Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:27:20 · Farza Majeed, Aaron Epstein
[00:27:20] S1: See, this is so weird because this is where you just have to be yourself. I keep saying that. Mhmm. People always say, how do I start making videos about my company or videos about what I'm working on or have some presence? It's always the same feedback. Make... Take out your iPhone, click record, go go go selfie mode, and talk about what you're doing for thirty seconds and post that to your Instagram. Post that to your TikTok, and then post it to Reddit and Instagram... Or Reddit and YouTube or wherever. And you know how many people take me up on that? Almost, like, maybe 1%, 2% of the time, people will actually do it. Why, though? If I told you right now... I mean, maybe you're different. I don't I don't... You're probably different. You're you're Aaron Epstein. But if you... If I tell you to pull out your phone and record a video, how does that make you feel? And then post it to your personal Instagram. [00:28:01] S0: Oh, yeah. You're getting nervous about it. Like, what am I gonna say? Yeah. How am I gonna look? What if people think it's stupid? Yeah. And all these thoughts, I think, go through people's heads, and they're afraid
00:28:01 · Aaron Epstein, Farza Majeed
[00:28:01] S0: Oh, yeah. You're getting nervous about it. Like, what am I gonna say? Yeah. How am I gonna look? What if people think it's stupid? Yeah. And all these thoughts, I think, go through people's heads, and they're afraid [00:28:11] S1: of My high school friend follows me. He doesn't care about this Right. What I'm working on. Like, nobody cares. But, see, that's the thing. Like, there's so much value to... You gotta be cringe for a little while, actually, to learn how to not be cringe. And so a lot of people will, like, post their first video and be like, this is this is horrible. I'm not even posting this. But the... I think the important part is to continue doing it. Mhmm. And so, again, every day as a founder, founders watching on YouTube at YC, you're spending eight hours on your laptop making magic, smiling, seeing things that you find are interesting. If you just spend even ten minutes to step back and ask yourself, what's something I did today that made me smile or was interesting or felt new? And just talk about it and then show it and then click post and then close it back to work. That's all you have to do. That's what it means to be launching, I think, in 2026. Just to show your work because that is what launching is. When you launch on TechCrunch or New York Times, you're showing your work. But in 2026, you can show your work every day. And you can actually get an audience just by showing your work every day.
00:28:11 · Farza Majeed, Aaron Epstein
[00:28:11] S1: of My high school friend follows me. He doesn't care about this Right. What I'm working on. Like, nobody cares. But, see, that's the thing. Like, there's so much value to... You gotta be cringe for a little while, actually, to learn how to not be cringe. And so a lot of people will, like, post their first video and be like, this is this is horrible. I'm not even posting this. But the... I think the important part is to continue doing it. Mhmm. And so, again, every day as a founder, founders watching on YouTube at YC, you're spending eight hours on your laptop making magic, smiling, seeing things that you find are interesting. If you just spend even ten minutes to step back and ask yourself, what's something I did today that made me smile or was interesting or felt new? And just talk about it and then show it and then click post and then close it back to work. That's all you have to do. That's what it means to be launching, I think, in 2026. Just to show your work because that is what launching is. When you launch on TechCrunch or New York Times, you're showing your work. But in 2026, you can show your work every day. And you can actually get an audience just by showing your work every day. [00:29:11] S0: A lot of people think, well, I'm not targeting Gen z or whoever is stereotypically TikTok users, Instagram users. Therefore, I should not use that as a channel Yeah. To try to acquire my business customers or I sell to procurement or whatever. But it it sounds like your argument is, that's not true. There's all kinds of people [00:29:29] S1: Oh, yeah.
00:29:29 · Farza Majeed, Aaron Epstein
[00:29:29] S1: Oh, yeah. [00:29:29] S0: Using these platforms that are real humans that happen to work at companies where they could be your customer [00:29:35] S1: Oh, yeah. [00:29:35] S0: And would be interested in seeing your product. Right? [00:29:37] S1: Yes. Everybody in the world is on... Not everybody in the world, but a large majority of the world is [00:29:44] S0: browsing through these platforms. Billions. [00:29:46] S1: Yes. We found that design agencies really loved our product. Like, three of them that found us naturally. So the question became, how do we get more design agencies? Now I'm curious. What what what would you do if you take yourself back, like, to founder mode Aaron? [00:30:01] S0: Oh, I don't know. Probably the default for a lot of people is, like, go look on LinkedIn and Yeah. You know, try to find people that list the place they work as a design agency or go to communities that they hang out in or, like, specialized design [00:30:13] S1: Totally. [00:30:14] S0: Websites or something.
00:30:14 · Aaron Epstein, Farza Majeed
[00:30:14] S0: Websites or something. [00:30:15] S1: And those are all actually really good. You should do those things. But at the same time, do you think a design agency founder is on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube? Do you think they're on these platforms? The answer is probably yes. It's probably a lot of them. And so we started making TikToks, I remember. I don't have the account pulled up here, that was just targeting design agencies. I would literally say, hey, are you a design agency? Or hey, are you the founder of a design agency? Stop right there. Let me show you something really cool. And then that's how we found 50 design agency leads, just through TikTok. And these videos didn't go viral. They each, on average, had, like, 4,000 views. [00:30:49] S0: But it's probably 4,000 targeted views. [00:30:50] S1: 4,000 targeted views. So the goal of my goal is never to go viral. It's just I wanna talk about what I'm working on, and I wanna make sure it's listened to by an audience that would be interested in... Actually interested in what I'm doing. [00:31:02] S0: How do you think about the different channels? [00:31:04] S1: Every channel is different. I'll say off the bat, Twitter is our worst... Is... In historic... I've I've been making stuff on Twitter for, like, ten years. Mhmm. The worst conversion of any channel. Like, this video, the original Clicky video, got 7,000 downloads on 3,000,000 views. Mhmm. If you do the math there, it's, like, less than 1% or some crazy low [00:31:22] S0: number. Less. Yeah.
00:31:22 · Aaron Epstein, Farza Majeed
[00:31:22] S0: number. Less. Yeah. [00:31:23] S1: It's very low. Screen aware dictation, this video. Right? 2,900,000 views on Twitter, but the conversion rate onto those people actually making accounts was horrendously low. This YouTube video has 20,000 views. But do you know what the conversion rate on this video is? It's, like, 20% to them actually downloading the app. Wow. So the chances of you watching this video and downloading my app is 20%. [00:31:44] S0: Do you think that's something specific to the channel, or is it something