good morning it's Eric I'm here with Aaron from YC Aaron do you mind giving us a little bit of an introduction Jerusalem sure hey so I'm Aaron Epstein I actually went through YC in winter 2010 so 10 years ago at this point I was co-founder of a company called creative market it's a marketplace for graphic design assets where people designers all around the world who create fonts and Photoshop files and stock photos and website
themes they come they sell them on the platform and it's a great way to get really great design work so now I am back at YC is a visiting partner and excited to help all of you startups cool founders get some feedback on your designs and put together some really great work so here's how we're gonna do this we've actually got two hours of Aaron's time which is amazing we're gonna dive right in in a few seconds
we're gonna go fullscreen so you'll be able to see what we're seeing and we will go through a pretty a pretty long list of startups and review their websites so we're gonna start with the first company called SEO buddy and we're coming at this from complete zero so it's as if we're seeing it for the first time look usertesting.com if you've ever used that before use your testing but with yce partners okay SEO buddy grow
your search search traffic and outrank your competitors with just 20 minutes of work per day twenty minutes work per day yeah so that sounds like a lot of work yeah like I think you're trying to make it seem like it's not a lot of work but when you're like 20 minutes of work like that sounds hard yeah that was my first reaction as well I think you're you're going you're going you're trying to like target to the specific customer a little
bit too early in the cycle like I get what you're doing you're visualizing the person who's already experienced the pain of having to manage SEO and search a search engine optimization themselves but it might be just a bit too early yeah so the sub-headline is kind of a light on white background instead of getting lost in endless reports and spreadsheets SEO buddy turns the daunting world of
SEO into easy to complete daily missions so I'm not sure what daily missions are okay so this is for growing my search traffic and out ranking competitors but I'm not exactly sure how and why I think it's good that you have like hey there's a free trial there's a very clear call to action you've got the two orange buttons the color stands out grabs my attention you've got the the fire emoji 111 companies signed up in the last month
that's good for showing social proof and helping build trust with people I think there's some stat where you know Airbnb and like booking.com and all those sites when they put things like you know 95 percent of people you know did this action or there's only two left at this price I think that significantly increases conversion rates so I think they're why now yeah that's like good social proof to create urgency and let
people know that this is something a lot of people are using my thought here is that it's the gray subtext is just hard to really sink into and because you've got such a long header right here that it this could be a bit shorter I think you could probably drop this like second part here yeah and maybe bump this up to make it a little bit larger and easier to read let's keep going you got some social proof here doesn't
truly land with me I can't tell whether these are news clippings or companies yeah and I've never heard of any of those I assume they're companies yeah so lets me know like you have customers but not ones that I would trust you know they could just be your friends companies or yeah house companies you've even created one thing some stirrup schools companies have been doing is putting their started school affiliation
in the on the main page yeah SEO and rocket science but it's not easy to be successful I have too many negatives here like yeah you can flip you could flip the sentence around to say like SEO is difficult we make it easy or like ending on a positive note here yeah I feel like this whole section also is probably telling your target audience something they already know which is like SEO is hard but still you know
we're like halfway down the page right now and I'm not sure what's different about what SEO buddy can do versus any other tool that's out there I feel like this is like a pretty crowded competitive space yeah and the main thing that I'm looking for is like what is SEO buddy and how is it better or different than any other tool that can help increase your search engine rankings so one way you could consider
doing this is presenting like what the world was before SEO buddy and then what the world is with SEO buddy like you're kind of getting into it here that at right at the top that like this is shorter than the it takes less time than the alternative so maybe what you could do is frame it as like here's what you're probably already doing today we turned it into this process that's much shorter yeah okay so now we're actually getting into
what SEO buddy really is it's an all-in-one SEO productivity tool helps you grow your search traffic outsmart your competitors and take control of your entire SEO strategy so you've got backlink monitoring competitor research content manager and outreach tool we've got some screenshots here okay a feature is coming soon but this is now I'm starting to understand like what your product actually is and does and why I
should use it so I would recommend taking this and putting this like much higher I'll pick it up yeah okay it's a little it's still a little bit crowded like in terms of trying to understand exactly what yours does um there's just a lot on the screen yeah there's a lot going on and I think probably what you're trying to do is you have a full-featured product and you're trying to communicate everything that you can
do but really it's usually better if you can be a lot more focused and focus on what are the hop 1 2 3 features that are the main reason somebody would use this and just be really crisp and clear about those the benefits that they provide week that's another thing like don't sell features to people you know you're saying track backlinks and key word performance like that's a feature that you do what's the benefit that somebody
gets as a result of that you know maybe it's like they can rank higher they can figure out what's working and what's not in their ad campaigns like lots of different things that you can do but frame it is like the superpowers that you give people rather than you know the specific literal feature that you provide okay anything to wrap up on this one before we move on to the next no I mean in general I think it's it's pretty
strong like it's straightforward you have to talk to me thing if somebody needs help at the bottom interesting I actually seen some before have you like maybe you could experiment with this Auto popping up on now you probably wouldn't want to roll the audio but like having that pop up would be a worthwhile experiment yeah okay so now we're further at the bottom and so you're starting to humanize it a little bit
more I see who's behind this thing makes me want to support you if I know your story so I think that's good like it yeah it's cool stuff here Thanks next up computus your Drive sure okay right off the bat computus the world's
best crypto tax tools okay so I assume this is for people that are have a lot of crypto and they need to file taxes on it and then you say find out what we mean and you should just tell me what you mean rather than making me click
another link to find out what you mean I think it opens an email link okay yeah so that's weird so I'm not sure why that's happening this there's not much going on here so I don't really know yeah you know what to make of this there's no missing an image yeah if I need something to draw my attention to like the top generate tax documents monitor expected tax obligations and make sense of crypto investments okay so
I can generate tax documents that means something to me I can figure out what I have to pay taxes on and I'm not sure what making sense of crypto expenses maybe it could be more specific with that okay now again do the services just a note about design like oftentimes I love to copy websites that I really enjoy or really like using this seems like you copied kind of a bootstrap template or something but then kind of
missed out on like what's tying the page together yeah yeah this seems super bare-bones almost to the point where it doesn't build trust and credibility with me and especially if we're dealing with something like you know your talk about tax advice and portfolio that sounds like serious where it's gonna cost me a lot of money if it gets messed up yeah so building trust any confidence is really important here so the first one
that we just looked at they had a bunch of logos where even if I hadn't heard of them it's like right people are using this they talked you know this little fire icon 111 people had used this recently you saw the face of the person that was behind it and heard his story I'm guessing this is probably like a landing page just to collect interest so rather than like a live service considering that you you're mostly
trying to funnel me towards like a consultation yeah and which is cool you're trying to like gather interest from users but in order to get people to trust you enough to share their crypto kind of story I think you're definitely going to need to like how would you recommend positioning this as like a website where the the founder could like gather feedback launch their product well first of all I would just you know
you talked about copying some other site like first you just need to hit a certain bar of like trust and credibility yeah for anybody to give any type of feedback or put in their information you know even things like having a logo rather than just typing the name of your company it just makes you look more legitimate if you have any like images of the product or something like that that makes me think there's like a real
thing here so I would start there to build the trust and credibility then I would figure out what's the main goal that you have on this page you know there yeah the action is like way down the page and what is what do you want us to do do you want us to learn more you know and open this PDF yeah like this should all be on your website and you should be driving people to one goal which it's probably not learn more because that
should be in the page it should probably be like schedule consultation or putting your email and that should be the thing that's all the way in the top at the header so I talked to founders pretty often that are in this kind of trap where they want to talk to users but they need a website in order to seem credible yeah I think this might be an example of where it actually is negatively impacting your credibility
like if I were to have a friend if you if you were to get a warm introduction to me through a friend and actually do user research that way that might even be more powerful than sending someone to a website like this yep or you know just go fire up like a web flow template or something like that is a really good way to just get this base level of professionalism that people would trust and you can do it super quickly you
don't have to be a designer they got all kinds of templates and stuff it's really easy to just yeah knock something like this out that would be worthwhile okay let's move on to the next one cepsa a mobile app for creative people fond of arts and crafts discover trends discover local events introduce your point of view and share your feelings meet your soulmate and sab senton okay I think you buried the lede here it
sounds like this might be a dating app that's it I'm not sure yeah I'm not sure I mean okay let's go to the next section yeah it's possible to join a mob or create one to stop the world from being regular okay okay so this is like an example of you are using a lot of vague words and terms that don't really mean things to people it's hard to visualize what this product actually is and then even the imagery doesn't help like
you're showing people and so I was kind of with Eric like is this a dating app or something oh it's a mutual friend between you and yet unknown but already truly your folks okay might also be some English language so is this for a meeting offline okay so fine local experts popular in private get opinions and reviews from celebrities and find like-minded people yes I'm unclear is like this an app to
meet new people in person that you share similar interests with or is this a community to engage around art and then I'm not sure the celebrities part comes from yeah so we're very confused we're overall let's let's check out the YouTube or the Google link here hangouts app okay you got some users that's that's pretty good and it's in Russian okay I think we might not be fully qualified to review a Russian app but
this move is Russian not good okay overall like the design the content that's inside the design does not really do it for us yeah so maybe some actionable feedback we could give here take the screenshots that are further at the bottom and maybe pull those up higher at least if I can look at something tangible I have a better chance of figuring out what it actually is oh the app screenshots yeah and those in those in Russian too
so like right off the bat if the app is in Russian even if you have an english-language website it just makes me think this is not for me yeah just very might yes literally is it yeah in which case maybe you don't need an english-language website yeah that that would be fair okay let's move on to the next one narration box it's good calm cool state-of-the-art audio and speech synthesis powered by a on machine
learning let's take a listen yeah making strangers rich it's a hot summer Tuesday what's Excel Rhonda it's a great trial station with his eyeballs powered up in a sunlight jangling off the canal motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering other okay so square smells partly I get what you're doing like the actual one-liner is excellent like state of the art audio and speech synthesis the problem is the
demo that you show doesn't sound like state of the art like there's gotta be there's just like comparative compared to like Alexa or Google assistant yeah it just sounds a little bit off it sounds like a robot yeah the other thing is I'm not clear what this is for its state of the art audio and speech synthesis but is there like an API can i integrate this in my app like what good can i talk to it like
what is this for what are the use cases or the things that i want to know so yeah my first question is just like is it good so it's great that you have the preview up there but then we listen or like yeah this doesn't seem as good as some of the other things there's still it's just on the low so so cost-effective that's for sure compared to a lot of their voices 20 languages okay it sounds like so I guess
okay so now we're in tune in to Deventer and here's some use cases further down the page it's to get quick so it looks like you could feed in audio files like a podcast and get the entire like translation or the entire voice oh no it's the other way around you're doing voice a text right design your speech in audio oh cool so you could like emphasize certain words hmm that's interesting I mean from some casual
playing around with the Google API so I don't know if that's something that they offer that's unique yeah what are the use cases here okay character voices and apps PA okay so is this like an SDK like it seems like this is for developers but it seems like there's not a lot of information about how developers can actually start using this yeah so you got a lot of languages so I guess what I'm struggling with is to understand how this is
different like there are many speech-to-text API is available in fact like iOS and Android include them by default I think it would be useful to call attention to what's special about a narration box and what advantages you have over the competition yeah yeah and then your pricing I don't think I saw any actual oh there it is okay yeah very hard there yes you might want to call that out a little bit more so start now
and contact sales I'm not really sure the difference between those so again like to your point before you didn't know who was supposed to start like you know targeting of like this is an SDK part this is for you know app developers do this right and why do I need to contact sales to like if I'm a developer and I want to use this I want to just download the SDK and start testing it or I want some web interface so I can start
typing out text and actually hearing it live I mean to go back to some like fantastic examples stripe I don't know they still have it but I'll wait for like the early part of their time they just had like you could actually get started with the SDK yeah like out early on well it's letting way back yeah start now contact sales so I think they're probably modeling this after strife oh here we go okay so there's
they've still got a little bit of their SDK stuff on the front page yeah so model the developers now after stripe to miss that component the iconography images what do you think I mean so it makes it seem friendly but it doesn't actually communicate anything about the product to me it doesn't reinforce like messages that you want to give so like it's not bad but it's not actually helpful yeah so it's not a negative but
you're not adding it doesn't make it a needle yeah I do like that like this seems like a very unique thing being able to yeah I have different voices and diagram which is like I I think you've got some cool stuff here I would like highlight maybe you know what basically you need to talk to your users and see what they're reacting to or what there was you know I'm attracted to but that sounds like one yeah it
seems like pulling that up and some of the use cases up to the top of the editor party up the editor is cool that stood out yeah and then I'll get rid of like the powered by AI and machine learning like people don't want AI
machine learning they want the benefit that that gives which is we can you know Auto speak any sentence you type or something 20 different languages yeah yeah like that sound because having to change the API yeah yeah yeah cool
awesome narration box okay we've got deco echo welcome to the wonderful world of upcycling I've heard about cycling I have not so I do not know what this is what would you like to do today learn about upcycling I guess okay let's see if we've learned how does it work find out how to turn waste into profit by giving the highest value jump from zero to market ready product okay so like I thought I knew it up cycling was
and now your market now and we're confused I think this is sounds like it's for people who want to recycle things and then so loan okay so tell us what materials you want to upcycle find the best designer for your project agree on a timeline and a price provide your waste get awesome upcycle products sell them by our marketplace okay shop with us hundreds of upcycle products so do I create there I just send you my recycle
bin and then somebody creates it so I think this is falling into you know one one air one error mode which is we don't know who the website is for or who lead the company is for oftentimes like founders will tell me that you know their products is for everybody like everyone can benefit from this but the the counterintuitive learning here is that you actually can benefit a lot from focusing in on who will get the most
benefit now that saves you time like basically it's a way to make sure that the people who can benefit the most from it immediately understand what what your product is so I think now having like looked at it I okay so take it stab at it like I think it's for companies that have a lot of recycling in a specific format like like watches or that kind of finger bottles they can send it to artists artists will upcycle them and
then you can make money if they get sold maybe okay so the examples are cool oh yeah you start to resonate with me like alright this looks like Miss recycled material in new products okay okay so now you've got one mobile okay so this was in there that's a major label if that's true one of the ways that you can actually maybe structure this it's like walk me through an entire example with one of your customers say
like t-mobile came to us or McDonald's came to us with this this waste and we worked with it we introduced them to an artists with the artists they were able to make it into this product and then they sold this product on our website yep I think the biggest thing we're missing is like the why and for who yeah and so is this a marketplace of this stuff is your goal to okay so here's some case studies you've got big names
on here and I want to figure out like what they did so this is a charity auction it feels like there's some kind of like nonprofit e something angle to all of this that I can't quite figure out yeah which is not bad I'm not turned off by that yeah yeah so this is really cool like I think I see what you're doing you're like recycling t-mobile market other marketing material like oh these are like the signs that they have
on like billboards job like that and turned back yeah so like the interesting part is you've got a lot of content here like you've clearly put a lot of time into taking great photos like building a lot of assets but the organization just is not yeah it's worth noting also like you have a lot of like big blocks of text written in here right and notice how we're going through the site trying to figure out what it is like not
reading yeah we're looking at pictures were looking at headlines we're like yeah oh okay we're trying to figure out from here you probably say it like literally what you're doing in one of these paragraphs here yeah and we're just not taking the time to read it and that's honestly what people come into your site you're gonna do - yeah so you really got a call out the important bits of like how it works and I think the
thing that you have on the homepage or it's like the step one through step 5 it doesn't clearly you negate what it is no and you can and and one of the ways that you could take this concept is to apply like the t-mobile like how to moment worked with you and just like wow yes through yeah like specific examples of how you work with t-mobile to do something it would totally legitimize it to you got you got
a section here like I guess there's brands that come to you with stuff that needs to be recycled and then designers how could you how could they like divide their site better to I guess it depends like what's the goal are you trying to sell products that have been like do you I'm gonna take a stab at this I don't I'm not a hundred percent sure of this how it works but are you basically trying you partner with like a t-mobile
or McDonald's you get the source materials from them because they have a lot of like bulk recycling that they want to do you take those you match it with a designer the designer takes those materials they create something and then you have a shop button so maybe I can then like customers can then come by the recycled materials from here and if that's how it works then it seems to me the thing that makes this a business is
not actually anything about partnering with t-mobile I assume you just get it for free because they were gonna recycle it anyway and they get some brand value of yeah and so it's actually like in in the selling the new products is really what you have you have like a marketplace for selling up cycled or like okay so recycle but turned into products materials that seem like these all look really cool yeah and I think if
these were on the home page I would want to just dive right into like you are an e-commerce or marketplace or something thank you like most of the people who will be visiting your site are not brands yep they're people who are gonna like want to buy really cool yeah so I want to buy this first thing for most cuz it looks cool but then I find out there's a story behind it it's all recycled and it came from these big
brands and it turned into this really cool you know pendant lamp like that makes me value it even more so I would start on the like the whole marketplace things selling those products and then tell this story in the context of those products just a small note it looks like you're using some sort of e-commerce platform that's not Shopify or maybe maybe it is I like one of the reasons why I love Kickstarter and and and choppa high on
these sites is like we we kind of know them like we've all shopped at sites before that use this similar hierarchy anytime where it's somewhere that's different it's like I have to think more about how I use this site yeah so like when in doubt like it is sometimes always better just to use like an existing yeah users have mental models of like how an e-commerce site should work or how a checkout process should
work that's based on their past experiences and like this guest button button is really small yeah and then I have to like enter an email to sign out his guest so right yeah yeah so try to map to what people are already used to doing and that way your product will feel familiar to them and they won't have to relearn a whole new set of experiences you cool so breezy no just breezy quickly help you quickly help you find the best and most
affordable insurance for your pets okay that's pretty clear yeah got that but then you want me to subscribe like what am I subscribing to I would expect that to be like like put it in for information about your pet and will give you quotes or like get a quote or something like that sign up for updates okay so it's a nun launched I'll kind of page we're just trying to collect interest oh here we go okay pet
insurance calculate now I'm guessing you mean health insurance I don't know too much about pet insurance but yeah I assume it's health insurance ooh that's a good point yeah I say I would I would clarify that so I unfortunately have experience with this which is my dog dislocating her leg jumping out of our car window and that was not a great experience and cost way too much blow and it would have been really nice to
have some pet insurance at that time so I can definitely see the value in this so is this a calculator so I don't I don't know what this is calculating is this like after you've had an accident or after the pet has had an accident yes it is look at sweets like you type in what the vet bill would be yeah okay so this is kind of for like your your situation like you know what you ended up paying yep and this would have
been yeah too many options yeah I think like again it would be helpful if you if you said like here's the scenario like you could give an example of someone that you've already helped saying like this person came to us their pet had this accident we we had to cover them already this is how much they paid and you can kind of walk through like a specific example yeah I think one of the problems here too is you're mapping the
options to literally how insurance works so there's a deductible yeah there's reimbursement there's an annual reimbursement limit and then you're kind of spitting out you know how much somebody will pay but that's not actually how your users and customers think of insurance that you know I want to know my dog just dislocated her leg it's gonna cost three thousand dollars for the surgery to fix it how much of
that am I gonna have to pay on each of these plans yeah and so I think if you can frame it in the mindset that of how users are gonna think about it like I don't know what reimbursement is I don't know what the limit is deductibles are confusing try to simplify it for people there's not too much else on this page I think you're missing just some common like you went to all this effort of building the page I would just take it
across like that finish line by adding the lower recall and footer bars yeah just to provide that like semblance of realness yeah people have a mental model for what a webpage looks like and this is been missing some key components of that yeah and like an about page or even just a section on this page about who's behind it maybe have a personal story about how you had this massive bill that could have been saved if you had pet
insurance yeah something like that it's like a small design thing that's kind of throwing me off the this this this tab here doesn't align to the bottom of the calculator mm-hmm yeah minor yeah I think okay like the image though that's a yeah pets food Kyle screams pets taxonomy tracks tracks anime business solutions reimagined oh I totally need business solutions Rita match yeah this is the place for me
Shrek tricks trips anomie offers a wide range of consulting services with the necessary tools and XP okay this is this is a lung yes aligner so way too much jargon here we have no idea what this is I have a feeling that even when we scroll down we're not gonna have an idea yeah you time out like what you believe in your yeah your thoughts on all businesses and stuff there's a lot of stock photos that just come across as
cheesy like what we're trying to get at here is like what's the meat of this business it sounds like maybe there isn't even a product if it's all consulting consulting shop but like what's your specialty like what are you good at consulting with what clients have you worked with in the past how have you helped them and even if you don't have clients like where have you worked in the past like maybe you had
some interesting experiences that drove you to become a consultant yep you could share those like you don't have to have too many case studies if you if you haven't right and who's the ideal customer or client for you like you want to speak to them in the header nobody's gonna come here and be like oh I'm looking for business solutions reimagine like can can these can these people help me so I think like often times when I
see these sites they're generally to support the in person sales process that you're already doing like this site is not gonna generate traffic but it's gonna act as like a place where people can Google your company name it's like it's a pretty good comm so if if I'm like you know if you're meeting people in in-person events and you give them your card like you want somewhere that they can come to that like like follows
up on what you probably spoke about in person yeah so if you're selling business solutions to let's say transportation companies then maybe you want to like frame that on your site when they arrive tiny point you SSL that might be because you rolled your own like site on WordPress or something like that like it's 2020 I think most people do expect SSL to be enabled on yeah on sites yeah if you use something like Wix I think it enables it
by default yeah you have an about Us page let's click on that nope oh it's in about a section okay but again doesn't really tell us you need about you yeah what would be like are there any example sites that you could use to to base this off of instead of this from a consulting perspective I'm not sure I mean again you probably have friends that are like that the founder probably has friends that are in
this space one of the ways that you can base your site is just to go to other competitors and go to other people that are in this in the same business and kind of use some of the same elements that they have yep companies day one day one day I okay but the URL is not day one day I that's throwing me off a little bit we're negatives MDT well maybe you're trying to work to buy it cool day one day I make your app marketing campaign
effective day one okay does that mean yeah sign up for beta okay we're missing the the one-liner you got to work on your one-liner the best one lenders here already identify kit they help me identify who this is for and how it benefits me I'm kind of getting the who it's for like if I have an app maybe it's for me yeah so I have an app I want to put together a marketing campaign you're gonna make it effective but I don't know
what that end the day one part is throwing me like that doesn't that doesn't help yeah like what's day one the first day that I started working on the app or the first launch day and like does it take time to ramp up marketing campaigns and like okay how is Wow gray text on a white background with a super small - yeah maybe I'm just old I don't know reduces acquisition costs by understanding user
behavior on the first day of your app marketing yet it also helps to fight BOTS and detect fraud traffic okay there's a lot going on here main criteria unique behavioral patterns so it's not clear like up top it sounded like you make the campaign more effective day one which is advertising that's like yeah how I'm market but now you're telling me about like fighting bots and detecting fraud which makes like that's for like the ads so that
frauds are front to them people are picking your app but you wouldn't have that on day one right and that's also not making me more effective it's like maybe saving me costs yeah so it's the fraud is about harming your marketing budget but again like yeah I'm really like torn I think you're trying to say like it's possible that your product is a little bit unfocused and that's spilling over into your website yeah
yeah I mean if you have users already I think something that would be helpful would be to just go to them and say how would you describe this product and they're probably gonna use different language and phrases than you use here and they're probably also gonna talk about like the one thing that's the most important to them and I think if you just take the words that they say and you just put those exact words up at the
top here with maybe like I don't know if a screenshot is relevant or like some type of visual that helps communicate what's actually there's something interesting here you you bring up a point that's no more SDKs no need to put yet another third-party SDK into your app we use raw data from other popular analytics platforms so one of the things that we've seen is be successful like if you're plugging into something like
segment or Mixpanel or an API that app developers might already have installed in their app you could say that up front say like we take your mix panel and segment data and turn it into actionable marketing advice yeah cool okay got some work to do here but I think it's definitely like definitely around like talking to your customers yep and it seems unlaunchable so that's fine but so what happens when you click that
that's how it takes you down yeah okay so like too many fields here probably you should just put this form up in the main header rather than you know you're requiring multiple actions now in this flow you need somebody to click at the top you can choose anything yeah exactly like just put like enter your email anyway yeah yeah cool next one Waterloo morgue okay connect the common denominator future-proof local and global decisions
on water local predictive analytics to plan produce and protects so you've got a lot of one-liners here and there's another one Jack and Briggs had local water effects your global that's my favorite one yeah yeah that one actually says what's happening here I would probably consider killing the other ones and just using this one yeah and make it much bigger and just Center it okay so I can predict how local water
I don't know what local water means but maybe like local water supply is yeah but like also why do I care about that yeah well if I do I want to track and predict it is it like problems with the local water supply and how that affects my business that you know that's potentially relevant yeah so figure out who you're speaking to here and what's the use case and just talk to that specifically I think a lot of times
people feel like they need to make it sound super broad so it sounds like really big and important yeah but what happens is it sounds really vague and it sounds like it's not for a specific person who you're learn more button it goes to an email a mail to link that does not help me learn more yeah that helps me not continue yes I think that was to an Elizabeth so Elizabeth if you're listening I think a good approach
here rather than asking people to email you is when you have a lot of offline conversations with people about what your company does and how it works and who it's for they probably ask a lot of follow-up questions and so hopefully you have a sense of the so things that resonate with people and and what they're interested to learn and that's the point of a website is not to get people to then email you to find out
information it's actually just to put that information on the website so I would list the the most common questions that you get just put answers to those directly here up at the top to give people a clear idea of who this is for and what they should use it for I also don't know what you want me to do on this on this page like assume on your perfect end customer and what do you want me to do here like email you to
learn more do you want me to pay you something like I'm not clear what I should do a small problem is you've got a dot org domain which immediately makes me think of nonprofits yeah especially considering you're talking about water prioritization water usage like that that kind of reinforces this like nonprofit idea but then you talk about we inform investors they plan for the future which makes me think that this is
not a nonprofit so maybe be more clear about that either by switching away from a dot org or just saying like what your business is up at the top yeah we and we enable investors to make better decision like better decisions based on water resource allocation or something and from a UI design perspective there's a lot going on here and a lot of inconsistency that I think hurts the credibility of the site so you've got a
lot of like moving background images you've got a lot of boxes that seem to have somewhat random alignment you have a lot of different fonts and colors a lot of different font sizes it's hard to get the hierarchy of things this email address capture form you know is like white on light blue and so it's really hard to really black yeah yeah and then you don't even call out you know like hey enter your email address to get what
even the button says submit it doesn't say like learn more or like sign up or something like that yeah I do like the the animated graphics that that makes a site feel a little bit more modern and looks nice but it's kind of thrown off by this texts with a blue yeah it's it's hard for my eye to figure out what you want me to look at and focus on because there's a lot of different things going on at once it's all moving yeah okay
next up is Shane with Boost Lee I shamed okay Loosli more new and repeat customers a smart marketing system for restaurants that automatically markets to customers based on their engagement with your brand okay your subtitle is much better than your main title with your brand okay maybe like they're online yeah yeah so the sub is definitely better and it's good and then it leads me to ask questions like oh how do you do that how
have these customers already engaged with my brand and I know who it's for its for restaurants yeah that's a good start yeah so make that a lot bigger I let's see how it works okay how it works build a customer database have data we can use it no data relax we've got data a lot of mentions of data yeah and so if I'm a restaurant owner I don't know anything about a database I don't know anything about data device complicated
Wi-Fi yeah yeah I'm not sure what's happening there like I just want you to tell me how you're gonna get me more customers what's the what's that great local business YC company that does reviews based out of Austin I can't remember the name anyways but not as helpful as I as I should well okay so now we're starting to get to something here which is text them on autopilot so texting drives incremental visits so now
it makes me think you've got a product that somehow captures the phone number of visitors to website are two restaurants and then can auto text them with specials and promotions and things like that so maybe it's like I come and I put my name on the waiting list and give you my phone number and then you text me later to get me to come back bring in new customers so like what what I don't knows like where do you get the new customers from
how do you know that they're gonna want to come and eat at my restaurant okay something about referrals you probably prompt for reviews on Yelp and things what an example well let me move pretty quick everything's still very vague it's like cut boost Lee's customer acquisition tools but like what are they yeah and so you can see we're trying to piece things together based on headlines or screenshots that we see but we could
be way off base - I do like that you have a phone number up top like that makes me think that you're probably legit yeah but still very confused on what this is or why I would want to call that number kind of go back to something we talked about before if you can work from an example and you have some customers like clearly people are using this you can kind of tackle two birds with one stone by sharing how this
specific company like tell us how local Joe's restaurant used your product to double their sales and walk us through instead of these kind of like abstract examples where you have screenshots that we can't really tell which company therefore like walk us through like the one two three steps for how one of your customers benefited from using your service because then they can like theirs you get two benefits they're
people who are in a similar category can can can filter themselves into that they know like oh I'm also a restaurant is in a similar style that this is relevant to me how can I use it how can i benefit from it yep the biggest question somebody's gonna have coming to your website is what is this and so you need to be able to answer that really crisply and concisely is it for me so you need to be able to answer you know who this
is for you want it to resonate with them and you want to be actually more specific rather than than more broad okay you've got a blinking thing going on the left here I can't even see what it is I think they behind them Irving Texas linking over and over and I've seen those before but this is not okay so it's showing that somebody signed up but turns off really quickly yeah so I think you're trying to do the
thing like there's only two hotel rooms left at this price you know to show the social proof of lots of people signing up but it blinks it's super small text it's actually just more noise than it's actually effective yeah and if you really have this many customers like I almost don't trust it because of the way that the site works like you don't even have a link to the actual product or or an example if you
really do have that many customers I would say like we have 35 customers that are using the product yep you don't have to hide it behind that blinking thing cool next up Martine our team from loupe earplugs protect your ears and style hearing protection cool okay beautiful image I get that someone's yelling and I can see I can see the side yeah yeah that's cool okay protect your ears and style okay so ear plugs reinvented loop is
designed to reduce volume by 20 dB I'm an engineer and I barely know what DB means it's like a logarithms logarithmic scale okay without sacrificing audio clarity so I think this sounds like it's for people who go to shows like music events and want to listen to it well not getting their ears damaged so I thought that too but then I get to the next image and that doesn't look like they're at a show no it's a show that
I'm not invited to experience clear sound okay so like I think it is that yeah I mean based on the images like some tattoos here there's definitely like a kind of like a high-class vibe going with some of this like rose gold and you know you're trying to show like the build quality and I've got music here but it's like listening to music going to music ooh a wired link let's go see that nope Kent can't see it that's weird like
you've got a you've if you've got an article in Wired and I can't click on it that seems like a total missed opportunity l yeah look at this yes that's pretty cool yes this is great but not great because I can't click on it right I once there Marta look okay I think we were right like look yeah it's definitely bad yes so the product okay so I think the team behind this has some vision of the brand that they want to
create yeah and I think maybe it it matches with the design of the product but I'm not sure that it actually matches with the use cases for the product like I would expect to see people at festivals wearing these and not looking you know really goofy with like orange ear plugs in out which is the common thing and here you can hear the music rather than yeah it completely yeah and none of the imagery actually
reflects the common use cases so as a as a person who's started a hardware company I'm also like super worried when I hear about technology because it implies that you have to charge them or there's some sort of electronics but I don't think there is technology I mean like there's technology in the shape in the form but not like electronics yeah so you could clarify that these are not electronic headphones like you can't
listen to music yeah and then it looked like the price was only like 30 bucks down there which is actually cheaper than I would have expected which might also be a reflection of the brand image you're trying to create which looks high-end yeah got some reviews I like that it helps like all this is selling me that this is a real company that really exists oh that's great yeah the store looks pretty easy to use some
different styles yeah okay so I think the biggest thing is you know putting some imagery that actually shows people using it in the specific use cases you would expect that FAQ link is not like you're spending so much attention here like you're getting your you're putting this front and center and then having a link that basically goes to nothing might not be worth it cool but I'm interested that that seems relevant to
my interests and yeah pretty good site overall yeah form facade who are we speaking with laughs ah embed Google form and your website embed inquiry form on your website make Google Forms look professional on your website so you might want to say forms embed feedback forms rather than bed feedback form in your website oh yes I was actually played with this this weekend because I needed this service and I saw this on startup school so I cheated a
bit so I've used the product it takes like actual Google Forms and it adds like CSS styling to them to make them not look like the classic Google form okay so are you actually embedding it in your site or you're just styling it to mattress and you don't have a form in your own website wow that's a missed opportunity like and that try it free button is so small I think the most compelling example that you have is the
before and after like the two side-by-side things it shows me like I recognize that as a default Google form and it's the typical ugly purple thing yeah no offense to the purple on your site and then there's the after which looks like you know it could embed or looks just like any other site and so that's the most compelling thing I think I would pull that like up into your header make the text bigger explaining
what it is and why should use it it's also such a simple compelling feature that you want to like you want people who use Google Forms to immediately like understand like you should be able to show like the way that I would test your site as you're improving it is talk to maybe like 10 or 20 other founders in start-up school like everyone uses Google Forms I mean people who don't want to pay 40 bucks to type form or
whatever all use Google Forms yeah and just make sure that like 10 out of 10 people who come to your site understand exactly what it's for yeah and so I would actually get rid of the rotating text in the top all it should say is just Google Forms and people could use Oh in Google form yes enquiries or whatever the other things that you're saying but you want people to instantly know like I use Google Forms this is for
me yeah like no no blinking cursor here no secondary thing just embed Google Forms in your website and then jump to the example but is it actually embedding Google Forms though yeah okay so it's not just changing the CSS no so like you could actually like add the form into your Oh guess like you don't have to link into that okay that's great expect actually and like a you know it's been spending a time actually a little
bit more time looking at this product for me personally I think of this as like a better type form yeah like type form costs $50 they're basically like scamming people huge amounts of money and because like you know superhuman uses that everyone else has to use it I love Google Forms and I love the idea of not having to have like the classic Google URL and everything like actually there's three features
that I think are really important like make the form look the way that my website looks don't use a Google URL like a bit embedded so you could use your own like own URL like maybe text maybe there's just too and like you're not conveying that to me yeah it's too much of like a wall of text in that section right above like nobody's really gonna read that font too small these these like this should be your one yeah you have got more customers
yeah it doesn't go anywhere but doesn't leave me completed to believe that they're your customers it's just a bit too but I actually like that line at the bottom there and make Google Forms look great yeah like that could be your header and then sub header that's just like directly embed Google Forms into your website so it matches your native look and feel and keeps your standard URL or something like that let's check
out your pricing so start your 14-day trail trial today I used your site it seemed pretty free like I didn't even have to do anything why are you over complicating things like it's free right now I don't think you're charging for it why have three options rather than just like free and then paid mm-hmm and I guess another question I have is like can you not embed Google Forms right now you can you can there's an iframe option okay I
think it you can't style it and okay yeah so this is a wrapper around that probably think so that lets you style it yeah anyways cool I think you got some you got some pretty good stuff to work with here next up nafeez crawl how are you doing on time with one hour and okay crawl let's get the outdated recruitment process classic keyword mattress and work experience filters does not work in 2020 okay so you're telling me things
about your industry and competitors but nothing about you and it's also like you're jumping very specifically into like very detailed points of your product here yeah before I even know whose is for or whether it's relevant to me or what it does like what is crawl like how far down do we have to go to figure out what crawlers enrich your CV portfolio so that sounds like it's for me as a job seeker but I don't think it
is oh it is uh and we have yeah and this is overlapping the text yeah I was gonna turn it off but anyways so it's definitely for job seekers and let the jobs come to you didn't get that from the beginning yeah I'm still confused on what the beginning is saying even now that I have a sense of where it is instead of hacking focus on building evaluate so this is it now I'm back to thinking that it's for companies
evaluating work history and backgrounds public profiles yeah I think those all the job openings crawl also makes it sound more like it's for the company to crawl yeah well okay so you're starting to get to that somewhere down here curls all the job nope no yeah to ends in opening also finds and analyzes job and openings with a different spelling here with the help of NLP matches you with overfitting
jobs and handles HR process for you yeah I know I feel like we've read most of this page and we just don't know what's happening yeah so and then you've got something for developers and a website builder so like oftentimes like when this happens you can get a lot by just sharing it with a few people who you believe are smart and asking them what they think because like if you like you don't have to I guess you don't have to
overthink things too much just like share what you've built with your friends and family and see if they understand it yep and this is hard sometimes to put yourself in the mentality of somebody that knows nothing about your company because you think about this all the time you have assumptions about how it works or you know how it works or you've used the product yourself and it's hard to communicate that to people that have
never seen it before and so by sharing it with other people that don't have the experience you can figure out like where are the missing gaps that you need to fill in okay I mean I think I see what it is I think it's something like an about me page for developers okay which is cool yeah something like this maybe should be the home page then yeah like why not lead off with us with a screenshot of this and you get your
call-to-action could be like build your build your resume build a resume web page with one click yeah cool sinks with all these different things pulls it in yeah yeah and if it is developer focus like make sure you speak to developers up at the top this right off the best page the website builder page is much better than your niche definitely create your custom one-pager in seconds yeah cool yeah this is this page so much
fitter guys your cards yeah cool yeah I would I would just switch to this one yeah as your main page next up she jus with Unruh moat okay office spaces here virtual and remote now we're from home just like you do so from office okay a few English language problems and that first sentence yeah I'm still not sure what it does like it's a virtual office but how is that different than like a zoom call or chatting with my team on
slack read more stories there's a whatsapp link here that's that takes me deeply deeply into what's that but okay okay so talking about the industry in general is not helpful to convince people that they should try your product these are just facts about things that are not your company you really want to keep it focused on your company and why somebody should use you okay we're getting a little bit closer to it single click
videos seamlessly only one of those things kind of makes sense to me a single click video yeah but the other ones just okay now you're trying to get me to watch our video but that just links me back to your site where there is no video hmm that's why what makes different okay so you can manage remote employees seamlessly they can collaborate with their teams upon single clicks there's a lot of clicks to open
that video and now I'm not sure what's open yeah and it looks like you're just scrolling through your own website yeah okay I think we're still kind of lost as to what your product does yes you talk in generalities about helps people collaborate better and things like that it's hard to visualize what that means and how it's different from the ways that I already collaborate so I think more specifics would be helpful like for
example the one thing that resonated with Eric was one-click video like okay that's something specific and I can visualize how that works what are some other things that you offer okay now I'm actually really interested in what your product is from the blurry screenshot like this seems kind of cool it looks like you got your team here and you can screen share like or even video with someone while you're
chatting at the same time like that's pretty cool maybe you need to highlight like a demo earlier yeah yeah make screenshots bigger so we don't have to zoom up on the screen to see what's going on yeah be very specific about the features that you offer and why it's better than what's currently out there and you've got some users like there are people on your product I believe you're based in India yeah one
of the things that Aaron mentioned before so you can actually go to your customers and ask them how they use your product and how they benefit from it and use the words that they share like on your page because there's probably other customers that are in the same in the same boat okay next up jamal from move halal ooh pop up for a newsletter lots of popups i haven't even begun to explore what your yeah we don't even
know what you do yes like that doesn't sound like a great idea and also it's just like newsletter yeah okay I'm just gonna close this so that I can see what's under it fresh food featured products PETA hello okay so I think this is like a food delivery yeah but it's definitely some sort of shopping site yeah food shopping site do you deliver it where yeah I'm wondering like is this relevant to me I live in the Bay Area
yeah is it available and in stock there yeah so there's no description of what this is and actually you don't even have a logo anywhere or the name of the product so that would be helpful so who's this for who is this for and what is it before you jump into it's just not there's like a link there there's no image so maybe there's supposed to be something yeah so right off the bat who is this way are you know like we ship halal food to
people in yeah this country or region or city or whatever yeah cool well it looks like you're live so congratulations on launching you've got some stuff on there and we're in Auckland you're in the Bay Area I was like relevant this could be like relevant directly Tory it was not what I thought did not get that yeah so maybe frame the problem like you started this company presumably because of you
know for some reason like there you are so you created this Oh for us I was even in know for us for us it's an MVP to get instead users schools become instacart for halal products okay okay maybe you could say that like right on the front were to look like quick haul delivery yeah you could say something like get the products that other other delivery services won't bring you something like that or get like if it's certain ethnic
products or halal or something like that that nobody else will give yeah and so then I know if I want that kind of stuff maybe I'm even frustrated like I use insta car for other things but I have to make a grocery trip to a special store in order to get the other products so I see that you created this MVP you you went very deep on adding like a lot of different products here I think that's gonna make it a little bit more
difficult for you to determine whether your MVP is actually working because you have so many different like parts of it that customers don't immediately know like what they should be doing here yeah and your for shop buttons and I'm not sure what the difference is between each of them yeah I don't know if it's different kinds of products if it's just different kind of products then maybe just different filters that personal
like if you're like if this is really an MVP and you're just beginning I would like start with one thing like fresh for all meats and just test that idea first if that doesn't work maybe go on and test restaurants but at least you'll get a better signal you'll get you'll get better data that what you're pitching to users like is actually Raz nating yeah it seems kind of all over the map too because you've got the meats
and then you've got like physical products yeah and so like I need this now I want to have lunch now right but this I don't need delivered in like 20 minutes right yeah cool it's good start Jeff from read up repast the headlines your favorite articles and stories 100% distraction free okay I'm not sure exactly that means the distraction free makes me think you like hide the ads of articles that I'm reading I'm also not
sure how it's different than our sauce feeds yeah or what is it like readability or whatever is this built into the browser a lot of times I feel like it can do that what we're reading are the polls okay so there's like some gamification here it seems like this is a point system and there's winners so this is this is what the readers of read up are reading great domain name we go there's an article of the day so this is
a clickable link okay Scout this is supposed to be like it's like a hack a new style yeah hunt for for crowd of countries yeah yeah so maybe the headline is something like fine the most read or talked about articles on the Internet today or something like that there's also like I think you have a perspective like because the product was started by you Bill and Jeff liked it I'm sure that the product like reflects
your choices and like you're in your background sometimes like you can embrace that and say who this is for like we are bill and Jeff we started it because we wanted articles about X Y or Z in in a better format like you probably will enjoy that as well if you're in a similar similar proof yeah and you're about is a little more specific about what this product is so read up is a social reading platform the new best way to find read and share
articles and stories online yeah I'm wondering if this is actually more important than the actual like an undistracted reading platform like this seems like it's a community of a specific type of people and articles that they want to read definitely and the thing that resonates with me is that you say that you're active in the comments every day and you love getting emails from the community so I get the
sense that you're both community builders and your interaction and activity is the type of thing that's going to get this off the ground when people see that you're engaged okay so this is really cool this is almost like a social network for what I'm reading I you know would be interested in this but I didn't like I want to kind of see what articles my friends are reading and you know did they spend time reading them
but I didn't get that immediately yeah the only issue that I'd have kind of with the product unless the design is people already do this with Twitter and Facebook right and I have to like I have to know why would switch from tweeting or posting links on those platforms to doing it on your platform is there any way that you could pull it in from like other channels that I'm already sharing them with yeah it seems like there's a
few different things going on in value props that you're talking about so like distraction free reading share with your friends comment on articles the examples popular yeah so there's no there's no example of that but I'd be curious to know of the people that are really engaged right now and are actively using the product what's the one thing that they really care about and I would focus on that because that's probably what's
gonna find other like-minded people that get that value from you you don't have an exact like I'm trying desperately to toast look at what the product is without signing up because I'm allergic to signing up for things and I can't do it and I feel like you should be able to like let me see out there okay you must read the article before you can post your reply okay so you have to can't read the article because I
yeah oh so they pull in all the articles on their platform you read it on read up I guess and that's how you know if you've read it yeah okay interesting yeah cool good start this is interesting to force people to read the article before being able to comment on it yeah I'm like hacker news nobody reads the article problem next up Mia with just you know it's just you know alright step into the life of
these real heroines innate decisions and pave your own path sounds like a game okay beta tester cool yeah I think we need a lot more information about what this is who it's for why somebody should use it is it a game looks like a historical yeah or an education yeah is this to teach me history tell us what it is like the website is your chance to kind of embed a little bit of information in the the person who's visiting so take advantage
of that be proud of what you've made the images scrolling past here they're just scrolling too quick and they're too small and too blurry some like you could imagine on the left of your page saying what it is like this is a game for young kids to learn more about Indonesian history and then on the right like one or two screen shots rather than nine different screen shots yeah a good way to think about the copy on your site is
it's your opportunity to be in the room with somebody when they're seeing your product for the first time and so in real life if you're telling somebody about your product there's probably a sequence of things that you tell them like oh I've made this new game it's called just Juneau you get to play as a heroine and from our past and learn about history and I'm making all this stuff up these we don't know
yeah so but there's a sequence of things that you would tell somebody in person and you basically just want to take all of that stuff and put that directly on your website I mean you just like your Twitter bio has a little bit more we empower women to reach their full potential through gamification that's like that's more data than we saw on the website yeah okay so you got you've got you've got some work to do here on just
like conveying a little bit more information but yeah okay here we go our first product is an interactive storytelling app for girls where they can play the character of reef real female role models from the country show them possibilities that they're another standard of successful women and that they too could achieve what these successful women achieve that's great yeah let's put that on the homepage yep
cool thanks and then a download link or whatever the action is that you want somebody to take for them next up is Natalie from call switchboard comm record and send personalized reminders to share with aging loved ones almost got it the the part that threw me off was reminders like I was expecting messages like record and send personalized messages to share with agent loved ones unless I don't understand what it is
right and you want to check in but calling every day can be tough like is it checking in if you're sending an automated message yeah as the checking in is more like receiving how well they're doing then it is about pushing a message to them so that's confusing to me what are some use cases like this is where my brain goes I want to figure out like what would I use this for maybe I have an aging loved one that I'm concerned about okay so leave
personalized messages remind mom to take her heart medication after breakfast send dad a note okay so it sounds like it's almost like a third party is sending somebody alerts or reminders so here's one thing that I can't visualize yet which is how does the old person receive the message like do they already have to know how to use an iPad is it some sort of Alexa automated call yeah I can't yet visualize that yeah oh you've got some
users that's great yeah this is good after her hip replacement my mother never remembered to take her medication switchboard gave me peace of mind that was doing the best to her baby back there okay so this is a little too much on how switchboard overall made somebody feel and yeah less unlike what the person used switchboard for what did it do how did they use it okay yeah we're already at the close at the bottom of
the page and we still don't know what it is like switchboard implies that it's a phone system so that's great because then they don't have to learn anything but you didn't tell me that I'm like getting that exactly from your domain yeah I just saw this on the way back up go to like right under yeah okay so easy to use and I'll get create and scheduling reminder it calls we might a a okay and then customize messages
edit and schedule calls to meet your and then check in summary receive a summary report when your loved one receives your message okay so that's important information it's got to be here and bigger yeah so like everything's buried in underneath the headers in the like little body copy there and people don't actually read all the content on your site and fortunately as you can see that we've done and most people just pick off
like what the header messages say and scroll until you see another header message and skipping over all the other stuff so make sure the important bits are in large text that's bold that stands out maybe you can do instead of this like icons here you can do a one two three like one record a message to remind your parent to take their meds you know to schedule that to arrive every day at nine am three your grandma
gets a call every day then AM with your voice and a customized message and you get the summary you report yeah to confirm but it was receive but you see how that would be like so like a it tells me what you do and how easy it is to use without saying the words easy to use yep yeah that's one of the biggest tricks for communicating is it's always better to show rather than tell anybody can say it's easy to use yeah
people do all the time even if it's not easy to use but if you can communicate like Eric chested with one two three like oh that seems easy to use you're showing the user how it actually works okay we've got thrown into a type form you can't use the app maybe they could use the Google formula yeah you don't have to pay them fifty dollars a month it literally is the cheapest type form plan right now is like forty five
dollars they make so much money cool yeah this sounds like a useful product like just clarify the the kind of the opportunity or how it helps people and I think you've got a great great start Miriam from softer zooming I usually build websites and marketplaces and web apps without code okay so I know what that is and you've got it's kind of like form builder page builder here build websites marketplaces or web apps
using building blocks 10 times faster ten times cheaper okay I I'm for seeing an issue here I can't tell who is for so you've got a couple different value props here one is like people who may have tried to work with outsource development shops and this is easier than that or people who just have an idea and want to make it for the first time let's see how we get well you're overloading my you're overloading me
here by trying to make me imagine three different yeah there's probably one thing I mean there are all websites a marketplace is a type of website a web app is a type of website I think just focus on that and keep it simple the most intuitive website builder for startups okay what type of startups what yeah there are many website builders here's you're also working against you know what you like you have to
differentiate why I would choose you / web flow or wicks or Squarespace sir space but it seems like it specifically for startups so that's good but what type of startups yeah and so you haven't launched yet but you're also promising a lot of features email lists and integrations and things that work well for general websites marketplaces Web Apps like all these different things and so my hunch is you could probably launch
a lot faster if not already if you just cut out most of those features and you just focused on the one core use case so the person who needs this most right now yeah so like one of the most successful early no code apps was launched what was that launch website where you could just like create a hot rock launch rocket yep like that was an amazing site because it conveyed quickly like who this is for you know how they could like
press a button and get value so the risk here is that you're you're promising so much that makes it hard for people to know exactly like how they could use this where like you kind of say it here the web site you're reading now is built on software so maybe this web site is specifically for startup founders to build like a better landing page yep and if that's the case then maybe just say that yep cool looks the page looks good
that's like pretty yeah solid design I think one other thing that we could use is a more concrete or visual example of how the blocks work I assume there's like components and you just kind of easily drop them into the page yeah and maybe this is just because you haven't launched yet but if you have anything kind of visual that you can show the actual product but I think that would be here's one example why can't I rearrange
this landing page if this website is yeah how built is built on software like what if right below here you're like try changing the price yeah or move the move the fields around edit this now and it has page that would actually be pretty cool yep I can edit button yeah yeah cool softer I almost want to have a section on like how people chose their name because I'm sure there's like really interesting sort of behind every yeah every name
choice junior a lunch box lunch box delivery service for school kids okay this is interesting to me cool it makes me smile the only one of the questions that I have is where because I'm sure that this really depends on which country okay India yeah because India has this entire system of moving lunch boxes around have you ever seen no so as a side note yeah in the lunchbox system it's incredibly cool it's like the kind
of thing that I learned on Hacker News so there's these people so people will people will people will like right there make their lunches and then send them on these delivery people to like bring them to office buildings downtown so that you can get like a home-cooked lunch huh every day and it's this like but there's their own lunch at home and then have somebody else deliver it yeah why don't they bring it themselves very good
question is because they leave too early before they've cooked the lunch for the day so there's this entire logistics system that like anyway so it's very cool if you're a Mumbai you can go to the train station actually see these people like carrying them all anyways so that's the context as to why ok this service exists so yeah a lunch box delivery service for school kids in India in India there because that will
like immediately let people who are from India and they understand the Davao system they will be able to kind of figure out whether they want that almost everyone I've seen with Parsloe jr. we can guarantee default comfort fresh food good health but it says you get to prepare the lunch notably yeah like do you cook the food or is the answers was good and you say our bombs but like are you the mom or are you the kid yeah
who's the person on this website you have to just sign up for ok it is for a parent so is it just the delivery that they do they don't actually make the food let's see yes I believe it is you comfortably cook food and in your child's lunchbox yeah so it's totally the same system for like business people but for kids I I guess one of the questions I don't know too much about the whole system but like why
can't you use the existing system I guess they right over to right and from a business perspective I'd be curious like what advantages are there to delivering to schools I assume like does that mean you have less routing to do because there's fixed locations for lots of people something like that yeah cool I like the whatsapp thing I think like that's that's super key you could even include a link like that will deep link
you into a what's that conversation yeah yeah I think some of the graphics if you could have even photos like especially up at the top it's like the balloons or yeah bring kind of like it seems like a hands-on box or something yeah like if you could have someone in an autorickshaw delivering the lunch to to a school yep yeah that would resume it start the call to action let's see it what's that nice that's it yeah that
wouldn't that be the right way to do it in India you're making me hungry I could definitely eat paneer want cheese want cheese achieve your happiness goal connect with amazing activities enjoy your life well that sounds great but I have no idea what else is yeah or if it's for me or what I would use is or app be a better you thank you it's very aspirational yeah that's for sure but how this is another example of going
way way way too broad to the point where you say we're all so focused in that block attacks but attentional seems like it's not everything starts everything big starts small changes your happiness starts with your little happy moments great so if you take that phrase that quote that you have Jenny that's something that you should apply to your website because you're it seems like you're trying to start with the big
thing rather than trying to start with the small thing so what are the small changes that you help people with that will lead to the big changes in their life and focus on that rather than the big broad changes you want to have and honestly this is like one of those conundrums that founders run into which is they have this big vision and they they want to share that with the world but they're almost like embarrassed to
share the first step that they're starting with and this is counterintuitive but it's it's it's actually better to share the small thing that you're doing that's very tangible and understandable don't be embarrassed about it like make sure that people understand the first thing that you do before sharing the larger larger vision let's take a look at the app because I imagine that that might help us understand a little bit
more okay it's a gold tracker I don't even think the words goal tracker we're on that Yap site so we're looking at the app now make your goals of reality create and visualize achieve it and share find new interests yeah I mean you got to say that on your website it's a gold tracker and you can set your goals and share with them and when you achieve them I've even knows an app because unless you you look at those buttons
like I don't think it says it's an app anywhere what it does there cause yeah yeah okay I think your your your your explanation on your app page is actually better than your webpage yep so I would kind of start like almost by assuming you're like start by explaining your app and then after that maybe explain the larger vision for the company but I would I would do I would do just like the app above-the-fold oh these are
links what are these it's a good Instagram you know it just clicks guess these are aspirational maybe these are the things that the goals that you're setting like a but I don't I don't get that okay yeah my recommendation start from explaining the app okay next up is Marcin from joint J Oh int from idea to venture in a single app a contextual work and a life organizer for entrepreneurs freelancers and
creative types okay what do you help me organize so zoom it I think I'm just zoom dead wow I can't really see what this is so this is one of the problems with screenshots right like it's hard to it's hard to jump in and understand what something is just from a screenshot yep you get all the levels of detail so one trick that you can do is you can actually just zoom in on one specific part of the app that you're trying to
show another thing is you can just almost create like a blocky version of your app you know it's it's like you just kind of put blocks of gray text to to kind of mask the unimportant parts and focus in on the part that you want people to see but always the best thing is screenshots should be like supporting evidence the description is really how you're going to communicate to people what you do and why they should use it
and they also draw my attention like I I'm definitely not gonna read this block of text I'm gonna look at the paper because a picture is always something that I'll prefer to look at yep and so even if this did explain it like I just haven't even taken the time to review it seems like there's a lot going on here too it's like combining communication collaboration bookmarking or you know all the other things that you say there
it's like what's the one thing that people would use this for and just really focus in on that yeah just too much texts I don't really like the white on black either yeah it doesn't seem as positive like having an entire black page just feels a little bit too dark yeah I worry about your URL also like it's really gonna be tough to say that to somebody and have them end up in the right place yeah one thing that I was
like to imagine is like imagine you're phoning if you're phoning someone and you need to explain your email address how would you say that you know I'm Eric at at J - - yeah yeah there's got to be a better calm yeah unfortunately we just we got lost right at the beginning and we haven't been able to jump back onto the yeah it's all super theoretical - it seems like rather than telling me specifically what can your app do that
will help me today and what's interesting is you've built the app like it's clear that using a sudden they're yeah so yeah ingredients so are you it's not a food site there's something about advertising workflows yeah then today mmm let's get some a blockchain okay yeah maybe yeah there we go yeah nope just as your IV is that your page no I don't think so okay yeah the good news is it like you've built
something it looks like you have some users we talked about this before the trick is to go to them and say how do you like what is the value that you're getting out of this but unfortunately we are still at a loss yeah growth Channel a I powered and digitally European site always asks for I know cookies hate that a I powered digital ads for FinTech startups okay don't know what that is get unlimited Forex and crypto ad
campaigns for up to 12 platforms on a small do you create the campaigns like are you creating the imagery are you creating the content are you telling me what keywords I should target this is kind of funny no payroll I would not have suspected that an ad company would need payroll no hourly billing yeah okay activate your future let's get going down okay you almost get there we help forex brokers funds and crypto exchanges
what save time save money can't oh these are features of your products yeah but like how like what are these together like yes what do you help them do like literally what does your product do how about we help forex brokers funds and crypto exchanges run digital ads we're not run but yeah but also even like what is run is run like you buy the ads you figure out your target you design them like it's unclear okay too many too many
items here that aren't really telling me positively what you do yeah keep going how it works okay one two three sensor breathe it seems like you're in an an adverb like a marketing firm like a cool let's go live all campaign Herman I'm also curious like why FinTech hmm like what's like specifically can you do that is useful for finta and even FinTech startups that wouldn't be as relevant in other industries yeah
there's probably something unique or special that you're doing maybe it's like you have a ton of domain experience and so rather going like we run 300 campaigns for different like crypto exchanges we know we know this yes inside and out yep and like that's the lifeblood of so many FinTech is being able to profitably acquire users and so if you just kind of start with something like that and tell how you are the experts at this like why
would you go with any other out of your digital agency or something like that why would you go with any other ad buying agency versus this one if you're a fin tech company you've got a little bit of a complication here like these are the channels in which people can run ads you don't say that like yeah you could you could be explicit here you could say with growth channel you can run ads on these 12 ad networks yeah but
also I don't understand why you're better like do you get people certain results are you cheaper maybe a case study so presumably you've worked with some customers explain how you help them yeah is it for me okay yeah great do you have 10 years of experience yeah why are you burying that a tiny text at the bottom of the page under a plus sign yeah I don't get where they look at why the location is important yeah what is
what he's seeing pay pay per click okay I don't know that's what I would guess yeah you know if there's a different meaning in this console and with goods yeah okay I think there's some simplification that you can get here but it looks like you've you know the site site looks cleaned or were mainly struggling with like who's this for exactly and how does this help them yep maybe the 2.0 whoa no how did you
know that I was about to click now oh I wonder if they could did surprise when you mouth off the page that's it next up I wanna from sunlight or habit or habit or your online space for doing things together what things who's doing them try having it let's try it let's let's click these like it looks like that's what I'm supposed to do okay it's an app okay habet er yeah there isn't even a description yeah you're missing you
you're missing a lot of like key key components of that page but but let's assume that you didn't want us to immediately leave your page schedule events but but just just a point like that's what happens when you have a link that looks like is the only thing on your page people are by default gonna press that they don't need they might not even know that there's anything below the fold so some of the ways that
you can counter this is by having a little arrow that's blinking at the bottom that causes people to remember that they can scroll down or don't have a link that takes you off the page right at the top I like that you have a lot of try habit or Now buttons it's not clear that it's an app from there though like it's clear once you see the screenshot open it throws you into the ears yeah right we didn't expect that versus if it
was the default kind of like Google Play also you've got an iPhone photo here but Iran goes to the Google Play Store yes iOS app available and I'm still not sure why I should try habit err yeah like what this is I'm gonna take a guess that it's like you set goals or I don't know what events are I would expect it to be goals and then yeah your other people get messaged about them and keep you accountable so you invite a friend yeah
don't give up until the time finishes a workout is this a this is oh so are you set is the event a deadline by when you're gonna do something it's interesting you talk about workouts and learning JavaScript both in the examples those are somewhat different things yeah not necessarily bad but it's tough for me to know who like who is supposed to be excited in the interest of notice that text is really hard to read - yeah
of the chat with your avatar update on progress and share the experience all right so it's like achieving goals together and keeping each other accountable yeah maybe say something like that up at the top yeah so again like kind of to Aaron's point right at the beginning you didn't say what the things were that we're doing together like help us visualize right at the beginning what this is and who its
or I like that you show the screenshots yeah but it's still a little unclear like what's happening join the event that sparks your interest yeah I think this this part is actually detract like you don't need to have five screenshots that are they're all here like you could probably like some of the stuff with one or two and I think to Eric's point if you have users you can figure out what are people actually using this for today
yeah and then focus in on that as your main use case and try to find other people that do that like if it's I want to work out you know by end of day today and I need somebody to hold me accountable then go find all the people that work out regularly yeah and and if you haven't if you don't have users yet like while the site is a great place to start I would just go directly to your friends like this seems like something
that you're you you built yourselves because you wanted to you wanted to use it I'm sure then you've got a ton of other friends who are also like in JavaScript or working out that you could add in before you even need to send kind of random uninitiated people to your website yep gee links will lead Oh quick links okay the professional resume for influencers okay that's a solid one-liner yeah kind of like a LinkedIn
for influencers yeah they're always having a little too fast and I can't control yourself I think I think maybe just static screenshots might help here versus a definitely versus a gif or show me an example of somebody who's like link off to ITER's right like or open an iframe job like that I go control excitable to brands okay so speaking new influencers well you're kind of burying something here which is like brand
reviews and and metrics like personally I actually think that these are more exciting than your than your sentence here like be direct you've got this kind of screenshot here I don't know what I'm looking at like is this a part of the page brand collaboration history so I guess it's people you've worked with before I don't know what the that's a yeah when you worked with them reviews from brands okay yeah oh I could feel though okay
I wouldn't have expected that yeah so one of the ways that you can do this is having some on an auto rotation where you can either click to go directly to the thing or would auto roll to the next one yeah and just in general like people don't click tabs even when they're super obvious yeah I would just consider that like hidden information that people will never see maybe sauce we went over and we didn't it's like an accident I was
actually like this is these two seem more exciting and more interesting than the third one because you you know at the beginning I'm thinking that this is mainly for like I already got it's like influencers who want to find other brands to to give them work there's a whole thing but the fan seems thrown in like I think these first two are more important yeah and it feels like your Instagram page or whatever else like is
the personalized page for your fans and you don't want to you know take them to another one okay try it free well if I'm trying it for free it was licensed was there a paid thing here is it is it really easy to make like it seems like one of those things of you to auto-generate if I added my Instagram and Twitter maybe the maybe the call-to-action here is like build your page for free yeah putting your your
Instagram I can link to Instagram link to Twitter and like immediately see your page in 10 seconds yeah this this makes me sound like me it makes me feel like it's gonna be like a while before I actually get to see my custom page yeah yeah and maybe everybody can create their own page for free and it lives and they can link people there and if you want some of the different brand features and stuff like that you pay for
that yeah this seems a little bit more like a landing page than like the entry point to a site and I think that's because it is but as soon as you get one page using your thing I would link to it so that people can like immediately see what I mean you could create them yourself probably for some of the top influencers and you could just message that they like I just created a page for you oh that would actually be really
cool because you could you could from their Instagram you know seeing if they'd have any hashtag ads on their Instagram yeah we could like build it and say like this this influencer worked with this campaign yep yeah that actually seems pretty cool yeah and then you can even link to them above the fold they're the ones that people would recognize yeah and it'll make it seem like you have legit people that are
using you and it's really just you've created profiles for them that's a great hack thought Thoreau Mirana brains which i think is a play on brains the entrepreneur network companies will come and helping you find the best funding opportunities connect with peers and learn about the field all in one place sign up there's a lot going on right above the fold we've got all your icons for how to contact you got funds hub
aims which I get it now brain brick aims okay let's keep going down you go we are here to create the link between brain brains aims and funds okay see too much play on brain yeah yeah and just calm like projects use the words that your users are used to again this goes back to like the mental models they use project here right right yeah so you should just use that everywhere otherwise it just becomes much more
complex and confusing for people so I'm still not completely I don't really understand exactly what you do so I don't know the funds hub is I don't know what aims are you've enough entrepreneur network you helped find the best funding opportunities connect with peers like can you prove that though like that's me my biggest question is like are you legit and based on the design of this site there's like you know lots of colors and fonts and
you know layout inconsistency and things like that that makes it really confusing and hard to follow which I think reduces the trust that I have in your product it makes me not believe that you can actually help me get funded yeah this is also one of those cases where you're over communicating there's just too much information here and since I didn't it didn't click for me at the beginning like the other information is not
actually helping reinforce it yeah so like one thing to consider might be to like start like no not necessarily with a blank slate but just start with what the most important thing you want to convey is and make sure that that resonates with someone who's reading it before you move on to share kind of like the other stuff that your project does yeah and get rid of all the other stuff too because it becomes noise there's a
paradox of choice when you have too many times I'd start now yeah there's like too many options and and it's like scientifically proven that the more options you give people the longer it takes to make a decision yeah so just get rid of everything and just focus on the one thing that you want your users to come and do on the site we don't have time for a couple more so let's see if we can pick out based on the name what
we want to click ok product voice that sounds like I can understand what that is and I was right let your customers know what's up and get instant feedback what does that mean what's up yeah there are an app which is email us the pages social PMR ok like what is what's up like let's be more specific than that like what are the things that I can tell my customers about is it like I'm letting them know that there's downtime
that there's a new feature that's released I think I've got it so in some web apps they have a little bar on the top right that has like recently updated or what's new in the app yeah I think you help people build that ok so it's like the slack thing like in the app where you can okay so here's a great idea why don't you embed your own product on your own site maybe they did what's that I want more information no no okay but like it
looks really cool it looks like you've built like a pretty beautiful little interface why don't you have that right up right up here on the right yeah like and then you and then you could say like you have an arrow that's like this is our example of the product on our own site yeah so I think it's a feed that shows you your change law change log great that's an important word to have up top why why don't you say that right
here okay I had a change log to your site with one click yep now does it grab your change log from your git check-ins or how do we how do you do that from your customers okay now we're into a we're into a different section of it yeah there's like a whole dashboard here which I do not expect yeah so actually personally I would love a little feature that lets me like prompts me to write a nicer change log like slack like in
their in their iOS change log they actually put effort into writing the copy there you're like I could totally see there being a product around help it like helping people learn how to write copy for their change log and then presenting it in a clever like a nice beautiful way oh you even got a little bit here and like who made it happen that's cool yeah that's cool okay and then do you like the update yeah this is
this is really cool just make it easier to show like you know one let your users know anytime there's a new product update to share or part of one is like share who on the team work worked on the update and so there's like you humanize it with the faces and then like three is like get feedback on whether your users liked the update or not one thing you can even do is say like everyone uses slack or most people use slack
especially your customer base like we're asked them if like they know about the slack update system you could say get the slack update system on your own site yep or something around that the feedback thing is really interesting to me though because I feel a lot of times like you put out a new update on your product and then you're like monitoring Twitter feedback or email you know like how do things get worse yeah like like
do people like there's no way to tell and this gives like a very like a quick feedback loop yeah like whether it was good or not okay so I think down here you're getting to the feedback that's coming back from that but the problem is like we didn't completely remember we filled out a lot of the blanks here and so if you switched like the second part of what you what your product does before people
have really understood the first part it's getting like I could see getting actually more confused by this and is there even a headline for this part - like you've scrolled learn for me it's like that's not clear to me what learn from your customers are it's like we give you a dashboard with real-time feedback on how they like the changes yes and the thing that clicked for me in that top screenshot was actually seeing
the different faces yeah yeah yeah like that makes me think like oh people can like rate very simply because even the give feedback that makes me think of like an open-ended comment form but it seems like what you're really doing is like thumbs up thumbs down in the form of faces cool well the other thing that I see here is like it's clear that you've actually built quite a bit of the product but the page looks like a landing like a many
page where you haven't actually built it so this is a little this puts me in this weird conundrum where I don't really want to sign up for like yet another product that's coming out but at the same time it looks like it's almost done yeah so like if it's gonna come out in a week like let people know yeah and I'm worried you're over building for this because it's not out and you've got like a whole dashboard screenshot and with
all these complex features you could easily have launched this entire product just with this box yeah that should have been v1 like even without the updates yep so you should launch this like you should launch this now and it took all the startups cool companies like every single company in start-up school that has a SAS app could definitely use this yep so you're in the right spot yep and then add an about Us page and yeah I
assume you'll have like a downloadable whatever here yeah cool good start excited I I pick just based on the name of the company okay we'll do one more do you want to pick one [Music] okay rewire paper flight or beep which sounds most interesting paper flights okay let's check that out watch your content come alive Wow oh we got some white on the white yeah okay it's the smartest way to share any
content anywhere and track results so that's like way too broad again what content is most commonly gonna be shared Wow your big names Siemens these Siemens fresh works you know what content are they sharing and where are they sharing yeah like in the enterprise kind of b2b world you can share case studies of how these companies use your product to do something the content everything platform means practically nothing to me
when you try to be everything to everyone you end up being nothing yeah no one okay we're still hunting for what you do break through those cluttered inboxes sharing a beautiful experience so whether you engage via sales emails social platforms are running a marketing campaign make it easy to share an assortment of different content types we're still not there okay now it looks like an email builder know exactly what
happens after you hit Send you don't simply track emails you track attachments - okay so it seems like a way to ascend attachments and get analytics on it which makes sense for salespeople that are sharing PDFs powerpoints or that kind of thing and you want to know if they opened it or something and I assume that means that you host it somehow so you can't rich explains why you have all these kind of
enterprise names yeah I would I would put that right above the phone if it's truly what we think it is yeah like track attachment open rates yeah and then like closed sales faster yeah yeah like that's very specific what Eric just said which is it sounds like it's for salespeople the value I get is I don't see who's actually read my stuff like missus like make content come alive like I don't know what that means remember the
Mixpanel thing which was like send better email they like drilled it into your head like exactly what they do and in your case if your thing is about attachments it's like send better attachments yeah very attachments you can do rack eligible why do I need to book a demo in order to send better attachments it seems like they send your customers maybe you're just going for more like enterprise yeah so it's a high-touch
kind of thing and what's the pricing I'm curious Docs and alternatives right you're doing a bit of SEO stuff out that that actually is like more effective that little thing that you're doing specifically for SEO it's almost more effective than the entire page like oh what it is yeah maybe how you're better than duck send what's the pricing I'm curious yeah let's see it thirty fifty no that's not enough to require a demo
yeah I don't think that I need a demo in order to like buy a fifty dollar thing yeah and especially if you're actually going after enterprise customers like that's almost too low for them to bother to take out their credit card yeah or pay a purchase order or whatever that's like annoying for somebody yeah so you should probably charge more if it's valuable it's also not going to be worth your time to do demos and a whole sales
process and take months probably to close deals okay 50 bucks yeah but cool okay so like I think we get what it is it's a doc said alternative explain why it's better and simplify it so that people can immediately understand like I'm it's relevant to my interests I close sales over like over email I need this yep cool so wow that was two hours worth of websites yeah I got through a lot that was well any any learnings I
guess we yeah we saw a lot of like opportunities like you could a lot of you who've been working on your one-liner like sometimes as you're as you're sharing your one-liner in the in the Thursday sessions you'll get feedback from other founders close the loop and actually put that put that updated one-liner on your website like don't let your website fall out of synch with the advancements that you're
doing on just like your normal pitch practice my hunch is a lot of people expected to get a lot of like you know make this button this color or something like that kind of feedback but really it's actually the copy that's the most important thing yeah if people come to your site and they can't understand what your product does then nothing else matters they're never gonna be your customer same goes for talking to
investors right and this is why you spend so much time talking about your one-liners and so the most important things are answer the question what is this literally what is it not your big vision just like what is it who it's for build trust around that and then convince people that it'll actually solve their problems and it'll be valuable for them and well it's it's awesome to have you know someone like Aaron review your site you don't
necessarily need to have that and you can actually start by just asking people who you trust who you think are smart to look at your site and be there and like ask them to be extremely critical like you heard you heard some of the questions that we were asking out loud like what does this mean like who is this for ask like if you have the opportunity to share your website with someone who's never seen it before
ask those questions to them just say like who is the site for who would get benefit out of this what is my product and instead of like don't tell them what it is ask them to try to just get that from the website and the other thing that people I think are really hesitant to do for some reason is to actually go and find people that would be your ideal users and go sit next to them and watch them use your product and use your
website and see where do they get tripped up do they understand it you know it's one thing for us to not understand it but if your users don't understand it like that's where you're really in trouble because then they're never actually gonna go and use your product and if you're really stumped and you really like you really can't find anyone to look at your website there are a couple sites that let random people
just like record videos of them browsing like user user testing I think that's a pretty popular one yeah like 10 or 20 bucks and if you if you really like it's like 11 p.m. at night and you just want someone in the world to look at your site I think you can get pretty quick results with that with that website yeah another tool that you might want to try is install full story on your site it lets you replay sessions of
users using your product so you can actually see how people scroll it's funny actually you can kind of track the mouse to see where people's eyes are looking people tend to do that because they browse around yeah and you can figure out where do people get stuck what links do they click on do they make it to the bottom of your page or not what buttons are they focused on and it's a great way to learn it's kind of
like remember that that site where like it explained part of it on the second second segment but then we had skipped down past it yeah you could actually learn if people do that yeah by default on your site yep yeah maybe we were the weirdos but maybe everybody does it maybe not thanks very much Sharon yes that's fun really appreciate you and we'll see you next week well not you but it'll see everyone on some surf school next week Thanks