Office Hours with Kevin & Qasar

all right hi everyone my name is Kevin Hale I'm a partner at Y Combinator I went through YC myself back in 2006 co-founded a company called wufu online form builder ran the company for about five years and it was acquired by SurveyMonkey back in 2011 my background is in product development user experience design and customer support my name is Katherine I'm also a partner at YC quick history is I went through YC in winter 11 and we had a company called talk bin and talk bin lets consumers send messages to businesses and vice-versa we were acquired by Google coincidentally on the exact same day as wufu so that's a interesting fact for me and Kevin and and I've been a partner here there's my perspective and a partner a couple of times my experience is actually similar to Kevin's I would say product design is kind of what I'm good at alright so time to do some office hours so office hours are a big part of what YC is and there are kind of four different types of office hours there are group office hours in in the sense that when you're a start-up you actually are sub broken into mini groups at YC and Kevin and I have group office hours with small groups every Tuesday and this is the case with all the partners the group office our surf is a way to see what you as a start-up are doing and versus the other startups and in terms of the tempo as you're going through YC what you should be working on what problems you're facing and you really realize I think as a founder in group office hours that your problems are actually not just unique to you they're they're actually very similar to other companies then there's individual office hours that's what we're gonna try to emulate here it's individual partner sitting down with companies we do a lot of individual office hours every week hundreds of them that is really the heart of kind of office hours and when people refer to office hours that's usually what they're talking about there's two other types of office hours worth mentioning one is investor office hours so Alfred and I actually did office hours when we're going through tockman so investors come to YC we pair them up and literally go through you know what the company is in short short meetings and then there are what we call like company office hours so Amazon Apple will come and very tactical things like how to you know problems with the App Store or AWS or whatever it might be Rackspace Heroku etc so today we're gonna do individual office hours give you guys a little bit of a peek of you know what happens at YC so these are obviously gonna be a little bit different than actual office hours the ones that we do at YC they tend to be a lot longer we only have ten minutes with these startups and we usually have a ton of context because we've been working with these startups over time so like people might think that office hours like the way you've probably seen it before are like pitches but that is not actually the way we run them we already have a lot of understanding of what to start working on and so usually our office hours are very tactical very focused on we're solving very specific problems with them and so we might not get into that today but letting you know that's how things are gonna be a little bit different one thing I can would have 800 people watching right that changes the dynamic a little bit of the other thing is I want to talk a little bit about sort of like if you get a chance to do office hours either with YC partners or other sort of notable investors there's some things that I would highly recommend to you so both for the startups that we're about to meet with but also for you guys out there if you go talk to us later today or with other investors down in the future because office hours tends to not be like pitches right which is where I would recommend you focus on being concise and clear in regular office hours where you're having a relationship with an investor what we want to know is very quickly to get to the problem at hand so the first thing is like know your numbers it is very frustrating to us then we're talking with the startup and they have we ask that questions about sort of like about retention their users and all this stuff and they just don't know where they stand and it helped help makes it very difficult for us to sort of diagnose their problems the other thing is like come to do office hours with a specific problem in mind investors don't really like sitting around and like sort of shooting a or at least not the good ones right so we like to be able to say that like you have something specific some problem that you want identified or solved and then we'll brainstorm with you during that or we might have a connection that might be able to help solve that problem for you and the last thing is like if you're having an office hours with someone and it feels like deja vu from the last time you talk to them or you're repeating the same numbers over again still working on the exact same problems know that that is a problem to us right so try to focus on when you have office hours that like you've done a lot of things based on the feedback from beforehand or we have reasons why those things didn't work and come to us with new sets of problems rather than go hashing over the same things over and over again all right with that let's do the deal first company is Z laugh I and I think we have Lauren let's give them a round of applause this is really this is really turning into a variety show you guys don't have to do some tricks afterwards alright so tell us what you do so we are the in the fight we profile high-growth exciting at small and medium sized companies to leverage their company culture and employer brands competitive advantage so we build online profiles using photo the office videos the employees and understanding what it's like to work there and to what end to help them attract great talent so talent can self-select website exactly and why do you guys pick startups I mean they tend to be companies that don't have a lot of money to recruit sure so M so we part of the problem was a when we're at university obviously um you know we focus on the junior level market and the large corporates have such a big employee brand and suck in so many talented graduates but all of these small companies that need great people just don't have that employer brand to leverage so whilst they lost they don't have a huge recruiting budget they do have you know a great great company culture and they are an attractive place to work but for the average job seeker coming up University they don't know these companies exist so I mean if I you know we did startups one of the first things you would see when you see a job or it is do you actually are there other companies on there that are relevant how do you get kind of these early adopters to actually sign up because the first thing I'm looking at I don't wanna waste my time posting across 15 different sites so what's the incentive for that early-stage company to actually sure so company culture is quite a popular topic at the moment with companies like buffer showing how important it is to leverage their company culture so as an example they pre-filed their company culture quite widely themselves and on average get 400 applicants per job so the impact of showing your company culture is really valuable so actually when we go to companies that's something they understand quite well so from our perspective it's just a great way for them to show that off so this is the way I sort of see it is a straight up sort of marketplace so to play and whenever we're dealing with stirrups that are creating marketplaces usually they have like one side of the marketplace like sort of solved right with some kind of deep insight or they have something they figured out right so they can focus all their time on the other side of the marketplace so where are you guys at right now sure so I think and we're definitely more focused on the company side it's on the supply side on the supply side yeah correct on the on the candidate side you know I'll kind of you know our strategies are just kind of with our with our networks leveraging their student student societies on campuses but which which one like do you feel like you have sort of that you can focus on the other I think it's the companies so actually onboarding companies has been a lot more simple than candidates the misconceptions of startups and SMEs with junior level talent is quite large in terms of what they think it would be like what career progression is there so actually solving that slide is quite difficult but the companies really understand why they want to show off what they what what it's there for and how they can attract talent the thing is like for these types of businesses like signing up companies it's usually not that difficult because the companies don't pay you what for the first or second or third posting but if there isn't traction I think that be yes so all companies do you pay up front okay and because you convince them that like we will help highlight your your culture okay yep and as a student why would I use this job board and any other one it seems in somewhat more limiting than and again the same thing right you don't want to post across multiple projects sure so obviously you know if you're if you're if you're a university graduate looking at jobs usually you just get a standard job advert and that doesn't tell you anything about what the company is like so you can get to very similar job adverts but actually the companies behind them could be very very different so what we do is we as well and said with photos the office kind of video interviews with the current employees in facebook how many guys have on the site twelve at the moment okay and how many students have you guys actively placed currently currently that's that's none we're still the early stage we've had we've had companies go through to interview how long have you guys been working on this about six months so we went live about a month ago with all our companies on there okay say we've just been driving ken what do you think is gonna be the biggest challenge in the next three months in terms of I guess I guess I'm a bit skeptical that students are just gonna rush in to sign up for a job site then yeah exactly and actually we found quite high engagement so we had a hint at go through each interview and haven't had the results yet but they looked through all the different jobs and there was two companies that they had about current user experience they were quite interested in that area they compared both and came to us and said I didn't think I fit in this company but I'm pretty sure I definitely fit in this one so for us that's a great way to understand how they're looking at it their depth of information and actually to give some context you said you have 12 like how many profiles you sort of made I feel like right now like you're Owen job is not the on board any more companies but like yeah place some employees obviously yeah big thing is like what did the students say like how many students have you approached how many students have actually gone in and filled out applications she was at the moment like you know are kind of like a vanity metric would be like how many people are coming to the - coming to the site but um as you said I kind of focuses just to get those like that a very few small handful of very high quality applicants and get them through I think what like you need to be that's like yeah well I think right now you're just trying to like try to figure out what sticks sure so like how are you finding even your students how they even knowing about you guys I feel like you want as many students to be aware of you so well yeah I mean currently that totally would like just targeting our personal networks so you know people are coming to us saying oh we need a job what kind of companies if you have you got and then we can show them the profiles and they and we're absolutely careers event so with the universities and the advantage as well as how did you get the first 12 companies so just through personal networks okay how do you just how do you want to get the next 100 so the well the most recent T we've got through client recommendations so they've said you know part of their value is in marketing their companies is also raising their awareness so getting their brand out there and that's what's made them recommenders on and so that's part of what we're looking at as well and then just rebuilding in options to share the companies and show that sort of viral loop so beyond the your original you know so let's go back to the actual applicants beyond your friends and people at your uni how are you going to kind of communicate this value proposition cuz I think saying like oh there's great culture and these companies yes so that's more of our pitch towards companies it for a lot of graduate forever have students that are just saying like looking at the profiles and going like yeah this is a good culture yeah yeah what's ingredients a good culture and how do you differentiate if you have 12 companies that are all saying that they have good culture so it varies I guess the you're sort of looking for what makes people want to stay what are the people like you're sitting next to so rather than just sort of company culture which is over arching term we use I guess a lot of what we're looking at is do you want to sit next to that person every day how what context so you you know do you want to feel I'm worried about right now is like you've I've done a really good job at building like a company branding yeah like service right but like that job market place yes and I think right now you've got to talk to more students about like are the pages actually effect like they're effective at making the companies feel good about themselves because they for like well we look pretty lame before these guys came to made us look good with these sort of landing pages right but like so the the punchline I mean you don't want these companies to be enthusiastic for you just because you came in shot their offices and you did individual cells and founders do sales they're very effective but as you go to that next hundred or two hundred companies there isn't at least to me and this says you know short con and it's a strange because usually would have talked for hours uh it just it's it's strange too it's hard for me to identify a very clear differentiator and I think what Kevin is saying is talking to students because I think if a lot of students said that companies will show up so so what you know what is the kind of out what's gonna drive students other thing I'm worried about is like culture it's one of those things that people once they sort of experience the company firsthand it's gonna be authentic or not it doesn't matter what you sort of say on the website once they go in there for the job interview the students gonna know whether that company is lamer it's like saying I'm cool yeah that's cool but we know so you're lying on this it's one of those things like maybe the focus is like these companies are too lame to make this marketplace sort of take off and maybe the first companies that you really need sort of help build out this other side of the marketplace is you've got to figure out how do I get the really cool as companies out there whether it's offering them services for free right the highlight their stuff and tell their story as early on as possible goes it's like the really good companies figure out how to use it for themselves the company I'd have a hard time talking about like how we're cool like they were already like going uphill the episode like in a normal office hours we would say let's talk next week after you talk to X number of students and we just validate that or or they even in those conversation with students you can figure out look what is actually relevant to students I think in this audience and we assume that culture is like a super critical thing but maybe to students that just isn't and it isn't hypothesis that we have that isn't really validated by the market I think I think it's a good example of an idea I think it sounds great I mean first time you look at any look how this actually makes a lot of sense but it's it's very intellectually seductive and that's not a great thing because you actually don't know there isn't somebody who woke up today and said you know what I'd really love a job site which highlights you know company culture so I can choose a company to work at and that's you know that's a big fear that you actually build something that people actually don't want even though it sounds like something something that people would want so changing gears just a little bit have you considered it like actually building this for just regular job seekers in general well I mean I kind of focus was the junior job market purely um you know because obviously that's the kind of market that we knew and that's how we experienced it firsthand that in my understanding a junior job market would be like why not do hourly employ the Taco Bell's of the world they need a lot of help is there a reason that you specifically chose kind of startups other than maybe your own interest well not even so much just startups I mean it's very much the kind of high growth high performing SMEs purely for the fact that you know graduates come out to university and they just have no idea what else is out there apart from the large professional services firms and they they just don't seem to want to explore that so then I think a lot of its down to sort of pressure from parents feel like you're just guessing right now so we've done we've just researched on that side so we had like if they're not actively searching out there then the triggers for like getting them to come to your site are gonna be difficult you have to figure out like how do I change the natural behavior in the like ideal scenario like you already know there's there's this like latent demand and you're you're just gonna put you know a lose on it and extract that value and so I think what Kevin means there's yeah like maybe actually students only want to go to professional firms or do something else that maybe actually they don't want to work for startups and they don't want to work for high-growth S&B we we have we have evidence that's not true for example we are we did like an office crew where we we had a load of companies where he took a group of students around to look inside and we we had a number of students who said I was only applying to the this structured graduate scheme and now I only want to look in these small companies so you're saying the biggest promise education right now are you guys educating students yeah are you doing that so we've got sort of non-financial partnerships with a lot of the societies so the entrepreneur societies things like that they can be societies so to give an understanding of what it's like to work in these companies we're running off this cross still we are going to careers fairs how many students have you talked to you through those I mean it's kind of in the in the in the hundreds rather than the thousands at the moment obviously just ask the two of us we trying to be as high touch as possible I mean scaling that is probably going to be one of our biggest challenges yeah I think I mean I think you know if and and then you say you need to talk to students I take that as to be true that means if students really do want these types of jobs then it becomes really important for you obviously to communicate on the landing page which is kind of there we looked at the landing page before here we would do a separate office horizontal copy and UX on that but the the kind of other thing is how do you make sure the companies that get in are not lame because the companies that get in are lame students who are who actually you know bought that call to action whether they hear from another Society maybe they're in some professions you actually might have ruined them for the yeah well they're like wow this isn't exactly like the hot you know what I envisioned yeah that's very true that's why I'm you know we are trying to almost have a like a kind of filtering process of the companies that we work with and whatever you order looking a rough so like meadow 15 to 250 employees high growth high performing and and kind of people centric so they're you know they they do turn away companies yeah yeah I mean it's exactly what our site is nothing without having quality and we've been very conscious of making sure that's there especially with the company's site and I it doesn't like if that's all and and if they're making up this company culture that doesn't exist and it doesn't work for us let's say if I have a lame startup I really want I really want to be on your site couldn't I fake the home of this stuff like say I'm really high-growth say I'm really cool have a cool icon and get on your site and then actually be lame I think yeah I like again how do you actually test that the companies are not lame yeah I think at the moment it's very sort of time intensive on my site so I do a lot of the client-side sales and it sort of just understanding how they talk what they discuss looking at their social media accounts looking at so how their previous employees have discussed there yeah I mean I think that's the right thing to do at this stage again another kind of we could do office hours again next week the other thing I would say is the other thing I would say is yeah like it would be good to identify at this stage just a two or three different metrics that you do want to ultimately you want to get to a state where you can say this company we talked to him in ten minutes you can assess they should be on here or not and the reason and how to communicate to other companies that are not on there of why they're not on there so they don't say when students ask them why are you not on this job board to say like well cuz we're lame and they told us so we are out of time Thanks like that much just like that it is strange doing office hours cuz yeah you know on stage because when you're when you're doing individual officers you can bring up the next company view Z as we you know when we're doing individual office hours aside from the thing that comes said there's a lot of context you can just I think really get into the nitty-gritty like we you know in this case I was kind of dying to actually pull up the site to really talk about if a lot of these value props that they're you know that they're they're talking about actually show up on the sand are easily communicated because obviously the founders are not gonna be pitching to startups and companies it's that site that has to make that clear okay on to the next step tell us your name and a little bit better start sure I Madero amazed okay and I am the founder and CEO of a startup called views views II is essentially were a platform trying to make the physical world an easier place to understand and we do this specific sentence and I said okay like we we use a retailer what does that mean to me your retailer we put sensors in your stores we detect customers as they move around and we show you some sensors we put in Wi-Fi sensors that pick up smartphone signals okay once and multiple sensors multiple sensors in actually and then is that it just a Wi-Fi access point basically so they are yeah the reconfigured Wi-Fi access points which condemn detects the Wi-Fi stick with some smart phones we try laughs to write people as they move across them so what about people who just walk by the I mean Wi-Fi is notorious problems right so whatever just walk by the store I didn't actually go in that's the biggest problem in our space product wise so most of the companies in our space trying to take people using a an access point which as you've highlighted you unite up to actually figure out with a person's inside or outside so what we've built is a system does actually is able to tell the person is really outside or inside this is live this is out in the real world this is live right now okay how many customers do you have we have for customers for customers at four locations or four companies for companies okay for how many locations they're in pilot stage about one or two locations each pilot stage that means they're paying you or is not yet they're open okay so you and they're just Wi-Fi access point sensors as either the wife access but there anything else is there any other type of sensor quote-unquote yeah so we also use for for counters 3d cameras that I can pick up people as they move across the shop lead on the cool stuff burying the lede on the cool stuff the first thing you say is like we install custom customized Wi-Fi access points 3d cameras all this stuff and we track data for retail outlets that hasn't been tracked beforehand and we go grab an awesome dashboard to do it yeah so what's to join your company and pitch this is pitching it back to you okay so I think we understand what you do so I mean I think it's pretty optimal let's let's so why why do retailers want this so currently do okay so today about let's say 43% of UK retailers actually track people who move into their stores using a footfall counter it's either a physical one or an actual for for counter above a door and the other people tracking so those who aren't tracking either don't see the business benefit yet it could be a supermarket where they get maybe 90 something percent of people who walk in convert in any way or it could be a business that's too small and focused on survival rather than oolitic so you're a product these four pilots are large locations mid to large sized businesses rather than locations even even businesses with small locations and lots of them are still about customers okay so just large companies that are sophisticated enough to actually digest some of the analytics exactly so let's talk about the analytics that you give what what's the what's the thing that the retailers want them most okay the two pieces of information they want the most one of those is the percentage of visitors who were outside who are now inside and that ties back to the USP I talked about earlier on the second of those is how much time people spend inside so the dwell time and the stopping power how as we call them and then what can they do with those three pieces of data so with the dwell time we see a relationship between the amount of money people spend and the amount of time they spend so literally time being money for every 1% increase in dwell time we have a 1.3 percent increase in the actual spend per customer that's one that's great yeah the second is stopping power so if you see if you're running a retail store and you get in let's say 10,000 visitors in on a day you don't know if that was one person a person traffic or five percent of person traffic you able to optimize and actually increase that how'd you find this first for so we actually went we did we did an accelerator when we first got started and the acceleration truces sed introduced us to a few different customer groups and we really threw a few things at the wall to see what stuck we started out talked and smaller retailers going for a shorter was your key insight they're smaller retailers they just don't have time to try to survive there they are interested in optimizing they just want to be around tomorrow so we went through this and we discovered that retail is a large market and they have a need the challenge that we found there that they have quite a long sales cycle the larger they get but that's where the real need is as well so just working through that sale cycle night now so you guys you're running the pilots um when's the next step for those pilots but they become like pay customers so the steps are typically six months three to six months to a pilot and then you've got a time after that when they're evaluating the product and then they do a rollout it's just like a guess you have experience no this is this is based I mean this is coming from other companies who've been in our space before so they're incumbents that were replaced and so we're gonna it's a mix of what we've learnt and what they've done as well what the the I assume you talked to more than four to get these four pilots and you know the ones that said know what was there like most significant objection so those that have said no some of it's because they literally have so much analytics in place already and they just don't need anymore some of them want love of regular I mean that's worrying right because especially sophisticated retailers that means they're probably employing a lot of this technology already so I think one one definite the thing is like they just don't have the kind of brainpower to digest and sort of like analyze it like they just don't have time to like bring on data science people to sort of work on that stuff so that's usually a problem one suggestion would be is to the value part to adjust that value problems to say hey listen we actually make this digest we make this actionable through these different ways because even their current kind of you know products that they're using are probably not actually giving them great information it'll tell them so many people visited in your sales pitch you already give like a little details that she's like this factor is highly correlated to this then you have to take it to the next step you so you can't stop there for this product to be compelling and for them to have it then you have to say like all right here your options not at play and ideally you would have the kind of product that says like we'll take you there like we can help you finish those things is there any insights that you have in terms of or any any way they're using data to compare retailers against each other or against the location yeah so we're building this is something that would come with a enough of a spread of installations but we'd like to build an industry-wide benchmark customer behavior see if some networks because I think I mean what's it stuff about I think the business right now is what you're talking about is the commodity hardware that anything is you more people right now you don't have any network effects right now quite frankly like with benchmarking in my experience like having a like forms and services suffer a lot of people to look at benchmarking numbers and they will immediately say like if it's again sort of what they want to hear they'll say like well Mike my company's different right that doesn't apply to me right and then look at you doing what they want because they think like that's someone else I run my company differently what happened so like the reason I whatever worries me is so the picture I'll paint is you're talking about long sales cycles six months to a year in a best case you're talk about a year plus before you get money in the bank you're you there's not a very clear way to go for more in real Taylor the other than just outbound sales so it's not like a consumer product in which there is some quote-unquote virality or some way that you can you can move it over so you're you could run out of money before you actually prove this challenge are you what are you spending most your time on right now product or sales my rest of the time is sales which makes sense yeah and then it's the thing I'd want to like challenge that assumption that you said like we have to wait this long period of time this is like sort of close people like I've want you to like make people feel uncomfortable other stuff but also like your whole thing is like we're providing value and you want to get started right now and like if you get in like on the ground floor with us with this like you're gonna get so many benefits out of it yeah pilots have are definitely valuable in certain cases but they one downside and you could potentially experience think they actually don't really want it and as long as you're willing to do some free legwork for them they're like how cool like maybe we'll get some insights maybe not who cares so all the pilots are actually paid for okay today we've generated about six figures of certain revenue just in the pilots alone and all customers go through pilots so what's your pricing what's your pricing model it's a pesto model so all rather it's square-meter model so larger locations single location pay a lot small locations lots of them pay smaller amount why that rather than like recruiting like a it's it's a it is a recurring role silver curse yeah so where are these pilots right now are they're like three months in four months in so the first of those is about a month or serving right now okay very recent yeah very very recent long so cycle to get there yeah and then what are you supposed to have at the end of it that's gonna like tip them over like have you identified and set up a road map that says like okay if we achieve this or like you start seeing these sort of numbers and improvements then when you sign up because like right now I worried that like you're just collecting data and you're showing it to them and like if they feel like oh well I can't do we need actual with these things right now they're not going to see that there's any value yeah the end of the six months or year you realize meant as the and so I would do everything you can to say like okay you now see where you are while working with us we're gonna help you drive those downwards or upwards depending on like where they need to go so that's exactly it so the first the first conversations we had we figured out that leaving them to run the pilots on their own just wasn't going to work and they needed actually a fair bit of account management and hand-holding yeah that's and that's great sense of the data right because that means you're really I mean you don't what you don't want to become is you don't want to come to become a consultancy essentially a consultancy so if you have a product business you basically have to be able to knock out a pilot and then so start thinking about definitely those sort of features that like helps them get to the touchdown sort of a moment not just the ones where they're sort of like identifying and assessing no it's definitely about one thing we use actually is making sure that they focus on ROI so we use ROI as the key metric to do all I mean these up there's other ways that you can like the sixty some purple you know this fifty sixty percent that said do not use any sort of internal analytics and the ones that said no to you there there's gonna be other rationalization for not to do this so the the ROI has to be so clear that the industry assumes it's a standard that's a very very very high benchmark for a young company to hit in the first you know year or two before money runs out and that's scary we're at a time unfortunately but on that note pleasure talking to you thanks what kevin is telling him as our email addresses so we can stay in touch I mean these guys are brave too in order to talk about their company in front of a front of a large group of people all right next one is third and last we're gonna do something slightly different than here yeah screen push stop me give them a round of applause yeah yeah you got an F as being founders you have to empathize with other founders this is not an easy easy job so first off tell us your name and toss Matt scream push ok so my name is will eat and screen push is essentially a screen shot collaboration tool so what we're doing is we're trying to target the the design digital design vertical and so we're really interested in kind of if you're redesigning let's say I can use website you might you know maybe go to an agency which Kevin is literally doing you might go to an agency let's say instead of doing it yourself and what you don't want is that agency you give them the brief let's say and you don't want that agency to go away two weeks later and say hey here it is final product okay so so it makes it easier for designers to collaborate or a person in the company to collaborate with somebody outside their company by sharing their screen so yeah like kind of twofold in the sense that it gives us like tool that allows the designer so here's the thing I'm worried about like we've gone several sentences into this and I don't know exactly what the thing is okay okay give you just told me about like this is the kind of solution and then there's you talked a little bit about the problem yeah so like so it's like a desktop application right start with that desktop application that the designers download themselves and then keyboard shortcut to actually send the current version that they're designing to the other designer while each and every screenshot is kind of saved and organized in a timeline so that the client can then go on to a website not have to download any kind of that desktop application that's a good place to start in tech and we talk about copy for your actual landing page is that you actually want to describe you can start off with this very verbose what you literally do and then pare it down as a good context I don't pick on you but this is actually a typical problem that we see all the time especially as investors a lot of founders the reason that they start their company is around the Y right the problem whatever the inspiration for them getting into the space and it's like it's the passion that sort of fuels them but for people who like see tons of pitches over and over again the problem that we have from our perspective it's just like remembering what you do so always lead that first right make sure we understand that and then if we're interested we're gonna prompt you and pull out of you all the whys the passion and all that stuff okay however we're gonna stop here and with actually a lot of the kind of office hours that Katherine I do at YC is actually UX reviews and we go through people's signup flows and stuff and so we want to do something different the product and give us our thoughts and hear why you made decisions that you made sure okay so why don't you turn around so you can see and then the way we did this because we don't want to take a chance I'm trying to do like a live demo or what have you is I just went through the product through the signup flow and it took like a billion screenshots going through that experience I'm just going to sort of narrate and go through it here so here's does the front page of screen push and this is the top third of it so it says screenshot collaboration made easy and in the next sentences collaboration it's what we do and literally I think house and I both thought the exact same there's like really we're doing something together I wonder what it is so if we scroll down the page a little further and he talks a little bit about his features here so in descriptions for each team member as a signer it's just for shortcut notifications they're subtle gentle and understanding the punchline here is I've really no one would read this we'd probably already be at the bottom of the page right okay so crossbow from compatible and I'm starting to get the first hints by looking at one screenshot and it says Mac windows check check that oh this is a desktop app right then the last part says looks familiar thought so say goodbye to the screenshot graveyard forever so now I like this is the first time I hear about like so this is some kind of problem that is sort of solving but I still don't know exactly what it is okay there should be an image to be fair on the left that demonstrates what is the screenshot graveyard but but that may have not came up okay so I think I think just a bit before we go into the actual sign of flow the punchline here is if you sat down you know there's hundreds of people here yeah with the ersite and said hey listen I'm an intern or right you know I got hired by this company called screen push what do you think this page is after looking at it for not we've already talked for five minutes and within you know 500 milliseconds or two seconds or three seconds or four seconds I don't think any of them would get what you think your company is yeah and that is a big deal because that's how most people are gonna discover your product that's kind of a meta piece of advice is you have all these things that you know what would you mean by the word collaboration yeah but not collaboration means lots of different inks lots of exactly I think it's become like this big buzzword and we got drawn into that so it's like yeah we're collaborations Weiss right here yeah exactly and we got drawn into that kind of the same with like big data everybody uses these words and everybody has completely different interpretations and we definitely so one thing I would say positive if we're gonna move on to it is it is a beautiful site it's well does I mean it's it's visually well-designed are you copywriter did you write all the copy guys did write a yeah so like how do you recommend you guys like go through the site and do the signup flow because there's some like really nice copy in terms of the sign up in the terms of the emails that he sends all right and in real office hours we wouldn't compliment you we just go on to the next so I went through and you click on the button and you go through a sign-up procedure that goes under so what's your email the password yeah can you tell me your name and then what do you do and this is place like as are actually a star yeah I mean I so beautiful it's in line I think that's great it's a it's a unique signup process but literally at what you do I I didn't know what to put there I think the example you have of the front-end dev yeah yeah yeah I don't know what to do and then if you go back one slide two slides I'm sorry I don't know for his full name or there's this password there's no indication of this is alphanumeric how long it is so what ended up happening is when I got I got an error state at the end of the signup flow okay which was very frustrating because I'd already gone through a bunch of questions and then I had to figure out I think that's when I closed the browser sure okay all right so you go through it and then it kind of does this nice pause and it says like you've got mail which was a really nice thought I was like so I'm a little different and so I go and check my email and I get into the app and then the first thing that shows me is this screen right here it says my team you did it let's get started oh you don't seem to have created any teams yet let's get started so we got repetition err start a lot and then named ad team and then team invites and so the first thing I'm thinking is also like I don't know what this is the first thing I do not want to do is send it to my friends right so like this would not be the ideal setup and as desktop software a lot of times the hardest part is like getting them the install software so yeah weird that it didn't start off with that yeah which is where I went to because I was like let me see what it is before I send it to any friends cool so go and download it so ghost here no convenient shortcut link to the Applications folder or so people are falling all left and right yeah you know you have one soul left to connect through it and then what happens when you hit like open is absolutely nothing it like clears away and I was like so I'm gonna start what's going on and you'd have to notice and this is the s with the hexagon that that icon appear in the top dock like we didn't know that that's the only indication right that it started and you're into it so I click on here and I see user name and I'm like uh I don't remember adding a username through my flow my email address so I don't know what's going on and I go back through and I actually go back to the account and I said like oh let me just log into the app when I come back here there's no link to login so I'm like okay well let me refresh because I remember this thing showed up dynamically yeah and then I'm like I don't see a link to login and it took me awhile to realize the already registered is the way I get to log in subtle I finally get there I actually had to go through a password reset theme at some point good copy make yeah it's really great copy in the places that you could sort of catch me yeah I think that's like sort of like what got me through it so we get to reset password I do this and this actually this page just refresh is backwards but there has no confirmation on it okay except there's an email you do send me and that's only way I know that the password reset so I probably hit that with a typo ten ten thousand times right and so when I finally like because I did it like five times and I don't know which password I actually got accepted yeah so I eventually get logged in and I sit here and I'm finally here and I'm like I don't know what I'm supposed to do but the thing I think is like oh I should click the biggest button on here yeah so the button I click is what do you think yeah because it's the most has the greatest sort of affordance and of course it's like a feedback email form so okay that's not it yeah I finally get hit the hexagon push thing and it takes a screenshot and then that is all it does it's like a crop cabinet Y Combinator and a check and an axe and I'm like what am i checking what am i crossing off I don't know what's happening and eventually I check it off and it go back to the app to see any clues about it and there really isn't anything yeah so anyway so that is very harsh so in you know in rec and regular office hours we in regular office hours we would really be going step-by-step and and really figure out okay what would be better copy here what are the individual thing we'd literally just got called for time yeah what would we actually change in every single one of those screens and that's very tactical and it's mundane boring but like that's what building makes all the difference but seeing it that way you can see like every place that I had a problem and like just the fact that that slide deck had like 25 slide yeah before I got to the part where I'm logged in yeah the the point I would take away for you for you guys who are all building products right now is you should do what Kevin and I basically did here which is have people who don't know your product use it all the time I'm talking about every single day meeting people who don't know what your company does and not letting them actually go through the signup flow their first interactions because that I mean you you you're just so caught in your own company yeah that you you know you don't realize like the most basic things like it's a desktop app is not obvious yeah and therefore you know it becomes a you know real fundamental problems actually awesome alright so those are not normal ours we'll do regular conversation with them off stage yeah so we're at four o'clock now I think we're having a break until 4:30 we will see you then thanks guys thank you

Channel: Y Combinator

Views: 13,302

Rating: 4.7530866 out of 5

Keywords: Y Combinator, Startup School, Startup School Europe 2014, Kevin Hale, Qasar Younis

Id: Ud4Q1Lzh5c8

Length: 41min 33sec (2493 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 31 2014