there's a lot of percentages in in the typography height here that I that I that I think we could we we could skew in a little bit. They they feel a little off in in in my opinion. And again, there's there's a lot of very dense information. [00:35:39] S0: Mhmm.
00:35:39 · Aaron Epstein, Marvin Schwaibold
[00:35:39] S0: Mhmm. [00:35:40] S1: And oftentimes to what we were just saying about Nstack, it's actually... As soon as you start to abstract some of the functionalities and features, but still stay stay very detailed like they're doing here, it becomes very hard to understand exactly what it does. And, like, it... It'll require a lot of actual reading of all of these features to kind of understand what's going on. [00:35:57] S0: I'm curious of your take on this. So what they've got here is they've got, basically, a bunch of sidebar tabs Yeah. That are trying to show off different features. And you, I feel like, have an interesting approach on tabs. Yeah. Because all those sliders that you make, they're effectively like tabs. Right? [00:36:13] S1: Yeah. [00:36:13] S0: Yeah. It's just you have the affordance of knowing that there are multiple of them, and you can see multiple at a time. Yeah. And I feel like the trap that a lot of people fall into a lot of times with tabs like these is people... Users usually will not click on all of the tabs and explore them all. Yeah. And so you have to assume that whatever is hidden behind all of them Yeah. Nobody will ever see. How do you think about that? What... How can they encourage people to explore this more and get more information rather than burying everything behind tabs?
00:36:40 · Marvin Schwaibold, Aaron Epstein
[00:36:40] S1: There's this rule I always have. Like, you can't put more than seven seven lines of text on a on a slide if you're presenting work. Mhmm. Like, you have to come up with almost rules and constraints of how many features you wanna show off. Like, a good exam... I think I would use a three up component here. I would take all of these features. I would compress this information down and try to understand what are the top three things Mhmm. That SkillSync can do for you. You can do x, y, and z. Those are the three things you show off. All of those are tappable. They lead you into potentially sheets or or a view transition into into more information, and then you you have more context behind. Since it's very flat and broad, you're kind of, like, a mile wide, but, like, only an inch deep. You don't really know what you're what you're really looking at. That's what that requires, like Yeah. A deeper understanding of your feature set and and and then more condensing those down into principles and rules Yep. And main kind of, like, points. And then you can rally or bring more information under each of those kind of pillars Yep. And that'll help the users understand the flow of the website better and how to navigate it. And it's also better for the founders. I feel like if if I was still running my studio and we were working with this company right now, there would be an... A whole exercise in, well, what's the one thing you do? Yeah. If it's syncing skills, let's only talk about that [00:37:57] S0: Yeah.
00:37:57 · Aaron Epstein, Marvin Schwaibold
[00:37:57] S0: Yeah. [00:37:57] S1: And make that really cool and show that off, and then get people to use the product as quickly as possible. So... I mean, [00:38:02] S0: it's also interesting, like, we just hit the bottom of the page. Yeah. It's not very tall. [00:38:06] S1: Yeah. [00:38:06] S0: Yeah. And so I think users are comfortable scrolling. Yeah. And so if there is important information that is hidden behind a lot of these feature tabs here [00:38:14] S1: Yeah. [00:38:14] S0: Yeah. Just break them out and, like, make the page longer. It's okay. People can scroll longer rather than compressing it and hiding everything. Exactly. And the other trap that I see a lot of people falling into with with the AI tools now is because it's so easy to, you know, create a different, like, image or animation. Like, these are actually animations. Right? [00:38:34] S1: Yeah. [00:38:34] S0: For every single one of these, they spit out a bunch of these, and they've they've all got the hallmarks of, you know, the very small text and, you know, the... This animation. Like, no human would spend the time and go, like, oh, we need a little dot that goes from these corners and program that and everything, but it doesn't mean it's actually adding value to what they're doing. Exactly. So this, I think, is when you're talking about you need to curate and set the bar and make sure it's communicating the right things. [00:38:58] S1: Yeah. [00:38:59] S0: There's lots of things here, but they don't actually help my understanding of the point that it's trying to make.
00:38:59 · Aaron Epstein, Marvin Schwaibold
[00:38:59] S0: There's lots of things here, but they don't actually help my understanding of the point that it's trying to make. [00:39:03] S1: I fully agree. And I feel like that... That's again something where you need to work and hire the right people with the right skill sets to do the... To help you do the the job. Like, AI definitely can help you probably put this whole website together. But when it comes to abstracting these features into illustrations, might not be the worst idea to work with an illustration designer who's done this before and who specialize in information graphics. And maybe that actually becomes, because it's well explained, just a core part of the SkillSync brand identity. Mhmm. It's like, this is one thing that... I remember working with Gemini a few years ago, and there was this animation with, like, a braid. Like, basically, they were showing the model and all of these different things Mhmm. That Gemini had, and they all came together and built, this helix. And that animation was... It basically just explained exactly the capabilities of the model Mhmm. And that turned into a very thin line, and then it said Gemini. And that was an animation that a lot of people worked on who are much more talented than me for a very long time. [00:39:58] S0: Mhmm.
00:39:58 · Aaron Epstein, Marvin Schwaibold
[00:39:58] S0: Mhmm. [00:39:58] S1: And then later, a lot of really good engineers translated that into a scrollable animation for the website, and it just, like, that kind of sold it. Mhmm. And then you were in the product and you were using it, but that was that was the memory of... Like, that piece of motion was just ingrained in my memory and really explained exactly what the model was doing. Sometimes, being a little more artistic and abstract actually goes a really long way. And I think, yeah, for SkillSync, I could definitely see... There's a million different patterns and a million visual examples of how to of how to show that off, and you can be a lot more, like, just craftful and and and graphical about how of how you just... How you design that on on the website. So Yep. That will be my feedback to to to to these guys. [00:40:43] S0: Cool. Thank you, SkillSync. [00:40:44] S1: Thank you very much. [00:40:45] S0: Okay. Next up, we got Instaplay. So let's see. So I'm seeing a bunch of featured... I can't tell if these are movies or games. So it says design something that [00:40:57] S1: Birdsort. Birdsort. Okay. So these are games that we can play? Games. I think. Okay. [00:41:04] S0: How do we play? Got a bunch of birds. We got some sound that's playing now. Let's maybe go... [00:41:16] S1: Let's go for... Let's try something else. [00:41:18] S0: Start button. We're fighting this wolf, I guess. [00:41:28] S1: That's enough. So [00:41:30] S0: we've got this call out here, which... It's interesting. You know? It it says create, describe your game idea, right,