How Top Startups Build Iconic Brands | Linear CEO Karri Saarinen

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 is that it's something that should be authentic to your company. I think these days maybe a lot of startups look at Stripe or Linear or some other company out there and they think 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, 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 like tells you is like it's maybe sets the wrong expectation for 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 to 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 take a look. I bought the first linear website from the way back machine and in some ways like I would say like I don't know that website is fairly simple like it's not 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 with even the copy is that we wanted to use this issue tracking term because like if you go to any large company website like you go to slack or you go 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. Something very vague. 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 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 just early stage companies and engineers will understand that issue tracking is 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 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 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 to sentence description, that customer pitch and like really put that right front and center.

Yeah, we don't have to go too much in the design itself. Like I kind of like 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 a little bit see like what the features might be, but it's a little bit faded. So it's a little bit mysterious. So it's like kind of like curious because in the end what we want people to do is put their email here and like 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 mystery and be like this looks like a modern tool. You should check it out more. Yeah.

Yeah, so I think it's a very simple message in the end. And I think we also went very simple with the rest of the site. It's like, okay, it's fast, because that's one thing we heard about a lot. And after Superhuman, we were one of the products to add this command menu that also makes things easier. And we showed that, oh, it connects with some of your tooling that you already use. And, okay, here's the team. And we have some like, this is not some random people that we have built other things in the past.

So it's very, very simple. It's one page. There's no other pages. We're not telling, we don't have about page and all kinds of, we don't have a blog and like, we don't have anything really. I think it 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 of days. Couple of 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 now.

I think this is maybe like a third evolution of the 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 checking 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 of 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 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 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 a fully enterprise Oracle company, like a brand or something, but I do still have to think about it. 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 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.

The way I think about the landing page, the first the home page 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 are other pages on the website. So we now have specific sections for 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. Okay, so first up we have Sprites AI. Let's take a look. All right, 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 growth. So in some ways 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 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 like probably like 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 like meaningful to or like useful to group them somehow that hey there's workflows for I don't know, like YouTubers or 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 could look into this.

Yeah, it seems like the 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 predictors, 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 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 kind of focused on the movement and like what's coming up next and like I think like the website should be kind of like this almost like this pyramid of 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.

Yep. 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. 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, because it just kind of floats there. 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 could kind of tell people, yeah, just try it out. And that way you could communicate it better.

Yeah, it's so interesting. 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 maybe they 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 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, image generation. Okay, so that's interesting. I think one of the challenges when you have like a generic workflow builder, 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 give, you know, 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 what is this workflow? 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. 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 I 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 yeah and so I think it's kind of highlighting the 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 the question, our website conversion rate is low, how can we improve that? Well, 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. Um, 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, what's your first impression?

In some ways, I think it's quite clean, and I think it fits well for the market, which is an enterprise. And I would say that the reason the conversion is slow, because you are going after enterprises, and there's probably no way to increase that conversion rate, really, because enterprises are not necessarily coming to websites and clicking buttons that much. I do think 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 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.

You have to do sales or some kind of events or some kind of 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 else. The conversion rate doesn't really matter because if you do one deal, that's probably gonna 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 GigaML's voice AI agent, ready to chat about anything. Do you have something in mind?

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 is 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 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 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 like interact 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 there 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 the um 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 are 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. But the sub headline there, 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 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 it's, I don't know if it's like super honest to say like these are the most admired companies in the world. Like I think that it's good, but there are 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 tune, 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 like- They need to check a lot of boxes. Yeah, you need a lot of customer stories, like there's a lot of things they wanna see, and maybe, you should put those things in the web, like the front page, but maybe there's a specific category, like 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, you can kind of like, they can like, 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 GigaML. 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.

OK, 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, OK, 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 we 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 side crawling. Okay. So then we move into, to some 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. Yeah, why it's better.

Okay. All right.

A lot of personality here. Mama, we need you. The cows 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, yeah, there's a lot of personality even 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 is 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 got to give them a lot of credit for trying something different here to try to stand out and be yeah and obviously it's like it's not a product you can sign up to so right so it's it's something you have constraints you have to buy them I wonder okay well there's navigations I didn't I wasn't expecting I would not have clicked on I would not have known that was I was like well what do I knew do now so I was definitely looking for what is the next step or Actually, it doesn't really do anything, it just scrolls you to the thing.

So what I would have wanted is that, in a way it's an announcement, but if I want to buy this, is that possible? Is it in stores?

Where can I find it?

So I think it's a nice announcement. I would consider how effective this will be. maybe later they will have to think like how to 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 tried to like make that a website. And obviously websites have become way more interactive now. But this feels like an old school like it's almost like a magazine. you know display or add or something like that.

Yeah, no, maybe the last thing I would say like maybe just add some kind of call interaction. Maybe just add like enter your email to join like some kind of mailing list. Just like people who like if people land here like even if that's been not that many like people sign up you could start some kind of community. Maybe you have a lot of people like students signing up or you maybe have someone else signing up and you can start seeing this patterns of well who is signing up and then you can ask them like why did you sign up like why is it interesting and then you can like start the conversation.

I think like with these kind of things they seem to have this like a more like a broader social mission or kind of like a just cause that we should live in a world where we don't have to like use the animals this way which is I think something like you could do more here is that Hey, join this cause like we could change the world kind of that. 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 like, I think a font or the typeface is very, very big thing on any website because websites in the end are textual. So there's text on the websites. Like this website doesn't have a lot of text. I don't 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 the, 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 for some of the like more like retro or older kind of feeling to it or something like more modern kind of geometric typefaces.

It's more like the standard of the day and that's considered modern. Then there can be 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, hand written.

The illustrations and the graphics feel that way. The colors are very colorful. I feel like I will remember this site a week from now.

I think the organic thing is interesting because technically this is a very scientific thing where you're creating something with science. which is not organic per se it's like you could go a direction of Jurassic Park or something and like you make it like super like scientific but they they they did like what I think is the right way is to 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, get food or nutrients, but there's a different method to it.

The font is very like hand-drawn here, but the brand on the bottle or the logo itself is very normal.

It's like, I don't know, Salvatica or what, but like it's... The website is very fun and playful and the bottle is not. Yeah. So there's a missed opportunity to communicate that there. Thank you, Brown Foods. 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 like there's a lot of like specific words here and I think potentially is a good thing for this market. Like you are selling this to some kind of expert or like an LLM expert and or a company and I think it's fine to use those. It's a good thing to use the words. I would say like I generally get what they're doing. I'm not exactly maybe like 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 Deep Bevel.

They're 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 what would it 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. I would say that it is too dark too. It disappears into the background. I also don't know why it's in a different color.

Why evaluation and not observability. Okay, let's scroll a little bit. This feels linear-esque where we're starting to get into the product a little bit here. Like a big screenshot.

Yeah, I think this looks nice. You can see there's this platform I can use and I can look at. It has different kinds of 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 AMO to eval's okay so it seems like it's really focused on eval's 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 when building the 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. I think it could be a little more clear. I don't think you should compare it to yourself, to the competition. like directly like say like hey we do better this and that like or something like that yeah but like i think you should look at like what are those companies saying how do you actually different from those companies like what 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 doesn't 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 should like make 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 leave 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?

Yeah, two things. One is that the speed was one of the main problems we heard from a lot of people we talked to, that they just don't like the tools because they're slow. And it makes sense. Linear is kind of like this free. it's like almost like an email client like you use it a lot and it's like annoying if it's 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 wanted to get the startups so but like what startups don't need is complexity so you try to find like that 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 web page, so maybe you can find more of them.

OK, 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 if it's a eval and observability platform for deep eval. But it took us a minute to try to understand that deep eval, like it was the GitHub link in the top right that says deep eval next to it. They clued me in that deep eval 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 like my first reaction with Deep Evil 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, Deep Evil, 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 a open source library, is it something, is it a technology? I don't know what it is.

Yeah, and maybe the other interesting point here is maybe that's their initial wedge, is they're just looking for the people that are already using DeepEval. And if you come here and you don't know what DeepEval is, like move along, you're not the early adopter. And the early adopter are the people that see DeepEval and go, oh, I'm using DeepEval and I should be using this too.

Yeah, now maybe it's just the website is like, well db.val hosted and then and maybe you have like well how maybe the site then tells you well 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 db.val 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 is 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 hard to read the text. Yeah.

Yeah. If that moving grid went away, I don't think anything would be lost. In fact, it might be gained.

Yeah.

So the drop back 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 got to stuff everything into this front thing. That's the first thing that people see and that users will never scroll. Is 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 just you don't have to do everything at the top. I think the top should be just again, fairly simple that this is what we do. Maybe this text could be even bigger. I find it's a little bit hard to read and it's quite small and I think you're just trying to quickly explain what it is.

I also think that yellow color is a little bit, again, I think there's not enough contrast. I think yellow is a hard You should go darker with it or not use yellow because it's a little bit hard color to use for button I think this like for example this local local local local like Documents, I don't know what I don't know. What would anyone think about that? I can't tell what's happening there, right? I do think like there's some like yeah these these could be like moderately useful to to show there's some kind of charge and things but I would say like keep the the home page like the front like the top fairly simple and You have the video here, which I think it's quite short.

It's showing some stuff, so I think that's good. I think you're already telling people what's in it, then you are clearly 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 kind of people who are not tech savvy they're not necessarily looking at the most like amazing website. Something like for example at Coinbase when I was working there I think that I found that the job I had with the brand or with the design itself is creating trust and because you are dealing with money and cryptocurrency back in 2014 wasn't what it is today and even today there's still trust concerns.

It's like can I trust this company to hold my money. And so sometimes you don't have to try to do everything with the website. You could have a few things that you really want to do. I don't know this audience, but it could be that they just want to see something trustworthy and you should just signal that this is trustworthy. We have 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 like what might I don't know what makes sense like 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 their problems will

be solved or something or that like other companies or other people like me are using it and like 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 you know 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 like 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 like adds to the chaos. So there could be some of that, but I would like 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 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 could 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 like I want to see what that is so so I think there's that kind of opportunity too.

Yeah, seems like these just link further down the page and take you down there. Awesome. Well, drop back. 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 come joining and helping out here. Yeah, thanks. That was fun. And we will see you on another episode of Design Review.

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