Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:00:51 · Farza Majeed, Aaron Epstein
[00:00:51] S1: Yeah. Started my first company when I was 13, selling stuff on eBay. Ten years later, started getting into software and, built a online school for kids, which I did y c four in 2020 with you. That turned into a company called Buildspace, which became one of the largest schools for people who wanted to work on their own ideas, and now working on Hey a new interface for AI. [00:01:10] S0: Doing videos has always been kind of a core strategy for you for how to reach out to people and especially with Buildspace. And now with Hey Clicky, it's how you've gotten a lot of attention for, for your your products and your businesses. How have you thought about that? And talk about your progression from when you got started with video up until now. [00:01:27] S1: Yeah. I mean, to this day, I just love making videos, making online videos for people. And these days, I'm working with my own company. So the story that's in front of me is actually my company story. And so it's been really fun to just tell that online. And it just so happens that making videos in 2026 is really good for business too. So... Yeah. [00:01:44] S0: Yeah. Tell us about that. So you've been making videos for over a decade, publishing them online. Talk about what's changed. Like, what is different now in making launch videos and getting attention for your product in 2026 that's different from how it was over the last decade?
00:01:44 · Aaron Epstein, Farza Majeed
[00:01:44] S0: Yeah. Tell us about that. So you've been making videos for over a decade, publishing them online. Talk about what's changed. Like, what is different now in making launch videos and getting attention for your product in 2026 that's different from how it was over the last decade? [00:01:58] S1: Yeah. I mean, you know, we... Me and you were in YC together in 2020. You know, you you as my partner. I mean, yeah, back then, you know, you were do... We had to do stuff like post to hacker news, post to product hunt, go to Reddit, like, find the right subreddit, you know, like, that... Those types of launches. And things have changed so much now. There are so many new channels now where our users are living across all all products. Doesn't matter what you're working on, could be drones or AI or, like, whatever, a dating app, your users are on many new platforms, mostly algorithmic platforms like X, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube. The biggest change is you're not really making posts anymore. You're actually just constantly launching all the time on these on these algorithmic platforms. [00:02:36] S0: Yeah. We see that a lot with, founders in the YC batch where they think a lot about... They have to put in all this time and energy and money to make some big fancy launch video and coordinate this big coordinated launch in the hopes that that's gonna be their big moment and everything's gonna take off. But you don't think about it like that. Like, I think your perspective is very interesting.
00:02:56 · Farza Majeed
[00:02:56] S1: Yeah. There was a time where that was the the meta. You know? Like, you gotta do, like, a fancy thing and make it a big... Because you got one shot. Mhmm. You get that TechCrunch article or you get, like, that the press in the New York Times or something like that. You needed something kinda nice to go with it. But now all of the old media is kinda just gone. And so now what's working is, like, a video where I put... I I say hi and I talk about my product is probably gonna perform way better than, like, a $20,000 produced video by the New York... That that I post with The New York Times in terms of actual engagement and traffic and, like, other things. And so it's a crazy world now. You don't need any of old media stuff anymore. And if you have a phone and a laptop, you're so much more powerful. And so, yeah, the... I think that now we keep calling these launches, and I think that that is what these are. These are mini launches all the time. But in my mind, I never consider it... I do consider it a launch, but not in the sense of, like, this is a big launch. This is a big thing. It's not we're launching a rocket. You know? It's funny. I rather call these demos instead of launches. Mhmm. And I just love shipping just demos constantly. Yep. And the more demos we can put as a company, the better. At my company, I'm always like, well, what are we launching this week? That's more of the question. And we work backwards always from the launch of whatever we're working on. So for example, give you... A small example. Yeah. If we have a feature we're working on... Well, we talk about... Sure. We talk about the feature, how it feels, etcetera. But then I ask, well, what's the copy on the Instagram caption? What's the first... What's the hook if we if we make this a v... A video about this? And not that, like, it needs to have a good... Needs to go viral, but we should talk about it because how we communicate to other people is just as important as what we're building. And so I'm... It's... At every part of the process, it's not like we make it, and then magically, make a hit video or something. That's never how it works. It's always like, we kinda know it's a hit before we even start, like, working on it because it just sounds good on paper. Yeah. And so I can show some examples of that.
00:04:35 · Aaron Epstein, Farza Majeed, Farza Majeed
[00:04:35] S0: I I think a lot of people see videos that you publish that go viral and get a ton of attention, and they almost think that it happens by accident because you just seem, you know, so comfortable and natural and off [00:04:46] S2: the cuff. But that's not how you do it at [00:04:48] S0: all because you're trying to figure out the hook before you even do the video. So maybe, it'd be interesting if you could pull up a video, walk us through it, and then maybe walk us through the process of how you created that video. What goes into it before you've even actually started shooting anything? [00:05:02] S1: Totally. Totally. My philosophy on a lot of the launch stuff now is just how can we just show, like, almost like the process of what I'm doing versus show the ending of what I'm doing. I think there's a lot of value to being like, hey. I'm this founder person, and I just got this much money. And this is my product, and this this is my fancy DSLR, and these are my good... My my wonderfully edited video, you know, with me in front of a nice office. You know? But I'm sure we've all seen those. You see those every day. I saw, like, five today for sure. Yep. And those have a purpose. But to to me, that becoming, like, the kind of, like, that people are reaching towards is really annoying. And so I try to always do the opposite and just do what I think is right. Because, again, that's a one time thing. You want you want a channel. Because why are we even launching, Aaron? Why are we launching? What's the reason? [00:05:49] S0: We're launching to get users.
00:05:49 · Aaron Epstein, Farza Majeed
[00:05:49] S0: We're launching to get users. [00:05:50] S1: Exactly. We're not launching to, like, get a bunch of clout on the Internet and make people think that we're smart. We're trying to actually get people to use our thing, and that means having a channel that we can keep on repeating and find users from. And so... Yeah. I'll show you one example here. This one's a perfect example. This is, like, the launch of click... Of of Hey Clicky. So this is Clicky. Clicky is this little blue guy that follows your cursor on as you use your computer, and it's basically an AI teacher that can teach you anything. Honestly, I thought the demo was not that good. I remember I showed it to you in office hours, and you're like, oh, you should post this. Like, it's actually kinda cool. Yep. And I I think one day you asked me again about it, and I ended up saying, okay. Yeah. Fine. I'll I'll post this. Yeah. Because even for me, I've been doing this for years, like ten plus years. And even I sometimes, I'm like, oh, I don't wanna post it. It's not good enough. But it was so wrong. It's so wrong of me for you to even think that. And so I record this video in the office five minutes before dinner, and I post it. And after dinner, it's just doing numbers. And now this is my company. Isn't that... It's a crazy thing. Yep. It was just a random side project that I then even just open sourced because I thought no one would even care about it. Mhmm. And here I am working on it six months later as a real company.
00:06:58 · Aaron Epstein, Farza Majeed
[00:06:58] S0: Right? So And so this was nearly 3,000,000 views. How how important was this video in actually even giving you the confidence that you should keep working on this? [00:07:05] S1: I do not care about the traffic at all. Mhmm. The views looks really wonderful, and people will say congratulations. But what are the actual numbers? So I actually don't care about this number at all. I was like, how many people downloaded it? Mhmm. And so after this video, think 7,000 people downloaded it. And then I looked at who's, like, retained four days later. And if you ask me why I'm working on the product today, it's not because it went viral. It's because 7,000 people downloaded it, and about a 100 people of those 7,000 kept on using it every day for five days straight. That got me so inspired. I reached out to those 100 people. I talked to each of them, and I was like, oh my god. People are using this for things I would have never imagined. And the users are what inspired me to keep going forward. Of course, there's so many little things I could talk about, things I'm doing just subconsciously at this point. Maybe you could help me think through it. But even just the headline, just like... Just casual. I built this thing. Yeah. It's an AI teacher. What does it do? Why is it important? Yeah. It's like, that's how my brain thinks. I've been writing for, a decade plus. Yep. And so to me, it sounds dumb to call a tweet poetry. But, like, I care about how long things are. [00:08:08] S0: Yes.