- The number of AI startups applying to YC has increased significantly
- The episode focuses on AI startup websites
- The first website, Rosebud, is confusing with multiple concepts and unclear call-to-actions
- The advice is to focus on the main product and improve the clarity of the website
- The second website, MagicFlow, shows an example of a workflow and addresses user concerns
- The drag and drop feature on MagicFlow's website is misleading and should be improved
- A suggestion is to make the product accessible without creating an account upfront

- The first piece discusses the importance of allowing users to access a product without creating an account upfront and prompting them to create an account once they are invested in the product.
- The second piece reviews the website for Reality Defender, a deep fake detection and protection platform, and highlights the need for clearer information about what the company does and who it is for.
- The third piece analyzes the website for Pump, a company that helps save money on cloud infrastructure costs, and suggests the need for clearer differentiation from competitors and more emphasis on the group buying aspect of their service.

- The first piece discussed the need for explicit information on how a product helps save 60% and reduce motion and animation.
- The second piece reviewed VoiceFlow, a tool for designing chat or voice assistants, and mentioned the importance of providing concrete examples of who would use it and why.
- The reviewer appreciated the chill and well-designed scroll and the use of social proof with recognizable company logos.
- VoiceFlow's longevity and iteration were seen as positive factors, and the inclusion of real people's quotes added trustworthiness.
- The clear call to actions, good hierarchy and flow, and overall understanding of the product were praised.
- The episode concluded with an invitation for founders to submit their websites for future reviews.

- The number of AI startups applying to YC has increased significantly
- The episode focuses on AI startup websites and provides feedback on specific examples
- The first website, Rosebud, is confusing and needs improvement in terms of clarity and call-to-actions
- The second website, MagicFlow, has a misleading feature and should make the product accessible without creating an account upfront
- The third website, Reality Defender, needs clearer information about its services and target audience
- The fourth website, Pump, needs clearer differentiation from competitors and more emphasis on its group buying aspect
- The fifth website, VoiceFlow, received positive feedback for its design, use of social proof, and clear call-to-actions
- The episode concludes with an invitation for founders to submit their websites for future reviews.

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.

And if you'd like to have your startup's website reviewed, please submit your info here: https://shorturl.at/wIJS0. We’re especially interested in checking out mobile site designs for an upcoming episode.

Thank you to these companies for volunteering: 
Rosebud (https://www.rosebud.ai/)
Magicflow (https://www.magicflow.ai/)
Reality Defender (https://realitydefender.com/)
Pump (https://www.pump.co/)
Voiceflow (https://www.voiceflow.com/)

Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DesignReview-apply
Work at a startup: https://yc.link/DesignReview-jobs

Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 
00:00 - Intro
01:01 - Rosebud
05:51 - Magicflow
10:41 - Reality Defender
15:44 - Pump
20:09 - Voiceflow
23:35 - Outro

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 focused entirely on AI startup websites.

Welcome to another episode of Design review.

Today, we are very lucky to be joined by YC's president, Gary Tan.

So Gary, why did you want to focus on AI websites for this episode?

The number 1 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.

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 3 different concepts all at the same time.

If you had to take a guess at 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.

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 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 2 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.

And then there's 2 obvious call to actions.

1 is a gaming asset generator, and then the other 1 is AI game dev platform.

So maybe let's just keep scrolling and see if we can uncover this.

All right, so there's a bunch of media, so social proof kind of stuff.

OK, So now I'm starting to feel like maybe there's multiple products here.

And then there's more calls to action here.

You know, tri-beta means, oh, this isn't vaporware.

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 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 not going to do it, and they're going to miss out on this.

Now we keep going, but wait, there's more.

AI-generated skyboxes, talking heads, AI avatar animation.

So it seems like there's at least 4 different products here, which is kind of confusing because usually you want a single call to action that you're driving people towards.

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 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.

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 1 of the most important things to use is contrast in order to figure out, in order to be opinionated to the user.

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 1 is most interesting to you and try that.

There's probably 1 that's their main priority here.

And given that this talks about game assets, my hunch is that's the 1, and it's the first 1 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 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

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 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.

How do you feel about these call to actions right away?

I feel like the flow is not that people come in, they read this first paragraph, and they immediately click the button.

I think what happens is they come in, they read this first paragraph, they're like, it is free, do I want to create a free account?

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 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.

It's more trying to show an example of a workflow.

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.

Usually what works, 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 image customization.

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 heard of Replicate at this point.

And they know, OK, this is where I get a particular open source model to use.

And I think a lot of people will see those, and it will resonate like, oh, I'm using Chat GPT, or I'm using Hugging Face, or whatever.

And that makes it feel like, oh, it's for me.

OK, iterate quickly with our step-by-step debug tool.

OK, well, I'm skeptical of the claim about fun, but it sounds useful, so that's good.

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.

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 1, 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 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.

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.

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 being able to drag.

And I actually clicked on it, and it dropped me into the login.

The problem with this interaction is it just doesn't build trust with me.

Yeah, you just hit a wall and you have to turn back.

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 1 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 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 1?

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.

Stop deep fakes 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.

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.

And there's really too much spacing 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, 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 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, it 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, the 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 5 or 10 percent.

Yep So I think we're like halfway down the page and we still don't really know what they're doing.

So this is like a social proof like we're a legit team kind of thing.

Provides enterprises and entities of any size intuitive protection against damaging deepfakes.

But I still don't know how or what they do.

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.

Authenticate, oh, so okay, there is an authentication piece.

So we weren't totally wrong about facial detection, I guess.

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.

Because the first 2 sound like you're selling, it's an API of some sort, and you're selling to social media sites.

Or companies to detect fakes of their products, but then there's the people up top, so I'm still confused.

Yeah, I mean, that's 1 thing that we're always looking for in the homepage, like you want your ideal customer, your ICP to sort of look at it and say, oh, that's for me.

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.

And actually 1 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, 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 skipped down to the lower tier things.

Like the most important thing, who is it, who's it for?

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 it looks like government agencies are using this, and Visa, and Microsoft.

So like, they sell me 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.

How a national public broadcaster detects deepfakes.

I mean that sounds pretty important but even then there's not enough data to really make me want to put my info.

Cheapest way to save 60% on AWS, the no-brainer, the fastest.

AI, you know it's got to be good if it's got AI.

I think my takeaway from this video is a lot of sensory overload.

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 for

Like that's not the thing that's gonna get me to use it.

View my savings makes it feel just very present to hand.

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, then it becomes a no-brainer to use this product probably.

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.

And if a lot of things are moving, then it just becomes kind of overwhelming.

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 we've seen a lot of these reduced 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 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, there, 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.

Yeah, that makes me want to click on FAQ.

I mean, having an FAQ present to hand means that you can sort of pique someone's interest and then get their in.

Like if within 2 clicks you can get, and actually having these 2 be the first 2, that's a good choice by them.

I think from the homepage, we were getting hints that there's this group discount, group buying thing that's going on here.

And it feels like 1 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.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Critiquing AI Startup Websites with YC President Garry Tan