Building a website for your startup is easier than it's ever been. The hard part is creating a unique brand that really stands out. So today, we'll be joined by Kari Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, to review your websites with an eye for what makes a memorable brand. Welcome to another episode of Design Review. Kari, thank you so much for joining us. Well, great to be here. So you were the first designer at Coinbase and you were a lead designer at Airbnb before ultimately starting Linear as co-founder and CEO. I'm curious, what have you learned about how to build a strong brand when you're looking at your website? One of the first things I would say that it's something that it should be authentic to your company. I think these days, maybe a lot of startups look at...
I don't know, Stripe or Linear or some other company out there and they think like, okay, this is the way to build sites or this is the way to build your brand. None of those companies started that way. Stripe's first website was very different than the current website as well as their product. And similar with Linear, it's like the first website was very different than the current website. So I think you should understand what stage of a company you are and what kind of people are you trying to find. These days, there's maybe this trend of, because it's easy to build websites, you might try to build very polished or fancy websites very early on. But what that kind of tells you is it maybe sets the wrong expectation.
the user that if your product is just that and you build it last month and like you don't have everything figured out yet the product might not be there yet it's not that polished it might be set this wrong expectation that this is a very i don't know like polished product already and it does all the things that you promised it does so i think like there's the danger that you go too far like trying to look like a large company or like a mature company too early so i thought like maybe it would be interesting just look at what was the linear website initially and what it is today to kind of like highlight this like difference love that let's let's take a look I pulled the first linear website from the Wayback Machine. And in some ways, I would say the website is fairly simple. It doesn't look horrible. But also, I think it's something we created in basically one day. We didn't want to spend weeks or months trying to create a website where we think the actual effort should be put into the product itself. In some ways, some of the things with the brand or even the copy is that we wanted to use this issue tracking term. Because if you go to any large company website, like you go to Slack or you go to some other productivity...
app website it often says something like this is the work platform or this is the where the work happens or something yeah and i think like that comes later when you're trying to build this narrative but in the very beginning what you're trying to sell is you try to find someone to actually use your product and like just understand what it is so what we did here was that we wanted to put the issue tracking we knew that that wasn't the like long-term vision for the product or the company but we knew that that's like something that the people we are looking for it's just early stage companies and engineers will understand like this is issue tracking is a it's a technical project management in a way it doesn't attract people that don't know what issue tracking is. So it sounds like with the copy and specifically your headline, you honed in on like the specific phrase that your ideal user would resonate with and be like, yes, I'm looking for an issue tracking tool rather than we're building a work platform, blah, blah, blah, where people would say, I'm not looking for a work platform. I'm looking for an issue tracker. Yeah. And I think it's, it's the way to think about it. It's like, you're trying to maybe filter out people. You should be very specific initially and maybe like try to like.
You can talk to investors in very ambitious ways. You can say like, yeah, this is going to be the work platform of the future. But like on the website, you can just put like, this is a chat app. And like, this is a nice chat app. And like, just do that. That's such an interesting point, which is, it sounds like what you're saying is like own being small, own being a startup. And there's a lot of advantages that come with that rather than trying to pretend that you're some big company. And that will set better expectations with users and more resonate with them. And it's also interesting that a lot of the times during YC, we spend a lot of time working with companies on their two sentence description, how they describe themselves. And oftentimes we say that there's usually two different two sentence descriptions. There's the one for investors, which could be, you know, the big, you know, ambitious sounding thing.
And then there's the one for your users where you want to use specific language that will resonate with them. Maybe jargon that investors wouldn't understand. And so it's really interesting. You're saying focus on that customer two-sentence description, that customer pitch, and really put that right front and center. Yeah, we don't have to go too much in the design itself. I kind of use this screenshot to show like, hey, there is some kind of product, even though at this time we didn't really have it ready, but we were working on it. So there is some kind of product. It kind of looks nice. You can just a little bit see what the features might be, but it's a little bit faded. So it's a little bit mysterious. So it's kind of like curious because in the end, what we want people to do is put their email here and sign that, join on the wait list. That's so interesting because a lot of times I think people put a screenshot on and they just...
put the literal screenshot. And a lot of times it doesn't work because people are not familiar with the app and you're not trying to communicate all the different features and everything like that through this. You're just trying to kind of build a mystery and be like, this looks like a modern tool. You should check it out more. Yeah. Yeah. So I think like it's, it's very like simple message in the end. And I think like we, we also like went very simple with the rest of the site. It's like, okay, it's like fast because that's one thing we heard, heard about a lot. And after Superhuman, we were one of the products to add this like comment menu that like also makes things easier. And we, we showed that, oh, it's like connects with your, some of your tooling that you already use. And like, here's the team. And like, we have some, like, this is not some random people that we have like built other things in fast. So it's very, very simple.
It's one page, there's no other pages. We're not telling, we don't have a page and all kinds of, we don't have a blog and like we don't have anything really. I think for us it was just like, let's just put something out there to capture people that... are potentially interested, show that we're pulling something new, but not exactly kind of explain too much what it is. And so this was like a week of work or something like that? Yeah, like a couple days. A couple days, yeah. This was how many years ago? This is 2019. Okay, so six years ago. And so now it's evolved a bunch because the product has evolved and what you do has evolved and you have a lot more customers and connections and integrations and the product and everything. So I'm curious to see the latest version. I think this may be like a third evolution of the site. And like the second one was the kind of famous purple website that was like replicated a lot across the companies. And I think with this, like, okay, yeah, you can see that.
the title is different because the product is actually doing more. So it's not just issue tracking, but we think like there's this building part that has multiple different kinds of features or workflows you can use. And then there's the planning part, which is also the planning, like the roadmaps, the projects that you can write project plans. But we still like to keep it pretty clear. Like here we say like issues, projects and product roadmaps. So it's not like, again, it's the language that technical teams would use. And yeah, like I think visually it's like we went more this kind of black and white. We try to make it a little bit mature in a way, like from the purple from the past. Like we still have like nice effects and like we like doing this that they kind of...
signal that we care about the experience and that's that's kind of like why we do this and but it's more there's now more information we try to to explain some of the what you can do with it and and we're still like pretty direct that these are like yeah you can do analytics and you can do like different we have different kinds of features so in the end like i think it's it's something that you should think that the website that the brand always evolves with your company and your customer base so even now like we have more larger companies enterprises i don't want to turn into like a fully like enterprise oracle like company like a brand or something but i do still have to think about it's like is this something that fits to the current customers i think one of the interesting things to me comparing both the original one from six years ago and this one now is how like you've resisted the urge to make it overwhelming people with features. And, you know, obviously the product has grown a lot. Your customer base has grown a lot. The company has grown a lot. And I think a lot of times the temptation is to want to throw more and more stuff, you know, on the page to communicate that to anybody who's coming here. And it seems like you've actively fought against that to try to keep it that same simple kind of ethos that you had when you launched, you know, six years ago. That way I think about the landing page, the first, the homepage is kind of like the front page. So like you can't explain everything. Like you can't explain all the features. You can't explain all the customer stories and everything. That's why there's other pages on the website. So we now have specific sections for it.
specific pages and sections for the areas of the product so you can go deeper in it. So I always think like the homepage should be for the people who don't really know about you. So it should give you some kind of enough information that you know that is this interesting or not, but not too much so that you get overwhelmed and not too little that you don't understand what it is. So you have to find that kind of balance. Well, it's awesome to get a sense for how you think about this and building your own product. Should we take a look at some YC submitted websites and give some feedback? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So first up, we have Sprites AI. Let's take a look. Build custom AI workflows and streamline growth. Very interesting.
What's your initial impression? These graphics certainly stand out in their style, right? My initial reaction is like, I'm not just looking at this. I'm not exactly sure who is this for and what can I do with it? So it says about like build custom AI workflows and streamline curls. So in some ways, like, okay, like I can understand there's some kind of workflow, but for what? Is it for designers? Is it for engineers? Is it for...
YouTubers, there's something, there's a card about YouTube there. So in Streamline growth, there's all kinds of growth. It's like revenue growth and user growth, there's marketing. And so I would probably go a little more specific on the copy here that there is some kind of templates, I guess, for different kinds of workflows. It's kind of like a random list of different kinds of workflows. So if it would be meaningful to or useful to group them somehow that, hey, there's workflows for.
I don't know, like YouTubers or if there's workflows for business people or some kind of analysts or something. So there's a little bit more like, oh, okay, I'm not a YouTuber, but I'm an analyst, so I have to look into this. Yeah, it seems like a who it's for is missing here. The interesting thing for me is I paid so much attention to the graphics because they're so unique that I didn't even notice that it was like brand mood board generator, interview questions predictor, social media ads generator. I think they're trying to tell us some of the use cases that you could use it for, but my brain just didn't even notice those because the graphics just took all of my attention. Yeah, I think like, well, there's this movement in the background and the movement on the cards, which I think can be nice, but it might not be the best thing.
to have this looping movement in the landing on the first screen, because maybe what happened to you is like you're kind of focused on the movement and what's coming up next. And I think the website should be kind of like this, almost like this pyramid. Like you start with, this is what it is. And then it's like, it's very like as simple as possible. And then you keep going down. It's like expands and like, okay, well, there's this thing and that thing. And there's more and more and more things. So like, oh, okay. Like I can, that's interesting. I will take a look. But the first thing should be like very like kind of pointed or clear. Yeah. Yeah. There's like good animation, which draws your attention to
important things that you want users to pay attention to and notice. And then there's distracting animation that maybe takes away attention from whatever you're trying to focus on. There's also this interesting element here, which is the prompt, it's some kind of prompter. Yeah. Which is interesting, but I just wonder, it's kind of floating here, and you might think this looks like a cookie banner in a way. Yeah, that's a good point. It just kind of floats there. It's like you kind of often ignore that. So I just wonder if you just would put this prompter on the page here at the top, and it'd be kind of like...
tell people yeah just like try it out and that way like you could communicate it better yeah it's so interesting like you're not designing in a vacuum of your page you're designing in the context of what users are used to and if users are used to ignoring cookie banners and things like that that tend to pop up at the bottom then like maybe they're just ignore your thing there too i mean those kind of banners like the ui itself like this could work in the product itself like when you're when you're looking at the like a page or some kind of document like it could be nice to have this like a floating thing but in the website context it feels like it's a some kind of banner that i don't have to pay attention to okay so we scroll down a little bit start building from a template so these look like i think the same kind of templates that we're scrolling across, maybe slightly different. And here we've got some more categories of types of things, business, marketing, AI generation, image generation. Okay, so that's interesting. I think one of the challenges when you have like a generic workflow builder or something that can do anything, it's difficult to communicate the specific things that people should use this for. And this seems like an interesting way to do that, to jog people's memory of like, what do I need, what workflows do I need to solve? People probably have a hard time thinking about that, but just like, oh, do you need to create an infographic? Then, oh yeah, that's something I would use this for. Maybe my biggest question here is like, what is this workflow? So it's not, so there's a lot of this.
There's this promotion on the templates that you can have different kinds of templates, but I don't think the page exactly describes how does it work. Like it might be worthwhile trying to add some kind of almost like a flow chart, not really, but explain that what it, like take one example and then like kind of like blow it up a little bit. Like this is what a workflow could look like. Hey, there's like other workflows we created, but like I guess maybe you can create your own too. And so I think it's just kind of highlighting the use case. Awesome. Well, thank you, Sprites.ai. This was really interesting. Really appreciate you submitting your site. Okay, next up we have GigaML and they came to us with a question, our website conversion rate is low. How can we improve that? I guess the first question is like, what are they trying to convert people to?
And I see two buttons that say book a demo. So my hunch is that's the goal here. They're trying to get funneling people to the website. Maybe they're doing cold outreach. Maybe they're doing other types of marketing or something. And then they're trying to get people to book that demo. It says AI agents for enterprise support, trusted by some of the most admired companies in the world. And then there's a glowing blue orb here. I don't know. What's your first impression? In some ways, I think it's quite clean. And I think it...
I don't know, fits well for the market, which is an enterprise. And I would just say that, like, the reason the conversion is low because you're going after enterprises. And it's like, there's probably no way to, like, increase that conversion flow, like the conversion rate, really, because enterprises are not necessarily coming to websites and clicking buttons that much. I do think, like, if you do want to have more users or more people coming in, you probably should have a way for them to try it out themselves and, like, kind of drop the demo. If you think that you still want to go full enterprise, I think this is fine. But then I think you just have to find those enterprises somewhere else. Like, you have to do sales or some kind of...
events or some kind of like dinners or some kind of ways to connect with the enterprise people because they are not often evaluating tools randomly maybe sometimes they hear about it like maybe you do some press or you maybe do something something else the conversion rate doesn't really matter because if you sell if you do one deal that's probably going to be like a huge deal it is interesting they do have a demo here so this is a little small and it's hard to read this thing but the animation did draw my attention to it so let's see what happens when we click on this hey there i'm giga ml's voice ai agent ready to chat about anything do you have something in mind uh tell me about enterprise support Our enterprise support is all about making life easier for big businesses. We offer seamless integrations with platforms like Amazon Connect, Genesis, and Salesforce. So everything just works together. Our voice AI handles massive call volumes without breaking a sweat.
Okay, so a couple interesting things here. First of all, when she started talking, she basically just said, what do you want to talk about? And I was like, I don't know. So it might be better to start off with a prompt that could lead people to what they want them to ask about, which could be features of the product, things like that. Another thing that I noticed is when she was describing the features of the product, she described it as SOC2 type 2, which most people know it's like SOC2 type 2 is how it's described. So just making sure that that's actually communicating the right thing. If I'm an enterprise user and one of the first things I do is talk to this thing to see how well it works and it gets things wrong or something, then I'm nervous that like...
oh, maybe I don't want to use this product. So I think steering people towards the conversation you want them to have with it that's most going to upsell them would probably make them more likely to want to book a demo and use it in their own company. Yeah, I would say like on the Orb, it's hard to see the icon in it. It's kind of gray. So I kind of knew that something was happening, but from the side here, I wasn't quite seeing the icon. So that might be one thing that people are not, that's something like you could track if people actually click that and I can track with it. And I don't know if you need to worry about it too much, but just to see if it could be like useful to like improve it. And maybe, I don't know if this element is the best, like maybe it could be, maybe that could be like more like a box or something. It's like.
maybe the box could have some prompts or something to like show the use cases like kind of well enterprise customer support or enterprise like I think that the agent with the agent kind of described what maybe a lot of things they do and I think again it goes to like what are these people looking for so if I'm an enterprise buyer and I don't know the CEO tells me like we need to reduce the cost and like we want AI support like what do I type in like what do I support like AI phone support or something and so kind of like trying to think like what is the language these people are using and then try to put that language here so you're like aligning with what they're looking for yeah i totally agree the headline ai agents for enterprise support is very generic i think the word enterprise is important we clued in on that um but the sub headline they're trusted by some of the most admired companies in the world is a missed opportunity to literally describe what the product does and more about specifically enterprise is the big thing like specifically who within enterprise should be the person that cares about this and then you know they say trusted by the most admired companies in the world And then they go right down and say, trusted by these great companies. It's like, you don't need both of these. So there's a missed opportunity here to communicate more. I mean, I would say like, I don't know if it's like super honest to say, like these are the most.
admire companies in the world. I think it's good, but there obviously seems like they're big companies, but I would say like, in my mind, there's other like, I don't know, Apple is very admired company or something. It's like, I don't know if that statement is exactly true, but this statement is true that these are probably like great companies. So I think that's fine. Yeah. And then coming down here, voice AI that is human. So it is voice, you know, it's all about voice stuff, but like nothing up here says voice. So that's probably a missed opportunity to really target who your early adopters are going to be. My understanding with enterprise buyers is that they need a lot of...
almost like, I think you need a lot of materials. You need a lot of text. You need to check a lot of boxes. You need a lot of customer stories. There's a lot of things they want to see. And maybe you should put those things in the front page, but maybe there's a specific category. Maybe you have a specific page about security. Maybe you have a specific page about something else. You could still, when you email them, you can link to those materials. And then once they're on the website, they can travel around. And so I think there is some benefit of adding things on the website. But I wouldn't consider this as a consumer startup where you are trying to optimize for the conversion rate. It's a very different kind of business. Awesome. Thank you, GigML.
YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com slash apply. It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video. Okay, next up we have Unreal Milk. So this one seems very opinionated. We've got a cow that's chilling on a chair on my forever vacation. We got some hand-drawn clouds in the sky. It's interesting when I look at the cow, it's not immediately obvious what it's communicating. But when I think about it for a second, I'm like, okay, so the cow doesn't have to produce the milk all day, every day. And so we have milk that is not real milk, which is what the product is here, I'm assuming.
It's definitely a different kind of category than I'm used to. I would say, like, from this screen, yeah, it's hard to tell, like, well, what is it? Like, I mean, it's Unreal Milk. So that's the only information so far we have. So it's not milk, but, like, what is it made of? It's not real milk. Yeah. So maybe we need to, maybe we need to, okay, like, so it has a site growing. Okay, so then we move into...
To some kind of use cases. So you can make cheese and ice cream. So we're still not sure what it is. Yeah, but it's all good things. They're pitching us on like why it's good, why it's better. Okay. A lot of personality here. Mama, we need you. The cow's crying. And then our way. Yeah, our way. There's some kind of container where the milk comes from. Yeah. Okay, so there's some actual pictures. Okay, we've got some scientists in the lab. So yeah, this kind of reads like a nice story.
And finally, they did it. They created the whole cow milk in lab. So it's kind of like grown milk. Yeah, there's a lot of personality in the copy. Like down here, we're moving towards a more sustainable future. This definitely has like a fun, playful brand. Seems like they don't take themselves too seriously. It is interesting that you talked about on store shelves, because I feel like on store shelves, you would expect a bottle that's more like these bright colors, the bright yellows, bright blues, that kind of stuff. But it actually feels very black and white if that's the actual container right there. I wonder if their website, which honestly, I think it's pretty memorable.
I think I would remember this later on. The side-scrolling is unique and memorable. The graphics and illustrations are unique and memorable. This doesn't feel like it's copying anything that I've seen before. It feels like they, from first principles, came up with the concept of this, which is something that I think helps make it feel more memorable. A lot of times, a lot of websites are kind of cookie cutter, and it's almost a meme, you know, in the design community around, like, all websites look the same. And I don't know, I've got to give them a lot of credit for trying something different here to try to stand down. Yeah, and obviously, it's not a product you can sign up to. So it's something you have to buy. I wonder, okay, well, there's navigations. I didn't...
I wasn't expecting I would not have I would not have known that I was like well what do I do now so I was definitely looking for what is the next step or well actually okay it doesn't really do it it just like scrolls you so what I would have wanted is that okay this is in a way it's an announcement but well if I want to buy this is that possible right how in stores where can I find it yeah so I think it's it's like a nice announcement I would consider as how effective this will be maybe later they will have to think like how do you actually explain this or like a little bit explain more. Right. Go deeper into some of these things. Right. Yeah. It's very interesting. There's no call to action that we could find. This is almost like an old school, like the early days of the internet, people took the medium that already existed, like books and magazines and just try to like make that a website. And obviously websites become way more interactive now. But this feels like an old school, like it's almost like a magazine, you know, display or ad or something like that. Yeah. No, maybe the last thing I would say, like, maybe just add some call to action. Maybe just add like.
enter your email to join some kind of mailing list. If people land here, even if not that many people sign up, you could start some kind of community. Maybe you have a lot of students signing up, or you maybe have someone else signing up, and you can start seeing these patterns of, well, who is signing up? And then you can ask them, why did you sign up? Why is it interesting? And then you can start the conversation. I think with these kind of things, they seem to have this more broader social mission or a just cause that we should live in a world where we don't have to use the animals this way, which is, I think, something you could do more here.
hey, join this cause. Like we could change the world kind of. And then that's the call to action. Join the mailing list. We can, I don't know, send you some updates. We can talk about different things. And so people who are interested in that cause could join it. The font choice feels very opinionated too. I'm curious your thoughts on that and how you think about choosing fonts to communicate part of the brand. Yeah, I think a font or a typeface is a very big thing on any website because websites in the end are textual. So there's text on websites, right? This website doesn't have a lot of text. I do think like their font choice is good here given the style of it. It's more like a hand-drawn kind of environment. In other websites, I would just think that, again, like what is that?
what what is the world that brand is living in and like what kind of signaling you want to do sometimes you want to do the serifs or some of the like more like retro or older kind of feeling to it or something like a lot of more modern kind of geometric typefaces it's more like the kind of like the standard of the day and that's like considered modern then there can be like more futuristic typefaces and it's not like you should just use one typeface everything because in small sizes a lot of typefaces don't work you probably have to use something fairly standard so people can read it but for headlines and special points you can you can bear it with something like more unique Very cool. All right. So from the founders, they have a question. Does the website leave a positive impression and recall for the brand? Well, yes, I would say so. It felt very organic, I would say, which is interesting because their product is not literally organic. It's created in a lab. But it seems like what they're trying to communicate is that this is just as organic as real milk and not filled with a bunch of chemicals and it's good for you and stuff like that. And I feel like this font choice feels very organic, like hand-drawn, handwritten. The illustrations and the graphics feel that way. The colors are very colorful. So yeah, this feels very memorable. Like I feel like I will remember this site a week from now. I think the organic thing is interesting because technically this is very...
like a scientific thing where you're creating something with science which is not organic per se. It's like you could go the direction of Jurassic Park or something and like you make it like super like scientific but they did like what I think is the right way is to try to like battle that feeling i think people have a little bit uneasiness of manufactured foods yeah and so you try to like battle that feeling like hey like there's a reason for this and like we're trying to like communicate like we do want to like provide you safe and i don't know good food but or nutrients but like it's it's there's a different method to it the font is very like hand-drawn here but the brand on the bottle or that the logo itself is very normal it's like enough helvetica or what but like it's the website is very fun and playful and the bottle is not yeah so i think that's a missed opportunity to communicate that there thank you brown foods i appreciate you submitting the site okay next up we have confident ai let's take a look The LLM evaluation and observability platform for DeepEval. Built by the creators of DeepEval, engineering teams use confident AI to benchmark, safeguard, and improve LLM applications with best-in-class metrics and tracing. Well, I would say there's a lot of specific words here, and I think potentially is a good thing for this market. You are selling this to some kind of expert, like an LLM expert or a company, and I think it's fine to use those. It's a good thing to use the words. I would say I generally get what they're doing. I'm not exactly maybe half the specifics of... I don't know this specific category that well.
My first question is like, well, how is this different from something else? Or something like, is there something specific about this that makes it so good? Other than it's built by the creators of DeepAble. Like, well, I don't know what that is. So I'm not maybe getting that sense of like, well, what is this really good at? Or who would this exactly be for? Or like, what is special about it or something? Yeah. Minor note, and maybe this is just because I'm old, but the purple with the underline, it reminds me of the early days of browsers and the internet where the default visited link color was like that purple with an underline. Well, I really thought it was a link.
I thought it was going to link somewhere and I would say it is too dark too. It disappears into the background. I also don't know why is it in a different color. Why is it not observability? Yeah. Okay, let's go a little bit. All right. So this feels like linear-esque where we're starting to get into the product a little bit here, like a big screenshot. Yeah, I think it looks nice. You can see like, oh, there's this platform I can use and I can look at like, oh, it has different features. Yep. And then open source and trusted by top companies. Okay, cool. A lot of GitHub stars. Okay, so it seems like we're talking about the deep eval open source product here with some of this to build trust, which is good. If you've got a lot of users for the open source version of this, then that's a good way to build trust. Build your MOTO evals. Okay, so it seems like it's...
Really focused on evals. Yeah, I think one of the tricky things is a lot of times people will scroll and just kind of like read the headlines and decide if they want to dive in deeper on the smaller text. And if I just read that, like build in a weekend, validate in minutes, I'm not exactly sure. Make forward progress always. I don't exactly know what those things mean. So I think it's helpful sometimes in building a site to, you know, do an exercise or just go down and just read the headlines. And does that communicate everything that you want to communicate to the user? Yeah, I think some of those headlines are good. Like, yeah, the make forward progress is a little bit vague. Like it's without, I think it could be like a little more clear. I don't think you should like compare it to yourself, to the competition.
like, directly, like, say, like, hey, we do better this than that, like, or something like that. But, like, I think you should look at, like, what are those companies saying? How do you actually different from those companies? And then, like, try to highlight those, like, benefits or specialties that you have. So, like, rather than saying, like, well, we do evils, but, like, maybe you can say, like, we do it differently because of these reasons or something. Like, how do you differentiate yourself? Sometimes there's not that much competition. Maybe there, like, sometimes there is a lot of competition. So you just, like, try to think, like, what is our lane here? How could we make it, like, special some way or something differentiated? And then try to, like, weave it into the...
website or into copy or into the graphics or something. Yeah, that's a great point. Especially as a small startup, you can't be the best at all the things that all users will care about. And so I think to your point earlier around trying to find your early adopters, just trying to figure out what's the one thing that we want to be better than everybody else at. And anybody who cares about that one thing, they're going to choose us. And it seemed like for you in the early days with Linear, speed was like one of the big things, you know, that stood out to me on your site. And so, you know, I could imagine you in the early days, I'm curious if this was explicit, just saying like, look, for anybody that cares about speed for their issue tracking tool, we want to make sure they're going to choose us. We're going to be the fastest. People care about other things like, cool, we'll get them later. But our early adopters are going to be the ones that care about speed.
Is that how you thought about it? Two things. One is that the speed was one of the main problems we heard from a lot of people we talked to. They just don't like the tools because they're slow. And it makes sense. Like a winner is kind of like this pretty, it's like almost like an email client. Like you use it a lot and it's like annoying if it's slow. But I do think like you probably know, it's like who cares most about speed? Like startups do. People move fast. Yeah. So those people, like we want to align with those people. We want them to get to startups. So, but like what startups don't need is complexity. So you're trying to find like the things that...
your product aligns the most with the people you want the first and then later like yeah like enterprises kind of care about speed but they also care about complexity and processes and things so those things come later but like yeah you should think what are some of the things or the one thing that your first type of like ideal customer and then in the beginning especially like how do you make the website to talk to those people And if you don't know, then you can go talk to them. It's like, why would you pick this product? Or why did you pick this product? And then see if there's some kind of pattern there. It's like, well, I like it because of these reasons. And then we'll put those reasons on the webpage so maybe you can find more of them. Okay, so we have a question from the Confident AI team. Say, the feedback we'd like is whether you know what we do within the first 20 seconds. We have an open source and closed source product so it can get confusing. I think we understand what they do. It's an eval and observability platform for DeepEval. But it took us a minute to try to understand that DeepEval, like it was the...
the GitHub link in the top right that says DeepEval next to it, they clued me in that DeepEval is probably their open source thing and that this is Confident AI is their paid product on top of it. So I think we figured that out, but it probably could have been more explicit. Yeah, I mean, my first reaction with DeepEval just made me think of DeepMind or something. It's like, is this like another company they built before or what? So it's like, maybe it should say that this built by the creators of open source, something DeepEval, like something like make it, I don't know if it's necessary, but I think it could have been helpful for me to understand, like, is it a company? Is it an open source library?
something is it's a technology i don't know yeah and maybe the other interesting point here is um maybe that's their initial wedge is they're just looking for the people that are already using dpval and if you come here and you don't know what dpval is like move along you're not the early adopter and the early adopter the people that see dpval go oh i'm using dpval and i should be using this too yeah yeah maybe this is the website it's like well dpval hosted and then and maybe you have like well how maybe the site then tells you how does the platform expand on the open source like maybe there's some additional things they do so it's like all based on that like the first version like obviously you can change the website later but like this first version could be just like well hey if you're using dpval currently Here's how we can make it better. Thank you, Confident AI. Website looks very professional. All right, next up we have Dropback. Let's take a look. Dropback is front office tech for elite college programs. And they raised 1.6 million. All right, congrats. Dropback is revenue sharing software for elite collegiate teams combining back office operations with front office strategy. Okay, very interesting. This almost feels a little bit like, you know, the bright colors and the gradients around the buttons and...
You got like a moving grid behind, like there's a lot going on here. What's your initial impression on the brand side of this? Well, I mean, like, I like that they are quite clear what they do. And so I think that's good. Yeah, maybe the backgrounds and the graphics here, like a little bit, like, are they really needed? And especially at, or at least at this front section. So I think like the moving graphic is probably not meaningful because it's making it hard to read the text. Yeah. Yeah. If that moving grid went away, I don't think anything would do this. In fact, it might be gained. Yeah.
So the Dropback team actually submitted a question. They said, our landing page feels chaotic, but there's so much information we need to share. Our customers are not tech savvy. Football coaches sometimes assume if they don't see it, we must not support it. Okay, so this is interesting. They're targeting a non-technical audience. They feel like it's chaotic, but it seems like they feel like they've got to stuff everything into this front thing that's the first thing that people see and that users will never scroll. Has that been your experience? I think these days people are pretty used to scrolling, like even on your phone, like you're constantly scrolling up and down. And so I don't think it's necessarily a problem. Yeah, if you have that kind of feeling that you need to share a lot, I think it's fine to share it like down the page. You don't have to do everything at the top. I think the top should be just...
again like fairly simple that this is this is what we do maybe this text could be even bigger i find it's like it's a little bit hard to read and it's quite small and i think you're just trying to quickly explain like what it is i also think like just that yellow color is it's a little bit again like i think there's not enough contrast i think yellow is a hard like you should go darker with it or not use yellow because it's a little bit hard color to use for button i think there's like for example this local local local like documents i don't know what i don't know what would anyone think about that i do think like there's some like yeah these these could be like moderately useful to to show there's some kind of charts and things but um I would just say like keep the homepage, like the front, like the top, fairly simple. You have the video here, which I think like it's quite short. So I wonder if it's, I mean, it's showing some stuff. So I think that's good. So I think like you're already like telling people what's in it. Then yeah, you are like clearly like demoing the product. So I think you don't have to use those graphics up here. I don't know if there's anything like you would want to add there. Like maybe there's some, maybe there's the grid, but like don't make it moving or maybe there's some like other shapes around it. But I would think like these, these kinds of people who are not tech savvy, they're not necessarily looking at the most like amazing website. Something like, for example, like Coinbase when I was working there.
I think that I found that like the job I had with the brand or with the design itself is like creating trust and because you are dealing with money and cryptocurrency back in 2014 wasn't what it is today and like even today there's still trust concerns it's like can I trust this company to hold my money and so sometimes you can you don't have to try to do everything with the website you could have like few things that you really want to do and I don't know this audience but it could be that they just want to see something trustworthy and you should just signal that like this is trustworthy we have to kind of like the features you need. Sometimes you can make pages very feature-based or you can make them customer-based or use case-based. So depending on your company, I don't know what makes sense. Our page is very feature-based because I like that. Because I think our audience is fairly technical. And so they kind of know a lot of stuff and they often look at the features and they like to look at those kind of things. But if these people are not technical, maybe they just want to know that the problems will be solved or something. Or that other companies or other people like me are using it and I should have their faces there saying something. Yeah, the social proof, right? Yeah, it's interesting as they scroll down, they do get into the specific features. And I think this helps to communicate.
I mean, the yellow seems to be the brand color. It keeps coming up here. Yeah, I think yellow is good, but it's maybe not the best background color. Yeah, but they did what you suggested here, which is the black text, which I think makes it a lot more legible. But then these, you know, the white text, white logos are harder to read. There's also, like, a lot of automatic movement on this page, which I do think adds to the chaos. So there could be some of that, but I would, like, basically every section is almost, like, moving. And so I think it's, yeah, like, there's, again, moving videos. So I would maybe, like, try to reduce that if possible. This page is very long, too. Yeah, sometimes it's okay, but if this user base, like, likes it, but...
the other way to do this is like you just create other pages there's currently a lot of space in the navigation that you could say like for college programs for, I don't know, coaches or something like you can make very clear with targeted pages for specific people or specific use cases. And so because people often might look at the navigation and then they're like, oh, I want to see what that is. So I think there's that kind of opportunity too. Yeah, it seems like these just link further down the page and take you down there. Awesome. Well, Dropback, thank you so much. This is a really cool product. Thank you, everybody who submitted websites. Super interesting to take a brand look at a lot of these. We haven't really done an episode like that before. And of course, thank you, Takari from Linear. Incredible feedback. Really appreciate you coming joining and helping out here. Yeah, thanks. That was fun.
And we will see you on another episode of Design Review.