Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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.
00:40:48 · Aaron Epstein
[00:40:48] S0: Right? Tell us more about the gear that you're using today to to produce these videos.
00:40:52 · Farza Majeed
[00:40:52] S1: Yeah. So for demos on my computer, which is just, like, what I'm hacking on that day, I always use this thing called Screen Studio. I think it's, like, made by some indie hacker, and it's just really good. It records your screen, records your local audio, makes your cursor look good, and I think it costs like $30. That's one level. Then the next level is, well, videos that more include me in a more native way. And for that, just pull up my iPhone, literally just a selfie camera, just and record myself talking, post, or edit on my phone even. I use on my phone Instagram's editing tool. It's called edits a lot. So when I... I do edit on my phone a good amount. So that's the iPhone. Nothing else required. But then there's the next level, where it's like you feel like you wanna do something a little bit more kind of, like, thought through, cinematic, and that's where I use my Sony FX three and Sony FX 30 or Sony FX three, the cheaper one, along with a DJI mic. It's actually funny. The most import... This is actually so important. I I can't believe I missed this. The most important thing in any video you make, doesn't matter if it's a shitty Loom or a shitty, like, little video or your iPhone, is audio quality. If your audio is bad, I'm bouncing. I've watched some some demos that are, like, seven twenty p, and just, like, the guy's in, like, a weird room in a basement, but his audio is crisp. And what he's working on is actually genuinely interesting, so I stick around. And so I don't care about the the rest of it. Don't care what he looks like, anything. I'm like, I can hear him, and I can see what he's doing.
00:42:17 · Aaron Epstein
[00:42:17] S0: That's it. Yep.