Vercel CEO Shows His v0 Workflow to Build 10X Faster (& 5 $1M+ AI Startup Ideas)

0:00I sat down with Guillermo, the founder of Vercel, which is a$9 billion company. In this conversation, he dropped three powerful startup ideas that really got me to stop and think. We also went through VZero, his vibe coding product, to tell us how to make money from it, how to build software from it, and how to use it to the best of its capabilities. I always find when you sit down with the founder of these vibe coding tools, they really, really give you the sauce around how to fine tune it so you get the most out of it. I'm not sponsored by Vercel. I have no relationship with them. Just thought it would be cool to give you some ideas, see how their platform works.

0:39I hope you find it interesting. At the end of the episode, I bought a domain that I'm giving away to one of you. I think it's an incredible domain that all you got to do if you want it, like and comment. And I'm going to pick one person, one person randomly to give it away. I can't wait to see what you build. Enjoy the episode.

1:08We got Guillermo on the pod from Vercel. Guillermo, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? Well, hopefully they're going to learn a little bit about my system, how I think, how I use our own tools, how I prototype, how I come up with ideas. I have some ideas that I think are good. Maybe most are bad, but some might be gems for some of the listeners. Yeah, I like to work in public a lot. At Evercell, we do a ton with open source. Maybe I'll share some of the things that we've been open sourcing that can be great starting points for people that are entrepreneurial. And yeah.

1:43Cool. And I just asked for one little commitment from you. You know, on this podcast, we talk about sauce, you know, giving the sauce to the people so that they can, you know, can you commit to giving the sauce? All sauce? I'm all sauce. All sauce, no breaks? Yeah. Okay. Let's do it. Let's go. Let's rip. All right. So, Greg, how familiar are you with VZero? I'm pretty familiar. Okay, awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I think I've seen some of your tweets. So what you're looking at here, in case you're not familiar, is the Vercel workspace for VZero. So I'm literally showing you like all the sauce, right? Like our own workspace, how we use VZero.

2:27But you're looking at the favorites, which are mine. Obviously, I created a couple of things that I wanted to show you all. So, and by the way, funny little behind the scenes thing, this is how I pitch product. We have a lot of huge enterprises using VZero. Yesterday I met with one of the world's largest companies. They came to the office and I basically did a version of this. So it's also a little bit of advice for people watching. Like, how do you sell? Like, do you do decks? Like, I try to show product as much as I can. So walking through a few things that I've created. So one use case of VZero that's really interesting is freeform data visualization.

3:09So it's really hard sometimes to explain complex technical concepts that have to do with different things of the Vercel infrastructure, etc. to customers. So I use VZero a lot to basically give some prompt ideas and then come up with unique visualization. So like what you're looking at here is that something that I think could have taken me quite a long time to create with like slides or whatever. And the AI walked me through how to represent this, you know, how our fluid compute system works and create something that I can hand off to other teams. I can hand off to customers, I can hand off, you know, I can further solidify my understanding of technical concepts.

3:52I actually use V0 for learning a lot. So that's a fun one. I'm actually really proud of this one that you're going to look at now. So if you're super familiar with Vercel, this might look like our blog. And so what I did is I started from the point of view of the Vercel blog and what it looks like. And by the way, if you're curious about how VZero works, it's like it's all prompting. And so really what you're looking at here is that when I engage with my Vercel team, I could take two routes. One, I can make a suggestion based on like 10 Slack messages, or I can just talk to VZero, create something that I kind of like.

4:29and then share it with the team. So what you're looking at here specifically is, it's a pretty novel component. I think I've seen it this only a handful of times on the internet. So when we launched the Vercel MCP, pay attention to this little component here and the evolution of the video. I suggested to the team that in order to highlight our partners of this launch, which were Anthropic, Cursor, I believe VS Code as well, I wanted to highlight them front and center. MCPs are a highly, highly, highly technical concept. So I wanted to show you, okay, how does Vercel MCB work? And so I actually cooked on the entire component.

5:07Like you can kind of like jump to the different markers. And so then the team can take it, implement it. They can actually share and sort of copy paste a lot of the code. And now this became kind of a foundation of our blog system. Whenever we have a change log or we have a new blog post, now we have this really cool resource. A little bit of a spoiler alert. We have the ambition that whatever you vibe code in V0 can actually become what we call remote components. Imagine prompting on a slice of a website and enabling anyone in your team or organization to do this. So this is a kind of like a little example of like what that would look like.

5:47Like I'm basically prompting the blog. I'm also pretty proud of this when I collaborated with our head of design on this. he sent me kind of like a rough sketch of, and I'll explain why I got so involved with this. We're launching a new product, or we launched, which is already kind of growing sort of exponentially. It's called the AI Gateway. Greg, I don't know if you're familiar with things like Open Router or AI Gateways. Yeah, Open Router we've covered, but yeah, explain it a little bit. Yeah, so the main idea is that when you access models, you, one, might not have made up your mind about which one you need.

6:27Two, because of the insane demand for AI tokens, a lot of model providers are unreliable or out of capacity. And three, you always want the best price and performance. And I will actually add a fourth one. You don't want to lock yourself into a model, even if everything that I just mentioned is perfect. You have the right model, you have the right provider, whatever. It might not be the smartest thing to lock yourself in. So we created the AI SDK, which is the universal developer experience for AI. I'm very proud of it, particularly because I didn't invent it, my team did. I invented Next.js, I have that going for me, but this is something that emerged organically at Vercel when we were building VZero.

7:09Maybe a metaphor for people listening, it's almost like the React of AI. It's a very, very, very cool developer experience. So AI Gateway is very exciting to Vercel as a company because it's a new entry point into the Vercel cinematic universe. Meaning you can adopt this AI gateway regardless of whether you're using any other Vercel product. And so what I wanted to do basically communicated to the team is a couple of things. It's like one, and frankly, this is inspired by Apple. I have to come out and say it. I wanted to create this sub product navigation so that I can go to Vercel.com slash AI gateway and you believe that that's an entire company.

7:46And second, I wanted to show this really cool, This actually was my idea. This really cool animation that represents how easy it is to switch between models. It's like that easy. Also, like we wanted to represent that, you know, we support not just our own AI SDK. Like I said, that React of AI, but there's other options, et cetera. If you go to the page today, does it look exactly like this? No, but that's the point. I was able to have this super high fidelity conversation with the team. And I did this on a Waymo ride back home. It was actually pretty fast for me to do. Um, let me jump to something that I think, um, is interesting for also for people to understand how we build VZero.

8:26Like imagine that you have the ambition of building something like VZero. So I have a surprise for you. We use VZero to build VZero. And so, um, and I kind of nerded out hardcore on this, by the way, because of many, many moons ago when I was 16 years old, I created a component like what I'm about to show. Um, so I'll explain the growth mindset here, like from a growth hacking perspective. whenever you share a Vercel deployment, you're going to see them throughout the web as.vercel.app. The way to think about this is like, this is like the Vercel marketing machine. And what I mean by that is that we're actually spending any marketing budget.

9:04You asked me for the sauce, this is the sauce, right? Like we created such a great product, hopefully, that people build, ship, and then say, it's almost like saying it was built with Vercel, right? And it can be toys, it can be big ideas, it can be your next startup, et cetera. And obviously we support custom domains. But with v0, I also wanted to preserve that identity. It's almost like a communication. It's like a significant bit. You want to communicate that the thing was built with v0. And so by default today, you might have already noticed this, we default to like v0 as a prefix of the things that you ship when you hit that button publish.

9:40But I was noticing that when people were customizing, they were nuking the v0 prefix. And so I wanted to both give them the freedom to nuke it, but also if they don't mind it, keep it. Just like they're keeping.versellodapp. So notice that if I select text and I say Guillermo talks to Greg, I'm not nuking it. But if I go to the beginning of the input and I press delete, I'm deleting that entire token. And if I press command Z, it comes back. So I couldn't have imagined describing this with any other tool. I would have spent more time putting words down. And you know that batch little token thing that you've seen on Facebook when you do an ad mention?

10:23Well, imagine it says, I actually had tried to do that, to be completely honest, and no one understood what I was talking about. So I just went ahead and built it. And because VZero is so smart, like things like the, you can tell it, well, when you hover, do this, select the text by default. All those kinds of things are just prompts. so and 14 prompts probably took me like i don't know 15 minutes um so really cool um you know i could keep going to some of this um we we do all kinds of like product specs but i also wanted to show you something that kind of became what i would almost say like the foundation for like a real product almost uh did you see this on x by the way okay so and and this is connected to something I think really relates to your audience, which is that I've posted all of these free ideas threads.

11:17And no one picked up on this one. So I'm actually going to like, you know, point this out to the people. I think one person paid attention to this one. So I had this concept of an AI camera. The idea of an AI camera came from a frustration that But my relative loves to take photos of the moon. And like, no this, but like, they're so bad. She loves the moon. Heart goes out of her. She's obsessed with this thing. But they're just so bad. And I was thinking, also, I just upgraded or downgraded, you could say, to an iPhone Air. The camera got worse. and so I was telling my team the other day I don't mind because I love this slick form factor and also because I believe that in the future cameras will be inputs or what you take with a camera will be an input not an output and why is it going to be an input because every photo will go through an LLM or an AI model and so that was kind of like the idea and so I actually because I got this iPhone and I was telling the VZero team about it.

12:28At VZero, we don't have dev rails. We have vibe rails. It's someone that vibe codes to show the potential of the tool. And so he built this. I took a selfie of myself when I was in London, I believe. And then I took another one. And so let's see it here. So I opened it. So the idea is that you can choose between different filters. Um, actually because, uh, let's see, kill bill because I'm from Argentina. I'm going to go with art Gentino. Uh, so, um, photo goes in. So it was actually quite easy to prompt the success of this. And by the way, like what I mean by success is like, it went quite viral.

13:13The success of this speaks to, okay, that actually looks like me a lot. But the success of this speaks to just how simple we made the interface, which I'm really proud of. You know, obviously it's inspired by the iPhone camera. We used really cool prompts for the different styles. So I'm going to go, let's see, let's do another one. I'm going to go with maybe more focused. I'm going to go with Disco now. Okay. So when Nano Banana came out, I told my team, and by the way, for people listening, I still believe this. Nano Banana is a GPT-4 moment for image models. And you can create amazing things.

13:56I think there's going to be a lot of great consumer products that come out of this, little great utilities. I was showing this off. By the way, the meta work here. When I was in London, I was obviously pitching to companies, startups, et cetera, like what Vercel and Vizier can do for you. And I was in a lot of meetings where this was kind of like the, you know, the, the memorable bit of the pitch, uh, taking a selfie with, uh, with someone and like showing them what, what, um, what VZero can do. So, uh, I actually ended up executing on that idea. So, uh, from the, from the free ideas thread. So that, that whole product that you showed me, you made with VZero.

14:37Yeah. A hundred percent. Then how long did that take you? Say it again. How long did that take you from start to finish? So it was lunchtime here in SF. By the way, you know what's funny about the importance of, and by the way, this is not just me patting myself on the back because I have a lot of bad ideas. You should see my team, my chats with my dev world team. But I do think it's in the age of AI, and I think obviously this is going to resonate with you preaching to the choir. The value of ideas is pretty freaking significant. Why? Because I pitched this idea to a lot of people and like, they were like, I don't know what you're talking about.

15:13Like, oh, that's cool. You're a CEO. I'm not going to annoy you, but like, I don't know what you mean, but like a lot of people kind of ignored it. But the day that we're at that launch and I saw that the lens of the iPhone had just gotten worse and whatever, I pitched it hard. I was like, guys, we have to actually do this. And so, you know, most of the process is actually downloading it into the prompt. And so there's a lot of debate about like, is prompt engineering a thing and whatever. I'll say it again. If you have a vision in your head and if you're able to explain it in English, amazing things can happen.

15:49So I think it was mostly, so I explained it to my colleague and I told him, and in the beginning, he first didn't get me. So it goes back again to like, sometimes you might get frustrated with AI, but remember like us humans are also not flawless in that department like explaining yourself really really well using the right metaphors etc is really important one thing by the way that if anyone wants to continue to riff on that idea which i encourage is and by the way you can actually open it in v0 so like when you click this you're going to go to the v0 when you click build with v0 here you're going to go to the template um so i had originally pitched it as instagram in the sense that like i wanted this to be a preview of what the different filters are going to look like we implemented it as like the different types of like photo portrait whatever which makes it super um relatable i think that has a strength for sure but there's another version uh and this is what's excited about ai because like the models are going to keep getting better so the the first pushback that i got was oh no that's going to cost us a lot of money because you're going to have to do 20 nano banana runs and whatever.

16:59So we started litigating like, well, but you could do, you, maybe you could prompt nano banana to give you a grid of all the permutations. And then you tell visitor to slice it. And because like the vision was just like Instagram invented filters, we can invent AI filters. So you could have, you could have seen Guillermo's solar punk, almost like a little preview, and then I click it, and then we do a higher fidelity AI pass. So I think there's a lot more to do with this particular idea. But yeah, 100 % V0. There's a Nano by Nano template. So if you go to the V0 community, there are a lot of really amazing starting points, right?

17:42So we have all kinds of templates that you can use to use as your starting points. if you want to create games, landing pages. I mentioned DataViz is really big for us, especially for teams that throw unstructured data, CSVs, whatever. There's really cool components that can, when Liquid Glass came out, everyone lost their minds and started trying to create different versions of Liquid Glass. So this is a great place to get inspired. frankly like um i i have my own contribution here uh i guess i cooked huh so uh i love particle effects and so speak of the of the value of vibe coding we're hosting a happy hour with aws at reinvent about v0 and we didn't have a promotional artifact that i felt truly proud of a lot of people i think that listen to us are always curious about like how do you get big go next?

18:47How do you get a lot of impressions? And I'll tell you, you know, the, uh, like, just because you have a lot of followers, it doesn't mean that you are putting things out into the world that people are interested in. So like, I actually use VZero a lot to cook on visualizations of data and things like that, that, um, yeah, that, so for example, when, when Next.js came out and we wanted to communicate that it, that in the past 12 months, It had over 500 million downloads. And then over previous 12 months, it had a ton of downloads, basically 500 million in nine years and then 500 million in 12 years.

19:24I used V0 to create my banger tweet. So there's a lot, a lot of cool stuff here to learn from. So one thing I'm learning about you is, I know you say you don't have, you know, you have bad ideas and good ideas, but you do have a lot of good ideas and you have a lot of good taste. Like you're able to, you know, think of, okay, Instagram works like this. Therefore, I'm going to use that as a reference to put it into V0. So, you know, what advice do you have for people who are trying to like build their inner Guillermo, basically? Yeah. So you mentioned something really cool, which is that what comes out of me is good ideas.

20:11what started out was probably a ton of ideas, bad, good, medium, whatever. And then there's a filter that happens for sure. I try to be a less is more guy. So like what I put out, I have some degree of conviction that it might hit. You also talked about the idea of, well, Instagram exists, therefore you can bring this over to this other product and whatever. I do think that that's extremely, extremely, extremely important to basically like accumulate a bunch of exposure hours to products in general. So even just from what I've been doing here, you might have gotten ideas about how V0, how I think about V0, right?

20:53Like you see the way that we have the community with templates, projects, search, like little nuggets of like how products work that I think are really interesting. I'll show you actually something also super cool. Notice that when I've been opening these VZeroes, they're in full screen. So like they're ready to be shared. So I care a lot about the first impression that a product has on people. And so I can reveal the chat, but the chat is not interesting to the presentation that I've been doing. So I wanted to also communicate that to the team. And I basically created this like mini VZero inside VZero to like basically show like imagine a world.

21:39And by the way, the design ended up being quite similar to what ended up landing at the end. Imagine a world where it's all content. Everything is computer and we hide the chat. So there's one version of Vizier that was like so much chat in your face. And the nugget of this idea or like the origination of this idea came from watching people use the product. A colleague of mine that works on X.js sent me a photo of his girlfriend working on a VZero for her education class. And she had a big desktop monitor and I saw that half the screen was chat. And the other half was the content that she was working on.

22:23And immediately had the idea of like, well, that doesn't seem right. And so the TLDR there is that You have to always be rethinking your assumptions, trying to observe how people use their products in the real world. And, you know, whenever something doesn't work, I never think, well, it's the fault of the user. It's the fault of the people. I don't have followers, whatever. It's the product. It's the design. It's the idea. When you were creating, let's say, the nano banana photo selfie thing, did you prompt V0 with the reference image of Instagram or were you plainly using English and just explaining what you wanted?

23:12I think it was all English in this case, which kind of speaks to like, there is one defining characteristic that I do want to point out is that you have to be able to visualize things in your head. and if not in your head, like you have to have some close reference so that you can guide this system, right? And so all of this that you're looking at, it's just maybe paying more attention to the details, right? Like if you open the camera app, there is subtleties to the border. There's subtleties to the background. There's subtleties to the gradient. Another big thing that it might seem small, but it's actually freaking huge is that a few of the initial passes were overly complicated.

23:56So there was a process of trimming stuff down and deleting. If I could actually give one lasting piece of advice to everybody, including my own team and myself, it's always delete, delete, delete, delete. There should be as few buttons, links, et cetera, as possible on any given product. And I think we kind of nailed that here because like how much attention can people give you, right? Like five seconds, 10 seconds. Another not minor thing is this is actually a very good mobile product. So by having less UI, you are almost forcing yourself to have a good mobile product. What's very interesting about this little app, if you go to it, v0bananacam.versell.app is that it's almost impossible to believe that this is a web app.

24:53It feels like you just downloaded a native app, which also speaks to the insane potential, I think, of this Vibe Coding Platforms because we're soon going to launch the VZero mobile app. You're going to be able to create apps like this on the go. And we're actually putting a lot of work into the model, the context, et cetera, to make them really good on mobile devices out of the box. So TLDR, fewer pixels, always better. And remember that most people don't have time and are on their mobile phones. So you have such a little window to get this stuff right. By the way, this, just for people listening, like this idea that you had, like the VZero Banana Cam, the 20 different filters that you had if you wanted to you know create an app that you know just did a little bit of cash flow and and was a fun project to do you can unbundle this and just do like Wes Anderson cam as an app right or I mean there's just so much to do with this and you can by the way again you can click open in v0 you can start prompting there's so much to do with this.

26:04Yeah. Because I mentioned also that the original idea, by the way, I also will give credit to my colleague who suggested to focus it more on selfies because let's analyze the ideas thread for a second, right? AI camera was the first idea. And I was thinking a lot about another inspiration for this, by the way, it was like, we took a business photo with a group at a large bank and it was so awkward that we had to take like five or six and i joked because obviously the conversation that we had was about ai i joked to them saying like oh don't worry ai will fix this but in reality it didn't like we took a lot of bad photos and uh we took six of them it was awkward the lighting was bad i was like guys like so to give you a context this was in a high rise New York City.

26:54The background was all sun and the skyline of New York. And I remember thinking to myself, AI has seen that freaking, I mean, it's beautiful, but it's seen this skyline a gazillion times. We are very clear on the photo. The lighting is not good, but our bodies are very clear. All it should take is, by the way, it shouldn't even take a prompt. And this we didn't explore with this idea, but you could ask AI first to critique the photo. So that process that I did of saying, oh, the photo is garbage, I'm sure GPT-5 would do as well. And so once you get the critique from GPT-5, you give it a nano banana.

27:40And so this is why I also believe that people sometimes fear that like the one model is going to take all the jobs. In reality, most cool things happen when you combine models, combine ideas, market it well focus it well create easy interfaces etc so i think since you're since we're riffing on other things that people could do the automatic perfect photo app where uh or the lighting fixer photo app and whatever uh especially if people can build the muscle memory to always go to you when they're taking that kind of photo um so by the way it's fun to compare it now because I believe that AI camera was probably the best of the bunch, but it wasn't necessarily the one that people got the most excited about.

28:27So what other ideas are in this list? This created a lot of excitement that I'm still bullish. So I might cook on it at some point, but obviously I encourage people to try it too. So I believe that forms need to be disrupted with AI. Period. All forms. Contact sales forms. we're going to be doing an experiment on versell.com for this i think other i heard rumors and other like big tech companies going to try to do like a conversational sales form i think it's going to be really interesting because like the classic thing is so if we go to versell.com contact and then go to contact sales we do have personalization here like we're trying to like eat our own dog food right so like it knows that i'm from the u.s it actually knows that i'm coming from an enterprise.

29:20So it's asking me a few more questions, et cetera. So we're constantly doing experiments on this, but like, what if you didn't have to fill out a form? And some people, by the way, might think like, why don't you just ask nothing but like the email? Well, interestingly, we've done the experiment and like we get such an insane amount of input that to triage and get more signal out of it, we actually do need more information sometimes to actually be able to prioritize who we talk to. And so we do need more information, but a chatbot could ask you for the follow-up. And so that's an experiment worth doing.