# Critiquing startup websites with Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin

**Author:** Aaron Epstein
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Iw-critiquing-startup-websites-with-webflow-ceo-vlad-magdalin
**YouTube ID:** B2JpZPSHaVM

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In this episode of Design Review, Y Combinator Group Partner, Aaron Epstein, is joined by the CEO of Webflow, Vlad
Magdalin. They review the websites of three Y Combinator funded companies—as well as one website from our Youtube
audience\!

## Transcript

hi I'm Aaron group partner at YC and welcome to another episode of design review [Music] today we've got a special episode we are coming at you from the webflow offices and I'm joined today by Vlad co-founder and CEO of webflow welcome everyone thank you very excited thank you for hosting So today we're actually going to be hosting is that a website hosting punch

you're welcome for hosting so today we are going to be uh reviewing uh websites that were specifically built in webflow so hopefully this will give you a good sense of what's possible with webflow and also some of the pros and cons of building really amazing landing pages and so obviously Vlad has seen millions of these things so together we are going to give a lot of design feedback that will hopefully be useful to all of you let's jump into the first website

so the first one we have here is Oda Studio stand out with your property photos let's see Property Management in marketplaces this makes me think it's something about photos for airbnbs or rental properties or something pretty much anywhere you might need because it's you know property managers marketplaces home builders could be a generic property photo service that you can feed into anything yeah so is this software is do they send

photographers to your place to take the photo that's not immediately clear to me here uh upgrade and organize so it's like Photo management um basically an asset management tool that you can put into other places image enhancements and labeling customize the home buying journey I think the tagline stand out with your property photos kind of it's probably a little too broad yeah um yeah I think we're both struggling here to figure out exactly what this is a lot of times for your website you want

to be focused on communicating what is it first and foremost and then the user that hits the site they want to know is this for me and I think they do a good job of the is it for me because if I have a property that I need to take photos of I feel like oh this is interesting but it's not clear to me exactly what they do with those photos yeah um all right let's see so buying up 40 businesses a million photos so here's an example okay so now I'm thinking this

looks like software to make the photos look better oh interesting it's the same exact one no it looks like oh I think it might be oh you're right so it's an augmented photo yeah uh if you go to the next see the next one it's a good use of a slider um okay it does look like the exact same framing it's not like somebody came in oh no like the clouds are different so it might just be this is taken by not pro and this is taken by a pro potentially I'm not sure if the staging

is done manually yeah I wonder if this is software staging where you take crappy photos of an empty room and then upload it to their software and they make it look like a well-lit well furnished and designed room that would be my guess but so website wise they're really missing out an opportunity to communicate some of this stuff more clearly it's especially since it says product example yeah is the product the photo itself or the management or it's not clear it's very generic just saying

like product example they should say like here's how our software automatically adds furniture or enhances the quality of the photo or adds a crazy Sky apparently start for free probably goes to a sign up experience yep um and then it's a little hard to tell what professional Quality Property photos no Pro required okay oh here we go okay this is a this is a little better what what page is this how did you get to it so I clicked

on from the home page it looks like based on the URL that's popping up here these go to different uh user personas that might use their software so I clicked on property manager and then it looks like down here why use Auto Studio smart enhancements versus this is where they should be on the average yes yeah this is what we're looking for and maybe you know sometimes I see this work well if you're um if you're buying ads or you have certain landing pages that are targeting certain users then this can work well to have it here but for anybody who hits your homepage directly it's not going to be

clear to them and this page goes a much longer way towards communicating what's actually uh what the software is just by pairing the same exact slider you see a before and after photo that's the same photo and the value prop or what it actually is premium virtual staging I mean I'm not a property manager but I can immediately connect okay I can see how this is a solution for me especially if you can communicate how your product is gonna help them get more rent or List

it faster find a renter faster that's actually going to go a long way because instead of just talking about specific benefits you're actually talking about the value that you can provide which is like make more money get your listings rented faster with this that's probably the benefit that I would focus on one thing I do like about this site is just it's really straightforward in the design it's pretty simple it's uh um no frills no you know egregious animation I think that what really needs

work is the content to to make sure that it really is more clear what they do and yep what the product is yeah there's good stuff here I think we get it now it just took a while so yeah it seems like further down the page is the really valuable stuff and that should be pulled up a lot higher things like Oto Studio by the numbers like I don't even have context to know what they do at this point and so that can go that's probably a social proof and attempt and social proof can go way down but I think you're right it could do a little polishing on what exactly this is and who it's for

cool well founders of Oda Studio it sounds like there's a lot of room for improvement to be able to just add more clarity around specifically what you do and I think that's going to go a long way to attracting the type of customers that you're looking for okay let's try the next one we got fly code here we free developers from product edits so I'm guessing product edits as in product managers saying I want this edit yeah product designers and hey I have this new update in figma yeah so product people ourselves we know that feeling of

tapping on an engine in your shoulder and saying hey can you change this code or do this thing and they're like that's like the 100th thing on my to-do list and I don't really want to work on that right now and so this I assume lets non-technical people because it says no code here helps the product name edits helps product teams work with software Engineers to ship their products faster with no code all right I can I'm curious to how it works but I'm intrigued this is I'm a little confused at the animation that happened here if three

minutes means like it's a three minute setup um I guess yeah if you connect your code three minutes from now you can have like this no code solution for product folks and the three the thing I noticed while the page loaded there was an animation so it kind of takes your your eyes there right away yeah and uh maybe it distracts from what you really want them to read first that's a great Point anytime you have animations and you have things that are moving on the page that always draws the viewer's eye and so it's a good idea to use that when you're

trying to highlight something that you want to make sure that somebody pays attention to first but if you're doing it for something that's not the main thing you can be distracting from the main thing that you actually want somebody to focus on yeah it looks like what they're trying to do is cram all the key information up in the top as close to above the fold as they can and I think actually a lot of users are comfortable scrolling and so I would think about it as unveiling different layers of the onion for what you want to communicate and so I think did a good job of communicating to us exactly what

the product does here assuming we're correct about it and then down here I think they're trying to communicate too many things instead I think we maybe need a little bit more information kind of your point about the three minute thing like what is it how specifically does it work at this point all right so let's see what we got when we scroll down make product changes without coding I think that's one of the other things is when you're designing your page the headlines are the things that are really going to stand out to people so

we hit this we read this headline we read the sub headline because it's up at the top and then we spent a lot of time here just because we were trying to decipher what was going on but I think if we were actually you know potential users of this product we would have gone I don't really know what's happening here and then we said okay make product changes without coding edit product flows in one place the free developers time we would kind of keep skipping down and just reading the headlines and and so it's really important that your website the headlines tell the story that you want to tell as you're scrolling down yeah and one thing I

noticed on the two almost competing headlines because the first very top one I'm guessing that's the H1 is we free developers from product edits as in like developers get the vast majority of the value as in you know I don't get distracted and then if you scroll down the second byline is actually we're for product teams right to potentially work better with software engineers and then make product changes without coding usually it's not developers who want to do do that they have a way to do that and it's now the value prop is for uh you know product managers or product

designers Etc so maybe consolidating that that value to you know uh product and Engineering teams uh and how how can you create sort of like the value add for them together this could be a little confusing into who you're actually trying to land this message without developers or product folks yeah that's the biggest thing people are going to hit this website and they're going to go is it for me and I think we have experience working with both developers and product people and understanding both of their challenges but I think if I was just a product

manager as my background the developer line might not resonate with me I might say like oh it's for developers it's not actually for me and I get you know at webflow we have the same tension between you know you want to speed up the designer developer workflows you don't want to like paint developers in negative light like avoid developers or I know here it's sort of help developers work on other things so it's a it's a there's a lot of tension to navigate so you want to get the messaging right so this is cool down here we get to some

social proof here's some people that have used it um that's super important it's it's you know once I understand what is this is it for me getting to some social proof around like does this work can I trust it um is really helpful and so we got some people here and some quotes and I don't know maybe these are made up or whatever but like they put their face behind it they put their company name behind it so anytime I see a face in a title in a company it's uh unless you're doing something really shady this is really seems like a real person and we even got

some it looks like some tweets or something like that about them so this seems like a real product and I think the website visually looks great like it looks professionally done and it sets a high bar for their product where I I think there's like professional product people that are working on this and the product probably works well too I think the biggest takeaway for me is like who is it for it's called fly code so it has something to do with code there's like benefits for non-developers developers freeing software Engineers there's some confusion here that I think warrants um some polishing yep great awesome nice

job fly code okay so for our next website we're going to take a look at this one is actually submitted by a viewer of the channel so looking forward to dive in with colossian here create videos with AI actors real easy okay this is one of those things where like the promise sounds really great yeah but the execution oftentimes is lacking and so the first thing that I want to do is see a video of this I just want to see if this actually works and if it

actually sounds like it right there and that's awesome because there's a video right here so let's check this out and see if this looks are you ready to create Studio quality videos with AI actors nothing is easier all colossian users enjoy full commercial license to use their videos freely online and offline what are you waiting for start with synthetic videos for free today okay interesting so like that was pretty cool I don't necessarily think it's a human yeah it's got that uncanny valley yeah

um effect so I that's a little bit more about the product I do actually like the fact this is one of the only websites I've seen where you know a lot of websites try to get to your watch videos where it's like it's only 15 seconds yeah and I think that puts your guard down or on okay this is not going to take a lot of time that makes sense to me I've got some social proof lots of videos so I actually kind of like this it looks like they're using their own product to to demo the videos to sell their own product yeah first

they immediately jump into personas so hello managers yeah so all of a sudden I kind of go from AI actors I guess e-learning content and all of a sudden it's managers I'm guessing at companies to to do like corporate training I wouldn't have expected this as being like the primary target that's right who they want to go after yeah they've booked a demo also I wonder if there's a way to just right here at the top have a text box that people can put their text into and just see it generated yeah and then you get your own

content maybe you can't save it out yeah until you start paying that could be a great way to get people through the funnel of actually trying and being like oh man I got the thing right here and it works I just want that video and I'm ready to go yeah my guess is it's you know non-trivial or not free to generate these videos yeah so it might be too expensive of an acquisition and then let's take a quick look at one of the use cases here what do we like Plano videos let's try explainer videos and it looks

like the use cases don't directly match to right yeah that is a little weird okay I'm not sure what's happening here yeah this is a little maybe feels a little unfinished um yeah whether it's a like a flow or different categories of what you're trying to do another demo increased sales okay yeah there's a lot of attacks here yeah yeah I don't think I would read this I would

just look at I'd be like increase sales 64 make a human connection boost and yeah it's kind of overwhelming with too much text okay so yeah it looks like this can be improved it seemed like the home page it was pretty clear what they do I think something just changed here whoa we just got a new maybe as you scroll create videos with okay we got oh wow I think I think the site maybe the power of webflow I'm pushing a new version uh okay this is a little bit more clear because it's you know choose an actor

give them a script generate your video yeah so this is almost something training videos can cost up to five thousand dollars per minute with colossian our clients save thousands on expensive Studio okay wow we got like the version one version two here uh this is like the feedback we just gave they basically just updated here yeah um and then generate your video in a minute so okay so one thing that stands out to me with the demo is when it's bigger it looks less accurate like the mouth when it was smaller it was a

little more incredible yeah so I I this actually unsells me a little bit more but I think this UI of like getting me to actually build it and see how it works is is more effective than the single demo video that they had yeah so being really precise around what you're using as your showcase demo is really important yep I think I think the the challenge here is not necessarily the the website um and it this is a hard problem to solve the challenge is like can you get people to believe that this is a a good

enough replacement for uh life human beings and I think the targeting with the specific use cases yeah I think we look at this and we're like wow this is really cool Tech and then I can't off the top of my head think of something I would be really excited to use those for I think the the multi-language portion really sells it for me potentially if you have a use case where you really want to create video content led by a host and you really needed that many languages it feels like this is the only way to really do that unless you're only doing subtitles and um and not having

that like more native experience yeah and we had to go all the way down in order to find that and pull that out so that might be something to put up here too right right awesome nice job colossian very cool product beautiful website well done just a quick break to tell you if you want your website to be featured in a future design review episode submit your information in the link in the description down below now back to more reviews okay let's take a look at artifact now great name artifact yeah very cool

and all of these that we've looked at so far they all have these beautiful headers and videos and it seems to be a common theme that I think we're seeing here which definitely gets my attention and sets the stage so I see a lot of families and kids here very grabs you on an emotional level yeah she only grows up once I don't want to forget it artifact creates a personal podcast series about your child okay this is interesting so we both have kids yeah I just had a new and I have daughters and she hits me on a heart level maybe this

is a product for me yeah I just had a new baby three weeks ago too so Now's the Time to be thinking about this so all right let's see but it's not immediately clear to me why I would want a personal podcast series about my child like photos or some videos like that makes sense to me so I'm curious if they can convince me that I would want a podcast yeah and immediately I'm sort of um I I start to pay a lot of attention to the video um and trying to connect is this a person using the product I think so yeah there's like interviews or is it maybe

is it a video podcast are you recording only um only voice like little notes around what's happening uh yeah looks like they've gotten a lot of coverage yeah so I think from up here what I take away is okay it's a podcast about your child so like cool I get what it is um I get that like is it for me because it's like if you don't have a child it's not for you if you have a child it's for you and then I go down and I see this and and I start to see Today Show CBS

Wirecutter Wall Street Journal so like seems like they've gotten a lot of really impressive press which makes me take this seriously too so that's really good A lot of it some of the quotes are great because it says like memorable keepsakes shareable audio heirloom I'm guessing it's more for like close-knit families it's not something that you beautiful gift yeah it's maybe great gifts for families okay so let's see okay what is the gift an app is it a subscription is it you know something where you like play you know um

we interview you about your child a pro-interviewer ah this was a service half an hour over the phone we edit and deliver with than five days a beautifully produced episode that lives in your family account okay family account is that on their website do I need an app for that is that like on some podcast platform monthly follow-ups text you a personalized question each month answer with a voice note and we add it it's very interesting that is not what I expected uh from the personalized

podcast initially I was thinking you know parents every day kind of do a little interview with a kid or ask them about their day and then you keep that as a Memento this is a professionally produced interview with a parent about their child to keep as a Keepsake with some um I'm not quite sure voice notes that are added yeah I was imagining more of like the voice notes as like a software product that you're using and it seems more like you the parent documenting the kid's life rather than the kid actually

being involved actually maybe when they get older I think most folks seeing this will now immediately think okay how much does it cost what is it I I can see sort of the process and how gifting works and we can hear what one sounds like how do I she pulled a toy airplane out of her little toy box and held it up in the air and started flying it around so she knew what the airplane does even though we've only talked about that maybe twice okay so kind of documenting through stories your child's life um this wasn't obvious

to me that I could click on this to play it yep I think like a big play button would be more obvious this was a good clue here I like the background music it sounds like good quality yes that seems kind of professional so I like that it's like uh it makes me think of like this is a little bit more like Pro Audio scrapbooking to remember like these moments about your child and then professional interviewers so journalists journalist journalists actor and podcast hosts so I see New York Times in the guardian all right

there's like some professional guessing you send this out to family or just keep it to archival Club yeah let's see they're crafted into instant heirlooms do you have to play it through their app oh and you can add photos too yeah it looks like an app that they have here an artifact app and I guess you share the app with friends or maybe it's web-based yeah actually maybe that's a URL down there so that's probably web-based something on their website I'm very curious because it require an account if you send it to other folks

it's a monthly subscription um so I'm guessing that a lot of the values in these like monthly follow-ups that then family get to um kind of relive I do this thing with with my daughters where I do one second every day it's a similar product where you record videos throughout the day and then you remember one second it's a mark in the app that's what it is and you can relive the uh the Year this feels like a similar value Addison like don't forget the little

moments um and create this almost like profile of my kid cool how long are your interviews yeah it's interesting it's very beautiful it's very um looks great quality seems good pristine a lot of press um seems like something I can trust they've even got their reviews up here a thousand plus reviews nearly five stars there very cool yeah very awesome seems like something I'd probably give it a try I'm gonna check it out awesome yeah cool nice work artifact great job well done

well awesome that's our videos for today hope you all enjoyed them thank you to everybody who submitted your websites and especially huge thank you to you Vlad and webflow for hosting us here really appreciate it it was an immense pleasure it's always awesome to see what can be built with webflow and what startups how startups are trying to get their message out there that's it's always a challenge and a struggle but uh it's so worth it to find a connection with customers Etc and so great to have you here yeah it's a beautiful space we

really appreciate it awesome well thanks everyone we will see you on the next design review [Music] thank you
