Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:35:29 · Aaron Epstein, Farza Majeed, S4, Farza Majeed
[00:35:29] S0: Yeah. [00:35:30] S1: But this is what... This is a perfect example. This was a super simple video. Basically, just a quick story here. I found out that with GPT real time, you could generate shell commands and control your computer in real time. Mhmm. And so we can watch it real quick. Alright. Check this out. No hands. Ready? Hey, Clicky. Can you please open up Spotify and play ACDC for me? Maybe Back in Black. I love that song. [00:35:54] S4: Rock on. It's playing Back in Black now. [00:35:56] S1: Amazing. Amazing. Clicky... Hey, Clicky. It's a little bit loud. Could you turn it down in Spotify 50%? This is so loud. Got [00:36:02] S2: it. Lowering Spotify to 50% so it's less intense. [00:36:05] S1: Okay. Thank you. Hey, Clicky. Can you open up my So now I'm gonna keep going. Yeah. And this is actually a fun one. Stripe dashboard for me in my browser. Let's see if we made any money today. [00:36:16] S4: Opening your Stripe dashboard now.
00:36:16 · S4, Farza Majeed, Aaron Epstein
[00:36:16] S4: Opening your Stripe dashboard now. [00:36:19] S1: Oh, man. A $140 in a day is not... And so to me, that was just one little moment in the day where I was like, oh my god. This AI model could do this. Does anyone... I didn't check if anybody did it before. I was just like, I'm gonna make a video. Turns out I did something very novel. Mhmm. And, again, the examples I used, playing a song on Spotify lowering the and lowering the volume, that's exactly the first use case that I had as a user myself. Yep. And so, again, always building for, like, the version of myself that's kinda watching out there. Because if I think that's cool, I think someone else would too. And, hey. Look. 3,800,000 views on Twitter. Really good. But, again, then Instagram, 4,600,000. You know, people always say, like, you gotta be super... Like, your brain has to be rotten when you're scrolling Instagram, and you gotta have a lot of quick edits and blah blah blah. Like, there's not a single cut in this video. [00:37:06] S0: Yeah. There's no cuts in the video, but there are beats in the video Yeah. That you do a very good job with. You know? You... We see you first. You say, hey. No hands. So right off the bat, I'm like, oh, no hands. He's just talking to this thing Yeah. Which is the hook that I think gets people [00:37:22] S1: to watch. That's all purposeful.
00:37:22 · Farza Majeed, Aaron Epstein
[00:37:22] S1: to watch. That's all purposeful. [00:37:23] S0: Yeah. Then you play the song. Then you lower the music so that you can continue to talk over it, and it responds to that as well. Then you pull up the Stripe Stripe dashboard, somebody goes, I wonder how much money they made
00:37:33 · Farza Majeed
[00:37:33] S1: to always... There's... Yeah. I'm always just trying to keep the story moving. Yep. I'm not trying to keep your attention. That's actually the wrong way to look at it. Mhmm. I'm always trying to... I'm always like, alright. Where is this going? Come on. You know, you're like, come on. Keep going. We we hear someone talking, let's get to the end of the story. Okay? You went to the movies, and and so you just keep doing that endlessly. And so I I love that you said the word beats. Some of my videos are purposely made to just kind of, like, appeal to, like, the audience that just has no attention span. Mhmm. You know, for example, like this one. It has been nine weeks since I built and launched my idea. It's an AI that can draw directly on your screen and guide you through any... So that's one example of, like, a quick, very quick. I'll show you this example here, which is talking about the beats just for once. Two weeks ago, I was in my apartment trying to figure out a cool idea to work on. Two weeks later, I built this thing that's now being used by thousands of people every single day. And the crazy part is So, again, I literally think about it like like like this. Mhmm. Am I here? Yep. Am I still watching? I think as you make these videos again and again, it becomes a lot more obvious to you as you do it. We have this one guy at our office right now. He is 19, and he has this built into his head, the same the same beat system. And it's funny. Like, most people who work on videos a lot have this little beat system in their head.
00:38:48 · Aaron Epstein, Farza Majeed
[00:38:48] S0: I think another thing that's unique is you actually invest a lot in your early team, which is small, but a large portion of it is actually built to help you create and produce and get these videos out the door on a regular basis. [00:39:01] S1: Yeah. I mean, I always say, like, I'm okay at videos. There are people out there who who are way better at me. Mhmm. My first two hires were... I knew from the beginning, even before I started my company, it's gonna be number one, a filmmaker, and number two, an engineer. And it's... Number one is film... Is filmmaker for me. So that is the first one or whenever... Whatever order they can come in. [00:39:22] S0: Why was that so important to you?
00:39:23 · Farza Majeed
[00:39:23] S1: I don't wanna put a ton of attention every day on making videos. I mean, any founder watching, any founder in YC, nobody wants to do that every day. At at some at some level, you do have to in the beginning, the early days. Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, look at my Clicky videos. Like, I'm forcing myself to just make videos and make stuff every day. At one point, you're like, well, this would be really great if someone's full time job at my company was to kinda observe what we were doing and help us launch and constantly make it their their mission to make us look good when we launch as well and make us come off properly. And so that's why a filmmaker was one of the first hires I I made at this company. And my last company, our film team was two people. We were only, like, a seven person team. Yeah. So even at this company, at one point, hey, Clicky. We had three people making videos and one engineer. Because it's so funny. Now it's so easy to pump out more code and more software, but it's harder than ever to actually talk about what you are doing in a coherent way in front of an audience. Mhmm. Because now, Aaron, you know, someone can clone my product in, like, two minutes at this point. But, again, what they... What's really hard to clone is the audience and the community that I built around what I'm doing and the energy around it. If you had an audience around your company, I'll say a 100,000 people that was really into what you were doing, maybe enterprise AI, you know, maybe something around, like, photography or whatever, whatever your niche is Mhmm. That'd be useful. Because because that's why, you know, I can make a video now about a new feature, and, like, thousands of people flood my app. That's awesome. That's, like, every founder's dream.