- The video is a design review of websites built in Webflow
- The first website reviewed is Oda Studio, which offers property photo services
- The website lacks clarity in explaining what they do with the photos
- The design of the website is simple but the content needs improvement
- The second website reviewed is Fly Code, which helps non-technical people make edits to code
- The website's animation may distract from the main message
- The headlines need to effectively communicate the value proposition of the product
- The value proposition of Fly Code should be consolidated for product and engineering teams.

- The first piece discusses the challenge of targeting both developers and product managers with a product's value proposition.
- It emphasizes the importance of social proof and a visually appealing website.
- The second piece reviews a website for a product that creates videos with AI actors, noting the need for improvement in execution and targeting.
- The third piece evaluates a website for a product that creates personal podcast series about children, highlighting the emotional appeal and the need for clarity on the value proposition.

- The company offers a personalized podcast service that delivers an episode within 5 days.
- The podcast is professionally produced and focuses on interviews with parents about their children.
- The service includes monthly follow-ups and the option to add voice notes and photos.
- The podcast can be shared through an app or web-based platform.
- The service requires a monthly subscription and has received positive reviews.
- The quality of the podcast and the company's reputation are highlighted as reasons to try the service.

- The video is a design review of websites built in Webflow
- The first website, Oda Studio, lacks clarity in explaining their property photo services
- The design of the website is simple but the content needs improvement
- The second website, Fly Code, has distracting animation and unclear value proposition
- The importance of social proof and visually appealing websites is emphasized
- The video also reviews a website for a product that creates videos with AI actors, noting the need for improvement in execution and targeting
- Another website for a product that creates personal podcast series about children is evaluated, highlighting the emotional appeal and need for clarity on the value proposition
- The podcast service offers professionally produced episodes, interviews with parents, monthly follow-ups, and the option to add voice notes and photos
- The service can be shared through an app or web-based platform and requires a monthly subscription
- Positive reviews and the company's reputation are highlighted as reasons to try the service.

If you would like to have your startup's website reviewed in a future episode of Design Review, please submit your info here: https://forms.gle/Yv7sCGpsi4PpAfRP9

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!

Thank you to these companies for volunteering:
Oda Studio (https://www.odaportal.com)
Flycode (https://www.flycode.com)
Colossyan (https://www.colossyan.com)
Artifact (https://www.heyartifact.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 - Design Review
00:59 - First website - Oda Studio
06:25 - Flycode
12:00 - Colossyan
17:30 - Artifact
23:21 - Outro

Hi, I'm Aaron, Group Partner at YC, and welcome to another episode of Design Review.

We are coming at you from the Webflow offices.

And I'm joined today by Vlad, co-founder and CEO of Webflow.

So today, we're actually going to be reviewing.

So today, we are going to be reviewing 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.

So the first 1 we have here is Oda Studio.

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 property managers, marketplaces, home builders.

It could be a generic property photo service that you can feed into anything.

Do they send photographers to your place to take the photo?

They have upgrade and organize, so it's like photo management.

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 probably a little too broad.

Yeah, I think we're both struggling here to figure out exactly what this is.

A lot of times for a 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.

Alright, let's see, so by the note, 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.

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 a 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.

So website-wise, they're really missing out on an opportunity to communicate some of this stuff more clearly.

Especially since it says product example.

Is the product the photo itself or the management or...

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.

And then it's a little hard to tell what this actually is.

Professional quality property photos, no pro required.

It looks like based on the URL that's popping up here, these go to different user personas that might use their software.

And then it looks like down here, YU Zotus Studio, Smart Enhancements, Virtual Stage.

And maybe, you know, sometimes I see this work well.

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 gonna be clear to them.

And this page goes a much longer way towards communicating

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'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 gonna 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.

1 thing I do like about this site is just it's really straightforward in the design.

I think that what really needs work is the content to make sure that it really is more clear what they do and what the product is.

I think we get it now, it just took a while.

So it seems like further down the page is the really valuable stuff, and that should be pulled up a lot higher.

Things like Otis Studio by the numbers, like I don't even have context to know what they do at this point.

That's probably a social proof, an attempt at social proof can go way down.

It could do a little polishing on what exactly this is and who it's for.

Well, founders of Ota 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 gonna go a long way to attracting the type of customers that you're looking for Okay, let's try the next 1.

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.

Or product designers saying, hey, I have this new update in Figma.

So product people ourselves, we know that feeling of tapping on an engineer's 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, make edits.

It helps product teams work with software engineers to ship better products faster with no code.

I'm curious to how it works, but I'm intrigued.

I'm a little confused at the animation that happened here.

If 3 minutes means it's a 3 minute setup.

I guess, yeah, if you connect your code, 3 minutes from now you can have this no code solution for product folks.

And the thing I noticed while the page loaded, there was an animation.

So it kind of takes your eyes there right away.

And maybe distracts from what you really want them to read first.

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 3 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.

I think that's 1 of the other things is when you're designing your page, the headlines are the things that are really gonna 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 potential users of this product, we would have gone, I don't really know what's happening here, and then we would have said, okay, make product changes without coding, edit product flows in 1 place to free developers time, we would kind of keep skipping down and just reading the headlines, And so it's really important that your website, the headlines tell the story that you wanna tell as you're scrolling down.

Yeah, and 1 thing I noticed on the 2 almost competing headlines, because the first very top 1, 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 I don't get distracted.

And then if you scroll down, the second byline is actually we're for product teams to potentially work better with software engineers and then make product changes without coding.

Usually it's not developers who want to do that.

And it's now the value prop is for product managers or product designers, et cetera.

So maybe consolidating that value to product and engineering teams and how can you create the value add for them together?

This could be a little confusing into who you're actually trying to land this message with, developers or product folks.

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, 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 helped developers work on other things.

So it's a, there's a lot of tension to navigate, so you want to get the messaging right.

So it's cool down here, we get to some social proof.

It's, you know, Once I understand what is this, is it for me, getting just some social proof around, like does this work, can I trust it, 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.

Any time I see a face and a title and a company, it's, unless you're doing something really shady, this is really...

And we even got some, it looks like some tweets or something like that about them.

And I think the website visually looks great.

Like it looks professionally done and it sets a high bar for their product where 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 Flycode, so it has something to do with code.

There's benefits for non-developers, freeing software engineers.

There's some confusion here that I think warrants some polishing.

OK, so for our next website we're going to take a look at.

This 1 is actually submitted by a viewer of the channel.

So looking forward to dive in with Colossian here.

This is 1 of those things where like, the promise sounds really great, 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 seems like it.

And that's awesome because there's a video right here.

So let's check this out and see if this looks like

Are you ready to create studio quality videos with AI actors?

All Colosteam users enjoy full commercial license to use their videos freely online and offline.

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Yeah, it's got that uncanny valley effect.

So that's a little bit more about the product.

I do actually like the fact, this is 1 of the only websites I've seen where a lot of websites try to get you to watch videos where it's like it's only 15 seconds.

And I think that puts your guard down around, okay, this is not gonna take a lot of time.

It looks like they're using their own product to demo the videos, to sell their own product.

The first, they immediately jump into personas.

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 do corporate training.

I wouldn't have expected this as being the primary target of who they want to go after.

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.

And then you get your own content, maybe you can't save it out until you start paying.

That could be a great way to get people through the funnel of actually trying it 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 non-trivial or not free to generate these videos.

So it might be too expensive of an acquisition.

And then let's take a quick look at 1 of the use cases here.

And it looks like the use cases don't directly match to

the first downloads that they were trying to get.

Yeah, this is a little, maybe feels a little unfinished.

Whether it's a flow or different categories of what you're trying to do.

I would just look at it, 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 homepage, it was pretty clear what they do.

I think it- Oh, something just changed here.

I think the site, maybe the power of Webflow, pushing a new version.

This is a little bit more clear, because it's choose an actor, give them a script, generate your video.

Generating training videos can cost up to $5,000 per minute.

With Colossian, our clients save thousands on expensive studio.

Wow, we got like the version 1, version 2 here.

It's like the feedback we just gave, they basically just updated

And then generate your video in minutes, so okay.

So 1 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 credible.

So this actually un-sells me a little bit more, but I think this UI of getting me to actually build it and see how it works is more effective than the single demo video that they had.

So being really precise around what you're using as your showcase demo is really important.

I think the challenge here is not necessarily the website.

The challenge is can you get people to believe that this is a good enough replacement for live human beings.

And I think the targeting with the specific use cases.

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 this for.

I think that 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, feels like this is the only way to really do that unless you're only doing subtitles and not having that 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.

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.

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.

Artifact creates a personal podcast series about your child.

And I have daughters and she, it hits me on a heart level.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Critiquing Startup Websites With Webflow CEO