Delia Lazarescu

tl;dr: Devs notice every detail. Take your cues from Stripe and GitHub, and keep your design clean and functional to drive adoption that sticks. Design ALWAYS matters. But it matters even more when you’re building a product for devs (speaking from experience here). Whether you’re a developer yourself or just dev-adjacent, you know that nothing gets past these folks. In their eyes, the devil’s in the details, and they’re constantly on the lookout for even the slightest sign to validate their inherent skepticism. Animations, subtle fade-ins and fade-outs, iconography, typography — you name it. These aren't just aesthetics; they're the unspoken language of a tool’s usability. In that way, design is the ultimate double-edged sword. Done right, these kinds of features have the power to oh-so-subtly tell the developer, “Look at how seamless I am to use.” Done wrong, they can create a frustration so powerful it leaves them running for the hills. So, how do you get it right? What I’ve learned from building both ScraperAPI and TLDR is that the easiest way to nail your design strategy is to follow the lead of the best examples. My two personal favorites? Stripe and​​ Github. When they hit the market over a decade ago, they set a new standard for the type of design developers have come to expect. For Stripe, the real showstopper wasn’t just the clean and intuitive dashboard we all know and love. It was things like clear, readable docs and all the little micro-interactions (think button and form field hover effects) that made the interface feel responsive and interactive. For Github, it was also a series of subtle features that made the developer experience smoother — like color-coded syntax highlighting or how merging a pull request would trigger a satisfying (yet not distracting) animation to emphasize the action. And while those are still the gold standard, there’s a whole new generation of companies on the cutting edge of dev design: - Resend - Vercel - Linear - Replicate - render.com So if you’re still in the early stages (or in a re-design phase), don’t be afraid to poke around the market to see which kinds of features are sticking and which aren’t. While us devs are particular, we’re also quite predictable in terms of what we do and don’t like (Hint: save your GIFs and confetti animations for another audience 😉).

32

3 Comments

I just went through 244 websites from the latest YC batch and as a designer, I’m going to pick out my favorites The first is Actionbase (YC S24) I like this one because it has an intriguing headline. So many of these companies are just stating what they do. Or at worst, state what they do and do something cringey like “AI automation at the speed of thought”. Don't do that!! You have to understand your customers, what their motivations are —  as a developer, I’m at least intrigued about using this product The second is Unriddle (YC S24) Super clean. Great black/white theme which I associate with writing papers. I think the headline is strong and action-oriented. The third is expand.ai (YC S24) This isn’t a super exciting page, but it doesn’t have to be. It tells me who I am as a customer — and importantly — shows me a demo! If you can show off how your product works without a 30s video. Go for it. Time-to-value there is everything. Next, is Mito Health (YC S24) Honestly, I think I like this site because it dares to be DIFFERENT. All of the other sites are headline/subheadline/cta/product image — which is fine! Those are definitely best practices, but I like seeing companies take a gamble. There’e something about the small video that makes it weird/compelling and makes me want to learn more! And finally, pap! (YC S24) This one is my *favorite* because it doing the 3 core things really well: 1. GREAT headline. It not only tells you what they do, but it invokes an emotional reaction: I’m getting ripped off by the man, and we’re the robin hood who’s going to fight for you, the consumer. I love that. 2. Really simple but effective imagery — just cutouts of images quickly cycling. Just so the customer knows: "Ok. Got it. This is for physical products." 3. Social proof. Their designer was able to seamlessly blend the main imagery with the positive feedback. Honorable Mention: Quetzal Labs Big bold claim: Copy and paste one line int my codebase and see if it works immediately. This is about time-to-value: If I can copy this, and have this translate my product in under a minute, you’ve definitely earned my business Remember: If you’re making a site, especially for a new product, make sure to have copy and imagery that not makes the customer say “Oh, I get it”, but also “And I totally understand the value” If you have that — you’re way ahead of the pack

8

2 Comments

Just want to give a shoutout to OpenVC. It's been a great resource, I've used it off and on for a few months, and today decided to get the yearly pass. It allows you to search VCs and submit your deck, with tracking and analytics. So you can see every slide a VC looks at on your deck, and when they back out. Helps for deck fine-tuning. It also allows VC's to tell you why they passed if they did. I've also gotten some followup meetings on ZOOM. It's just a great resource that doesn't cost thousands of dollars a month like most others. Also, had some tech support issues as well (my fault) and they were handled within half an hour. Thanks Stephane Nasser for such a great tool for entrepreneuers.

18

1 Comment

A big part of getting into YC is recommendations by alumni. Don't know any YC alumni? Work at a YC startup. https://lnkd.in/gq67hQwN If you've helped YC founders achieve an exit, you've been given the best possible exposition of the YC way. With that experience under your belt and the blessing of the founders, you'll have a strong application to YC. If you want to do a startup, I would completely skip FAANG and just work at YC startups. At a FAANG, you will condition yourself in ways that make it very difficult to do a startup, that would take tens of thousand of dollars of therapy to undo. These are divergent paths.

2

1 Comment

AI Innovation Taking Center Stage The recent news of /dev/agents raising a staggering $56M seed round at a $500M valuation is a testament to the transformative potential of AI-driven developer productivity tools. This massive funding round highlights: -The growing demand for AI agents that streamline workflows, enhance efficiency, and supercharge development teams. -How investors are betting big on technologies that redefine traditional software development processes. As someone passionate about leveraging AI for impact, this news reinforces the importance of continuous innovation. Tools like these aren’t just about productivity—they’re shaping how the world builds technology. Kudos to the /dev/agents team for this milestone! What are your thoughts on the future of AI in development? #AI #StartupFunding #Innovation #TechTrends https://lnkd.in/gXnd5DaB

4

tl;dr: Not every ad channel is going to deliver results. Don’t be afraid to cut the cord on the underperformers before they drain your budget. Ever invested in a channel that just didn’t work out? If you’re a dev marketer, your answer’s most likely yes. At ScraperAPI, Google Ads was a total bust. We tried. We spent. We waited for results that never came. Outside of branded searches, it was a total disaster. It was a stark reminder that not every channel — no matter how popular — is always worth the spend. While I’m a big believer in the idea that growth doesn’t happen overnight, you need to know when it’s time to jump ship before you drain your whole ad budget. Our problem at ScraperAPI was that we were building a product that devs didn’t quite know to even search for yet. Hindsight's 20/20, but I wish we’d poured all that AdWords spend into channels that *actually* helped devs understand our product — like Quora, Reddit, and other dev communities — instead of holding out for a payoff that simply wasn’t coming. tl;dr: Not every ad channel is going to deliver results. Don’t be afraid to cut the cord on the underperformers before they drain your budget.

23

1 Comment

The Power of NOT being perceived as a threat 😎 When Andreas Bischoff and I spoke about Lisa Moskotova and I doing a panel on traffic monetization via API, I didn’t think much of it other than being excited because I was going to be sharing the stage with someone whose knowledge complements mine and that loves tech as much as I do, which would make it a good session no matter what. But it turned out to be so much more than that… This is one of my favorite subjects and I speak about it very often, as per usual the audience was 95% male online marketers with different levels of experience on the subject. But this time it was so different and it left me thinking of what made it so!? 1) Lisa Moskotova and I have been friends for at least 10 years and know each others areas of expertise relatively well. 2) From the get go we set out to add as much value and knowledge as we could, given that we both dislike sessions that are disguised sales pitches. 3) We had fun with it. We understand that is a complex and complicated subject but also understand that there is power behind making something complicated seem simple and putting your audience at ease. 4) We are both extremely passionate about what we do and that translates to a great deal of positive energy in the room. 5) Like it or not the fact that it was just two women up there made it so unthreatening for the audience that by the second half of the session it became so interactive that we ended up running out of time. People opened up about their own experiences, their doubts, their fears, their challenges and because we were so nurturing and non judgmental: ALL FILTERS WERE OFF. It might have been one of my favorite sessions ever and if you have been following for a while you know I have a crazy amount of speaking engagements a year, so I decided to stop and try to come up with the answer to what made it different so I could share some takeaways to help us all: 1) Speak about stuff you are both, passionate and knowledgeable about. 2) Make the complex seem simple by not over complicating your explanations. 3) Try to gauge the level of knowledge of your audience so that you can adapt the complexity of your content to keep them engaged. 4) Do your best to add value to the attendees. 5) Understand the power of not being perceived as a threat and have sooo much FUN with it. Good vibes are contagious! #publicspeaking #onlinemarketing #affiliatemarketing #ceolife

27

2 Comments

I have been fortunate enough to invest in 13 unicorn founders over the last 10 years and 12 shared one core trait: They excelled at video games in their early years. Aidan Gomez 👇 on why video games make for better entrepreneurs. #Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

358

109 Comments

Join Me this Thursday 6PM with Nate Zaru for Creating Product Videos that Drive Sales Workshop. PLUS networking happy hour at Gambit Lounge. Learn and mingle with the top marketers in the San Francisco SaaS world! Join us for a workshop on how to jump into 2025 with an unforgettable product video. You’ll learn what makes the best product videos and what mistakes to avoid. Bring your projects and case studies. Hosted by Nate at MyProductVideo.com with yours truly. AGENDA: 6:00-6:30 Welcome and networking 6:30-7:15 Workshop Presentation 7:15-8:00 Happy hour networking What You’ll Learn: The New Opportunity of Product Videos Why SaaS is different and how to leverage it The Story Comes First Crafting a narrative that defines your brand Work Backwards from Your Dream Context and Formats Planning with purpose for maximum impact Focus on One BIG Idea and a Strong CTA Simplify your message for clarity and action Show People—People Love People Harnessing the power of human connection Show the Product Without Showing the Actual Product Building intrigue and interest creatively Remix and Repeat Strategies to keep your content fresh

2

1 Comment

Listened to a podcast by decagon CEO Jesse Zhang today - AI for customer support. Pretty competitive space. Ex gaming founder. He was saying 2 things: 1. Don’t overthink stuff 2. Go sell and get paid. Otherwise pivot or don’t build it. Reading Posthog blogposts says the same thing in a way. You get paid - or you pivot or you don’t build it. They did not really mention anything about getting paid before you build it. Met with a great fintech founder on friday in London as well. He said they got a contract from a bank and built the product for years before launching. I thought they got paid - turns out they did not. The payment was more in form of time and verbal commitment. In my case, I can't shake this feeling that I am overthinking things. There are hundreds of companies now who are making ridiculous money of the top of simple chat interfaces or automations that involve LLMs only barely. My reaction could be to go build one of those things. Then I remember one of the lessons I learned on this. It does not matter if you build a copycat. You can sell it. However, selling is damn harder if you receive the following question: "So what is the difference to X product?" This is not even a question. It is the declaration that after all you said and demoed, they made up their mind that this is the same product this other X product solves for. You can still get them as a customer. However it will require a herculean effort or a BFF-level relationship building. When possible, you want to avoid this. Try to set it up in a way that you don't even receive this question. You want to solve the same problem in a very different way. AI, thankfully enables this. There is a massive UX difference between pasting a chat widget into a product that is 10 years old vs having a product that is entirely chat based. This is what you could call being AI-native. Does it help? Yes. Is it temporary? Yes. You have to do more, improve more, value your customer relationships and simply solve their problems. P.S.: Do not take the solutions or the problems your customers tell you granted on face value. You will build the wrong things. More on this next time.

3

I screwed up a customer’s phone number but they’re still with us 6 years later. Let me tell you a story that I’ve finally built up the courage to share. When we were doing YC, we had a customer, John, who runs an auto repair shop, transfer his phone number to OpenPhone from another service. At that time, it was just Mahyar Raissi and me. After porting John’s number over, I didn’t realize I had set it up incorrectly. When he reached out on Friday night saying his number wasn’t working, I was terrified. I immediately realized what happened. I called him back, admitted my mistake, and shared that he had missed calls because of it. I was so ready to be yelled at… Surprisingly, John was very nice. I offered to call his customers back (on his behalf) and book appointments for him. He took me up on it! So that’s what Mahyar and I did the next morning. Well, mostly Mahyar. He called back each person and set up appointments for John’s business. Talk about doing things that don’t scale. 🙂 Six years later, John is still an OpenPhone customer. He’s grown his team, and they’re all using OpenPhone. Even more surprisingly, he ended up porting more numbers over to us. Isn’t that crazy considering how badly I messed things up for him? As I think through this, several lessons emerge: 1 - Customer service is a major differentiator. It’s often why customers choose to stick with you even while you’re figuring stuff out. Embrace it and deliver an 11/10 experience. This is crucial for early-stage startups. 2 - Mistakes happen. Be transparent, own up to them, and offer quick resolutions. Sometimes the best customer experiences emerge out of embarrassing situations like this one. 3 - Early customers are the reason why startups exist. If you show them genuine care, they’ll become your best marketing. 💜 The journey of building a company is filled with doing things that don’t scale. These moments feel very normal when you’re going through them and only looking back do you realize that they also shape your company culture.

149

15 Comments

Vishal Sachdev highlights the strategic integration of open source and proprietary tech in architecting tech stacks, developer ecosystems and resulting business models. The world class companies effectively balance value commoditization in open source and value capture in proprietary tech. This is the strategic challenge for companies operating in #blockchain and #AI. I believe those who operate at the intersection of blockchain *and* AI stand to win this strategic battle...

3

1 Comment

A $100,000 mistake inspired me to start my company. This week while at SubSummit, a lot of founders have been asking me about what inspired me to create The Starters. The reality is, it was built off of a pain point that I experienced running e-commerce businesses. I made really expensive mistakes, learned lessons the hard way, and built The Starters so other founders & leaders don’t have to make the same mistakes I did. At Winc, we had raised tens of millions of dollars in VC-capital, and used that capital to grow unsustainably and unprofitably. Not in the form of negative ROI marketing spend, but in the form of over hiring and working on too many things at once. I hired by the dozen to build out my organization, but when cash got tight, I had to lay off so many of the people I had just recently hired. That experience was not fun for me, and certainly not for those whose roles were impacted by poor leadership decision making. It was at that point where I turned to the freelance market and fractional roles to “keep the wheels turning” on a shoestring budget. I had previously hired from Upwork and Fiverr for personal projects, and knew those platforms were filled with spam, fake reviews and profiles, and bots. They were not an option for me. So, I turned to the only other option available at the time— staffing agencies. I worked with a popular marketing freelancer staffing agency to fill a much needed role, and agreed to pay $150/hr for a senior-level talent working ~20hrs/week. As I started to work with them, I quickly realized the freelancer was actually incredibly junior… and I asked him how he could justify a $150/hr rate… His response stunned me. It turns out he didn’t make anywhere close to $150/hr. He made just $60/hr. The staffing agency was making $90/hr in fees.. which equated to nearly $100,000 on an annualized basis. That very night, I knew I was going to go out there and build a competitor that would hopefully put an end to the price gouging of staffing agencies. A platform that would: - Attract the best talent (no compromises here) - Allow brands to choose who they want to hire (vs. sending them 1-2 options) - Be 95%+ more affordable than staffing agency options And thus, The Starters was born. I’m committed to growing this business in a way that helps thousands of entrepreneurs and e-commerce leaders hire more sustainably, and that helps freelancers take home 100% of their earned income, not just a fraction of it.

18

1 Comment

I got a preview of this talk. It's going to be good. If you think we've reached the end of the gen AI opportunity, then you should listen to what Roman Shaposhnik and Tanya Dadasheva have to share about the future of transformer architecture for AI.

3

Alex Lieberman just shared a cool side project: YourStack. He shared storyarb's & Morning Brew's tech stack + got Noah Kagan to share his too. (more founders to come) As it scales, I thought that a few simple features could be useful, like: ↳ seamlessly see which softwares/services are most commonly used ↳ all founders' reviews of a given tool aggregated in one place ↳ how many founders use a given tool While still keeping it simple, of course. Made them in Notion + Super already. WDYT? Is this overcomplicating it, or would it be useful? ( hoping this reaches Alex :) )

13

1 Comment

tl;dr: Finding external advocates for your product is one of the most foolproof ways to build developer trust. If you’re generous enough with your incentives, loyal customers don’t just become endorsers — they become revenue-generating machines. Your biggest fans could be generating 10% of your revenue. At ScraperAPI, our affiliate program did just that by converting loyal users into top salespeople. Here’s how we spotted the opportunity: We realized that a lot of our customers would outsource web scraping tasks to freelance software engineers who would use the same tool over and over again for different companies. That left us with a great opportunity to build relationships with those freelancers who had the potential to bring us more and more new customers over time. Here’s how we did it in practice: It’s super simple. We offered killer incentives to everyone involved: -25% recurring commissions for affiliates -10% first-month discount for the new customers they referred Because our product was well-designed and easy to use, freelancers were happy to recommend us over and over again.

19

2 Comments

After a year in stealth, today is the day… Andrew, Josh, and I are beyond thrilled to share that Miriel AI is officially live! 🎉 👉 Get Early Access to the Beta: https://miriel.ai What is Miriel? It’s the fastest way to build personalized AI applications or integrate AI into your existing products. With less than 10 lines of code, you can weave any data source into powerful applications like: Customer engagement agents that understand your product and every individual customer Voice-controlled personal assistants that seamlessly access your email, calendar, and any relevant files Intelligent video monitoring systems that alert you to custom threats in real-time Code assistants that understand your development environment, codebase, and any relevant API docs 🚫 No expensive training. No complicated setup. ⏱ You’ll be up and running in minutes. Why does this matter? AI is at an inflection point. Miriel puts the power of AI into your hands. We’re making it possible to build applications we could only dream of before. With the ability to rapidly prototype, iterate, and scale, the future of AI will move faster than ever before. We’re already collaborating with a number of incredible companies on game-changing projects. And this is just the beginning. We can’t wait to see what you build with Miriel. The possibilities are endless. Join us and weave the future: https://miriel.ai #artificialintelligence #startups #miriel

99

14 Comments