Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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,
00:41:30 · Aaron Epstein, Marvin Schwaibold
[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, [00:41:36] S1: when you [00:41:36] S0: click into it. What's interesting is there was no copy under the title Instaplay. And so we we were up to ourselves to try to figure out how to orient around this page. Yes. And the first thing that we did is we saw all the visual games [00:41:52] S1: Yeah. [00:41:52] S0: All the screenshots of them. Yeah. And so we jumped right to that. Yes. And so we missed the fact that, actually, the primary purpose here is for us to be able to just create our own games on the fly. Yes. And so I think a line of text could help with that or some type of callout that makes that... The prompt box more prominent. [00:42:10] S1: And and, again, it goes back to your example from from earlier. It's like, what is the one thing we want the user to take away when they land on the page? Is it exploring the the the multitudes of of games that have already been created on this platform, or is it the fact that we can create our own games? Creating our own games actually leads you to a sign up page, which no one's gonna do if they haven't seen their created game. Right. So you have to come up. You have to cough up enough credits to try to, like, onboard people into the product. [00:42:35] S0: That's the