Critiquing AI startup websites with YC President Garry Tan

Today, we are very lucky to be joined by YC's president, Gary Tan. Thanks for having me. So Gary, why did you wanna focus on AI websites for this episode? The number one question that is sort of the most important for a lot of startups is actually why now?

All of the activity around large language models whether using open AI stuff or Anthropic or open source, It's just the most exciting why now that's happening because we just didn't have this level of capability. So when you have this crazy new why now, often you're actually literally trying to figure out how do you describe a new category that didn't exist before.

So that's some of the stuff I think we're gonna dive into today. Awesome. So we're gonna get started with Rosebud. Alright. Let's check it out. Right off the bat, what do you see in here, Gary? Well, there's a busy thing on the left that's sort of distracting me, but AI generated game assets to game development. Build games at the speed of thought, GPT to game.

That's a lot of that's three different concepts.

all at the same time. If you had to take a guess at what what they do based on this, what do you think it is? I mean, I must be a game developer. So if I'm not a game developer,.

it's probably not for me. Yep.

Yeah. I'm pulling out the AI generated game assets and then game development. But I couldn't tell if game development is for game development or a play on words for like to game like development in general. And sometimes I think we see this from founders where they want to be cute with their tagline Mhmm. And sometimes the meaning gets lost Right.

But they think it's clever because they understand what they do. Right. But it makes it hard for new people to quickly understand. You don't want to be clever if clever equals confusing. And that's like the first thing that people are trying to understand when they hit a website is what is this? And number two being, is it for me?

So I guess we're saying AI generated game assets for game developers. Right. Build games at the speed of thought, GPT to game. So now it makes me think that like this helps you build games.

rather than just being for assets. Yep. And then there's two obvious call to actions. One is gaming asset generator and then the other one is AI game dev platform. So it sounds like it is both. Okay.

Sounds like a lot of things. Yeah. And so I'm confused. I don't know which to click, so maybe let's just keep scrolling Yeah. And see if we can uncover this. Alright. So there's a bunch of like media, so social proof kind of stuff. Pixel Vibe AI game asset generator.

Okay. So now I'm starting to feel like maybe there's multiple products here. What do you think? Yeah. For sure. And then sprites makes sense. And then there's more calls to action here. Which is great, know, tri beta means, oh, this isn't vaporware.

So then I yes, I click tri beta. Cool. Okay. This is interesting.

Describe your idea here. What would be helpful is like even a couple things to click on and like even a fly out here that's, you know,.

just give me some good ideas, just impress me. Right? Like how could you just have this right on the homepage so people don't even have to click? Every time you move people, make them do extra clicks, you have a risk of drop off. Some percentage are are not gonna do it and they're gonna miss out on this. Now we keep going, but wait, there's more.

AI generated sky boxes, talking heads, AI avatar animation. So it seems like there's at least four different products here, which is kinda confusing because usually you want a single call to action that you're driving people towards. Here, I don't know. I guess there could be lots of different types of users coming here that may be interested in different things. But I don't know.

What what advice would you give to maybe improve what we're seeing here? Seems like we have to be a little bit more.

opinionated about what we really want the user to click on and do. You know, a good example of this is actually on this page. You know, if you really want people to try the beta, make that the call to action and then make learn more instead of a button that's equal weight, just make it a link.

And you know, of the most important things to use is contrast in order to figure out in order to be opinionated to the user. I want you to do this. I would recommend for Rosebud to figure out.

what their main KPI is and what outcome they want from people that hit their website. My hunch is it's not go explore all of these products or figure out whichever one is most interesting to you and try that. There's probably one that's their main priority here. And given that this talks about game assets, my hunch is that's the one and it's the first one here.

And so maybe some of these other ones just get moved to secondary pages where it's not the main focus and you can keep everybody focused on just driving them towards the game assets, trying that out, getting them to use that if that is in fact like the primary action that you want people to take. The other question I'd have for them is, is there a way that you can.

make a video or use animation that actually shows the product and then shows, in particular for AI, a feat of strength? Mhmm. So it's like, check this out. You've never been able to do this before. You know, type a few things and then look at this magic output. I mean, those are the types of demos that really wow people, and that's actually why people are so obsessed with this technology now.

Like, the demos and the technological feats of strength that people are capable of putting out, like that's just.

blowing people away. I think the biggest, piece of advice for Rosebud is to focus in on the, the primary product here that you want users, to explore and spend time with, and get them directly into that product to get the moment as quickly as possible. That's great. Yeah. Thank you, Rosebud. Alright. Next up we got Magic Flow. So AI workflows made easy.

How do you feel about these, call to actions right away that's like, create the free account? I feel like the flow.

is not that people come in, they read this first paragraph and they immediately click the button. Right. I think what happens is they come in, they read this first paragraph, they're like, do I It is free. Do I wanna create a free account? And then they go down and explore more. And then what are we looking at here? User image,.

you can remove the background. Okay. I mean, this is actually pretty good. Yeah. Cool. It's sort of showing, hey, this is what we can do. You identify they identify the object, and then from there, you can create different types of scenes. So this is interesting because, I can't tell whether this is actually what the product does.

Based on reading it, that isn't. It's more trying to show an example of a workflow that Yeah. Which actually I think is important like, you know, we've worked with lots of.

kind of generic workflow companies in the past at YC and I think the problem that they all run into is nobody's like, man, I really need workflow software. Instead there's a specific problem that they're looking to solve.

And so usually what works, kind of to your point earlier, is to actually focus on very specific use cases that are the most common ones and use that to get people into the product and then they can say, oh, there's actually much more that I can do here too. So it seems like maybe the use case they're trying to target there is is image customization.

And maybe it does more than that. I don't know. Okay. How it works. I like I really like when they do how it works very early because Yep. It brings you to a much higher understanding of what's going on. It's kind of like when you do YC interviews and you get to do a demo. Drag and drop tool to create any AI workflow you can think of.

And then I like that they're using Hugging Face and Stability AI and chat I mean, these are you know, being able to pull models from Replicate, great. Like, most everyone's heard of replicate at this point and they know, okay, this is where I get a particular open source model to use.

And I think a lot of people will see those and it'll resonate like, oh, I'm using ChatGPT or I'm using Hugging Face or whatever, and and that makes it feel like, oh, it's for me. Mhmm. Okay. Iterate quickly with our step by step debug tool. That's actually fun. Alright. Okay. Well, that's skeptic I'm skeptical of the claim about fun, but it sounds useful, so that's good.

Workflows are so much fun. Optimize for production. Make sure it's fast and cheap as possible. Well, this is great, but I think it is good to use very concrete claims, like it's 30% cheaper and 25 faster. Know, the tricky thing about this stuff is like, well, how do you know? And, you know, there's not really a footnote.

I'm not saying you need to add one, but those are sort of the questions that people sort of think through. And then you can use a a simple a API call from your app. I think what I like about that section is it feels like it came from lots of conversations with users. Mhmm.

Like the faster cheaper kind of thing is probably the thing that when they talk to users they would tell them were there concerns about using a product like theirs or why don't I just build it myself or something like that. So it seems like they've proactively addressed that which is great. How funny. I I meet I inherently tried to drag and drop because it felt like I should be able to do that.

They they said that multiple times, drag and drop. They said drag and drop. Yeah. So the first thing I tried to do was and then when I moused over this thing, it actually becomes a hand cursor, which is also the affordance for Right. Being able to drag. So what happens when click on it? Absolutely nothing.

And I actually clicked on it and, it dropped me into the So I'm like, oh, did the wrong thing. The problem with this interaction is it just doesn't doesn't build trust with me. Like a mall. What I expected. Yeah. You just hit a wall and you have to turn back. Well, said try, so okay. Okay.

Now you're just lying to me. They're not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is intro I mean, I can see what they're trying to do.

It's like trying to give, you know, you're getting tricked into the wall. Nothing.

feels like a live example about this. Right. Maybe something like do your first one free. Like don't even actually force people to create an account and put that wall up front. Instead you could just make it accessible and if somebody wants to save it or use it or however they plan to use it, that's when you prompt them to actually create the account because they're already invested in the product.

When you click through and it's like try it now and you hit this wall, there isn't even context about like why you should sign up here that's encouraging you to actually like click the sign in button. Yeah. Basically you're always fighting the urge for the back button or to go look at Hacker News or something. And how many times have we hit the back button already on this Many times.

My biggest piece of feedback for them is like there's great stuff here. It's just kind of small and like buried on the side there. And the more that they can make that like, you want to hit people over the head with it, otherwise they're just going to quickly scroll past it. If they can make it more obvious, then this thing's great. Next up we got Reality Defender.

Deepfake detection and protection. Stop deepfakes before they become a problem with Reality Defender's proactive detection platform. Alright. So what do we got going on in this video here? It's pulling out people and faces, I guess. Yeah. This makes me think this is like software for like closed circuit cameras. Right.

Like to find people walking through the airport or something like that, but it talks about deepfakes, so it seems like maybe that's not actually what's happening here. That's right.

And there's really too much spacing between the between the lines of this header, and then there's not enough spacing between the logos and this bottom body area.

So the interesting thing is up here I'm sort of getting this enterprise sales y vibe, and then like it or not on the visual side, you I think I subconsciously do this, and maybe this is a designer thing, but it's generally true that having really good spacing, it just sort of contributes to this feeling of quality. And Yeah.

When you have little fit and finish issues like, you know, certain things being too close or headers having the wrong line height, it does ruin the illusion for me that Yeah. This is something that I can trust at the enterprise level. Yeah. Ruins some of the structure and organization.

Like there's way too much space between this and this and, you know, if the hard part about this is like does it really matter? You know, majority of people probably won't tell, but for some people.

it it will matter and it just brings down the quality by that like little five or 10%. Yep. So I think we're like halfway down the page and we still don't really know what they're doing yet. Mhmm. Stop deepfakes. Okay. Developed by Okay. So this is like a social proof, like we're a legit team kind of thing.

NATO uses it. Provides enterprises and entities of any size intuitive protection against damaging deepfakes. But I still don't know, like, how or what they do. Maybe they'll get into it here. Real time results. Okay. So it does something in real time. We're still not sure exactly what it's doing in real time though.

Yeah. We're halfway through the page and we're still really looking and we still don't quite understand what it is. And we're trying. And I think most users when they hit this, they're not actually gonna try this hard. I mean, defending democracy sounds pretty important, but I also still don't know what it is. How though? How do you defend democracy?

Authenticate oh, so okay. There is an authentication piece, so we weren't totally wrong Okay. About facial detection, I guess. Yeah.

This is almost a one two three maybe? Okay. So protect what's important. Scan user generated media for fabricated items. Okay. So you scan user generated media, you detect potentially damaging content before it spreads, verify voice prints, detect doctor documents and grow your fraud prevention capabilities.

Yeah. And so these this is interesting but they don't quite go together Yeah. Because the first two sound like they you're selling it's an API of some sort and you're selling to social media side. The scanner. Right. Or companies to detect Right. Fakes of.

their products. But then there's the people up top. Right. So I'm still confused.

Yeah. I mean, that's one thing that we're always looking for in the homepage. Like, I You want your ideal customer or your ICP to sort of look at it and say, oh, that's for me. Yeah. And in order to have that, you actually have to write the homepage for that particular customer. Yep. Not like a nebulous like any customer, anyone who might need our technology.

Like being too general is actually a little bit problematic here. Yeah. Being specific is way better and actually one of the best tactics to be able to do this, go talk to your existing users,.

ask them, how would you describe my product? And then take the exact phrase that they say and just put that up at the top of your site. Because that's ideally the same thing that will resonate for other potential customers. What final words of wisdom do you have for Reality Defender here?

I guess the main thing is, and it's always the main thing, which is I, you know, this is my first conversation with this company.

and I really need to know who's it for, what does it do.

And then again, like some of the things we said earlier still apply here. Like, I kind of want to be impressed, especially when you're talking about AI. There's some sort of feat of strength that you can show. It's like they skip down to the lower tiered things. Like the most important thing, who is it? Who's it for? You gotta know that. It's like Maslow's hierarchy.

You can't progress to the next step. But they seem to do a good job at the social proof, you know, government approved and got looks like government agencies are using this and Visa and Microsoft. So like they sell me on on that piece which intrigues me to wanna learn more like I take it seriously but I still don't know. Yeah. Mean this case study might be pretty important actually. Oh yeah.

That's great. I totally missed that.

How a national public broadcaster detects deepfakes. Got it. I mean, that sounds pretty important. Mhmm. But even then, there's not enough data to really make me wanna put my info Yeah. Yet. Thank you, Reality Defender.

Alright. Next up, we got Pump. Cheapest way to save 60 percent on AWS. The no brainer. The fastest.

Okay. There is actually a video here. Let's check out the video. I.

like the tunes. That's it pumped up to use this this company.

Exclamation point. Group discounts.

AI. You know it's gotta be good if it's got I don't know. I think my takeaway from this video is a lot of sensory overload. Yeah. Like a lot of colors, a lot of movement, a lot of graphs, like it's cool. But I'm not sure that I watch that and I'm like, oh yeah, I know what these guys do and I wanna use it.

Yeah. I don't know if I need to watch a Super Bowl ad first. Yes. That's what I Like, that's not the thing that's gonna get me to use it. I do like the call to action. View my savings makes it feel just very present to him, like, oh, I could do it very quickly. Yeah.

And that seems like the main reason that somebody would use this, right, is to get savings on their cloud infrastructure. And so if you can like that's the moment for this company. And so if they can show people right upfront how much their savings would be, then it becomes a no brainer to use this product probably. I like the social proof. That makes sense. Gotta do that.

I think the visuals look nice. I think a lot of the bright colors and moving elements may be potentially overused. A lot of times animation can be used effectively to draw the user's eye to something. Yeah. And if a lot of things are moving then it just becomes kind of overwhelming. And I think being selective about it. So it's what's the thing that you really want to draw people's attention to?

What's the next step you want them to take? And then put animation around that, drive a lot of the attention and focus to that. So like we we've seen a lot of these reduced cloud spend companies and so I'm kinda wondering with my YC partner hat on, like what's different about what these guys are doing? And probably that's something that potential customers will be thinking too.

If you search for like cut cloud costs, there's probably dozens of potential products that you could go with to help with that. So like, why these guys is probably the question a lot of their users are gonna be asking. So would you put like a, you know, x versus y sort of reference to competitors? Yeah. It's not clear to me what's different.

Like I guess there's AI, but like lots of others are probably gonna have AI too. So I'm not convinced that's enough of a differentiation. They keep throwing out this Groupon thing which makes me think there's some like group buying aspect where maybe it's like multiple companies pool there, a group discount.

Multiple companies pooling together in order to get on a better tier with lower pricing would be my hunch, but they don't actually really say that anywhere. Yeah. That makes me wanna click on FAQ.

How does the group buying work? Okay. There we go. Yeah. Okay. So Which is good. I mean, having an FAQ present to hand means that you can sort of peak someone's interest and then get their you know, this is actually a good experience like if within two clicks you can get you know, and actually having these two be the first two, that's a good choice by them. Right.

I I think from the homepage.

we were getting hints that there's this group discount, group buying thing that's going on here. We saw the group discounting flash. We saw something about Groupon. But they don't actually say that, and it feels like one of those things that you should beat people over the head with to make it super obvious that that's what's happening here and that's why it's better.

What would help me is if there was a customer that I had heard of that had used this already and saved x percent.

I'm You know, usually when that happens There's a bunch of logos right there. So Yeah. But there's nothing There's You can't really I mean, Ruby uses it. That sounds great. I mean Yeah. I almost want there to be a case study with, like, whoever the number one customer is. Okay. And then this is sort of their how it works.

View your savings estimate, like the savings, let us know where you'd receive the dollars back. Join your AWS account. Okay. There is a collective.

That seems to be the thing that's different here and it's kind of buried. I think the advice on this one is to be more explicit around what's different here, how they actually help save 60%, reduce down some of the motion and animation and bright colors and instead use it sparingly to draw attention to specific things. Yeah. Less is more here. Less is more. Yep. I think that's right. Okay.

Next up we have Voice Flow. And this one was actually submitted by one of our YouTube viewers. So thank you. Teams use Voiceflow to design, test and launch chat or voice assistance together faster at scale.

Start building. It's free. Or book a call. This is,.

pretty slick, I think. This is a great demo. There's the start, so maybe that's.

That makes sense. Okay. I can visually understand that here's a flowchart. It's literally called voice flow.

It's moving a little too fast for me to dig in and be able to tell what is actually being connected. That's right. Like what this flow is. And so that's a similar issue from the prior one that was about generic workflows. It's trying to figure out like, great, you do workflows for, I don't know if this is voice or chat, seems like maybe both.

But to give a concrete example of who would use this and why, I think would be helpful. I guess they're making a big deal of, multiple people being on the same web page.

sort of collaboratively being able to build it, which is that is a cool feature. Okay. Here's some social proof, I guess. Trusted by a hundred thousand teams. That's nice. I actually like how chilled out this scroll is. This is a good contrast to the last one. Yes.

It's like, boom, like so much movement. Like, oh, I'm, you know, I'm getting dizzy. And here it's like, oh, we're chill. Like, it's Yeah. Don't worry about it. Yeah. And it was the same thing up here. Like, there's animation,.

there's motion, but it actually made us intrigued. It wasn't like, oh man, I need to put on my sunglasses. That's right. And then down here, yeah, we can follow along. We can actually realize that there's, a lot of companies that we've heard of before. Like, that's impressive if all of these big companies are actually using their product. Well, that's why they can be chill about it then.

Maybe that's that's the difference. Okay. The interaction image was so good, I sort of already got what it was for Yeah. And whether or not it was for me. That's how you know that that, it's well designed.

I'm getting the feeling that Voiceflow existed for a while, so it is probably good if you're like one of the older AI companies that didn't just suddenly spawn into existence in the last six months that, hey, we're sort of hip, we're with it. Yeah. It seems nicely designed.

It seems like lots of people have used it and given feedback on it and they've iterated to this point, which is actually another good way to learn is to look at other products that have been around for a while and, take some of the techniques that they use, and it's really easy to Like they've already validated it. They've spent years refining it.

Like you get to take their learnings for free right out of the gate. And then it's nice how they keep, weaving the different logos and customers throughout as they're making a different point. And then they have somebody from that company that's giving a quote that reinforces that it's actually real people at this company.

It's not like one user tried it one time and then, you know, stopped using it afterwards. Yeah. This makes it very very trustworthy and I like that this is a a coherent point. Mhmm. And they've got Molly's face or Colin's face there and it feels like real people rather than something that's made up. Loved by designers. Great. I mean, makes sense.

We can tell. Mhmm.

Yeah. Game recognized game. Well done, Voiceflow. Yeah. This is great.

Clear call to actions, nicely designed, good hierarchy and flow. I think we understand what it is. The right things drew our attention. Well done. Yeah. I would totally use this if I needed a great AI assistant. Yes. Alright.

That does it for this episode. Gary, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. And thanks to all the founders who submitted their websites for review. Just as a quick reminder, if you would like us to review your website in a future episode, go ahead and click on the link to the form in the description down below. So thank you all for watching and we'll see you on the next design review.