# Critiquing AI startup websites with YC President Garry Tan

**Author:** Aaron Epstein, Garry Tan
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Iv-critiquing-ai-startup-websites-with-yc-president-garry-tan
**YouTube ID:** uIYujpFmvo8

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In the crowded field of AI related startups, it's important to get your website just right. You probably have a lot to
say, but not a lot of time to say it. For this episode of Design Review, Group Partner Aaron Epstein invited YC
President and CEO Garry Tan to break down what’s working (and what’s not) on the websites of five different AI startups.

Watch along as they provide concrete advice that will help you improve your own site designs, regardless of what type of
company you’re building.

## Transcript

over the past few batches we've seen a pretty big uptick in the number of AI startups that are applying to YC and building AI focused companies so today we thought we would do an episode Focus entirely on AI startup websites welcome to another episode of design review [Music] today we are very lucky to be joined by YC's president Gary tan thanks for having me so Gary why did you want to 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 staff 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 going to dive into today awesome so

we're going to get started with Rosebud all right 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 uh 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 two game like development in general and sometimes I think we see this from Founders where they want to be cute with their tagline 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 ad 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 a 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 all right so there's a bunch of like media so social proof kind of stuff uh 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 you know try beta means oh this isn't vaporware so then I guess I click try beta cool okay this is interesting describe your idea here what would be helpful is like even a couple things to click on 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 home page so people don't even have to click every time you move people uh make them do extra clicks you have risk of drop off some percentage are not going to do it they're going to 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 kind of 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 one 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 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 well 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 um the primary product here that you

want users to explore and spend time with and get them directly into that product to get the aha moment as quickly as possible that's great yeah thank you Rosebud all right next up we got magic flow so AI workflows made easy how do you feel about these uh 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 they come in they read this first paragraph they're like do I it is free do I want to 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 it's sort of showing hey this is what we can do you identify they identified 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 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 sort 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 chat GPT or I'm using hugging face or whatever and and that makes it feel like oh it's for me okay iterate quickly with our step-by-step debug tool that's actually fun all right 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 that I think it is good to use very concrete claims like it's 30 percent cheaper and 25 faster you 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 simple 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 like

the faster cheaper kind of thing is probably the thing that when they talk to users they would tell them were their concerns about using a product like theirs or why don't I just build it myself or something like that um so it seems like they've proactively addressed that which is great how funny I I mean I inherently tried to drag and drop because it felt like I should be able to do that they said that multiple times drag and drop they said drag and drop so the first thing I tried to do is 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 you click on it absolutely nothing and I actually clicked on it and uh it dropped me into the login so I'm like oh I did the wrong thing the problem with this interaction is it just doesn't doesn't build trust with me what I expected yeah you just hit a wall and you have to turn back well it said try so okay okay now you're just lying to me yeah yeah yeah yeah uh this is interesting 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's an 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 and how many times have we hit the back button already on this one 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 seems great next up we got reality Defender deep fake detection and protection stop deep fakes before they become a problem with reality Defenders proactive

detection platform all right 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 deep fakes so it seems like maybe that's not actually what's happening here that's right and there's really too much spacing between them 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 salesy Vibe and then like it or not on the visual side yeah I think I subconsciously do this and maybe this is a designer thing but it's generally true that um having really good spacing it just sort of contributes to this feeling of quality and 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 this is something that I can trust at the Enterprise level yeah ruin 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 will matter and it just brings down the quality by that like little five or ten percent yep so I think we're like halfway down the page and we still don't really know what they're doing yet stop

deep fakes 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 deep fakes but I still don't know like how or what they do maybe they'll get into it here um 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 going to try this hard I mean defending democracy sounds pretty important but I also still don't know what it is how though yeah we 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 Tech doctor documents and grow your fraud prevention capabilities yeah and so these this is interesting but they don't quite go together because the first two sound like they you're selling it's an API of some sort and you're selling to social media size 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 home page like I you want um 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 home page for that particular customer 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 a 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 um 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 feet 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 got to 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 go looks like government agencies are using this in visa and Microsoft so like they sell me on on that piece which intrigues me to want to learn more like I take it seriously but I still don't know yeah I mean this case study might be pretty important actually oh yeah that's great I totally

missed that how a national public broadcaster detects deep fakes got it I mean that sounds pretty important but even then there's not enough data to really make me want to put my info yeah thank you reality Defender all right next up we got pump cheapest way to save 60 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 and use this this company exclamation point group discounts AI you know it's got to be good if it's got AI 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 watched that and I'm like oh yeah I know what these guys do when I want to use it

yeah I don't know if I need to watch a Super Bowl ad first yeah like that's not the thing that's going to get me to use it I do like the call to action view my savings makes it feel just very present to hand 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 aha moment for this company and so if they can show people right up front how much their savings would be and 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 um maybe potentially overused a lot of times animation can be used effectively to drop the user's eye to something 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've seen a lot of these reduce Cloud spend companies and so I'm kind of 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 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 going to 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 going to 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 they're 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 want to click on FAQ how does the group buying work yeah there we go yeah okay so which is good I mean

having an FAQ present to hand means that you can sort of pique someone's interest and then get their you know this is actually a good experience then 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 then right I think from the home page 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 be 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 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 voice flow to design test and launch chat or voice assistance together faster at scale start building it's free or book a call this is um 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 flow chart 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 like what this flow is and so that's a similar issue from the prior one that was about generic workflows is 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 be able to build

it which is that is a cool feature okay here's some social proof I guess just to buy a hundred thousand teams that's nice I actually like how it chilled out this scroll is this is a good contrast to the last one I was like boom like so much Movement Like You know 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 it was the same thing up here like there was 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 um 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 and whether or not it was for me that's how you know that that uh it's well designed I'm getting the feeling the voice flow existed for a while so it is probably good if you're like one of the old 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 um 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 uh very very trustworthy and I like that this is a a coherent point and they've got Molly's face or Colin's face there and uh it feels like real people rather than something that's made up loved by designers great I mean makes sense we can tell

yeah game recognized game well done voice flow 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 yeah I would totally use this if I needed a great AI assistant yes all right 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 uh 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 uh down below so thank you all for watching and we'll see you on the next design review [Music]
