LMArena Goes Startup, AI App Wars Begin, Scott Bair’s Design Playbook | E2114

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31:44That's quite a lot. And I think that's probably indicative of venture interest in general. I'm just interested to see what happens to all those bets in a trade war environment when there's an effective trade embargo on China, which was the source for quite a lot of drone parts and similar technologies. So it's going to be interesting to see how Theseus and other companies like it survive, thrive in the changing world. It's, as we learned on Wednesday, a tough time out there. Okay, let's keep going. All right. So we're calling this segment Tips from the Trenches. We've got, you know, founders, experts, insiders giving you very specific, granular, helpful advice, instructions, tips about various sort of topics facing the startup founder today.

32:28So we had the other day at Founder University, we had Scott Baer, the director of strategy for Lunor. I think I'm saying that correctly. He gave us a amazing presentation about the basics of branding and design for new founders. And so I've got little summaries. The first segment here, the difference between your brand and the concept of branding. So let's take a look at that first click. The two definitions I like to use to break this apart is brand, which is someone's gut feeling about your company or service. It's what they say it is influenced by multiple experiences over time. Whereas branding is the unending act of perception design.

33:07And so like Jason was saying, design is really, really important. And I you could have the most beautifully designed whatever product, web page, anything. And if it's misaligned with your target audience, it's going to fall flat. And so being able to be perceived correctly by your target audience is critical. And so that's where branding should constantly be a double-sided conversation of you're speaking something, you're seeing how it's been responded to, and you're adjusting. Now, the two most important words that I like to go back to with branding are differentiation and consistency. So you got to find out what is that angle that we have that's different from everybody else.

33:48And then how do we go double down on that? And you have to say the same thing over and over and over because even launch does that. So launch, if they started going into a completely different direction, then they start muddying the waters and it's confusing where you have to say the same thing over and over to where like liquid death, if I were to say liquid death, you know what they do because they've been saying the same thing for a while. If you were to, you know, put Nike in here, you know, just do it. Iconic brand, but they do branding constantly. I am constantly seeing different Nike, you know, sub brands, Nike running, Nike yoga, Nike basketball, Nike loungewear.

34:28They're constantly building on the brand promise, which is to just do it, to just get out there and work out and it manifests itself in different ways. What I like about this is repeating yourself over and over again. People assume that people understand what you do here at This Week in Startups, right? We cover the news in technology and how to build companies, right? Like over and over again, we have to tell people like, hey, when you listen to the show, we're going to talk about what's happening in technology. And then we're going to talk about building startups. That's it. And Founder Fridays, for founders, by founders.

35:05I keep saying that over and over again. For founders, by founders. Found a university, start a company. That's it. Just start a company with two or three of your friends. Start a company with two or three of your friends. Start a company with two or three of your friends. And the reason we keep saying two or three of your friends is because we like to invest in teams. We don't like to invest in solo founders. So we're trying to tell people, hey, get two or three of your friends and build a startup and we'll help teach you how to do that. So this is super important to start thinking about early on.

35:30I mean, I noticed this a lot when we started doing the inside streaming newsletter. I felt like I was talking about it constantly to the point that everybody's going to get tired of following me on social media because every day I'm like, hey, I got a newsletter. I talked about this in my newsletter. And when I would actually talk to other people every time, they would be like, you have a newsletter. Why don't you ever talk about it? Why haven't I heard anything about this? And I'm out there. I felt like I was doing it every day. So you're too close. Whatever you're working on, you're too close to it.

35:59Talk about it more than you are because people still don't know. That would be my advice. And Twitter, when you live in the Twitterverse, you assume that you're reaching everybody. The Twitterverse is like 15 % of society. That's why you have to master Facebook, Reddit. There's other places online people hang out. And then there's the real world. Man, so many startups never go operate in the real world and touch grass. I think touching grass with your brand, super important. When I started Silicon Alley Reporter, I used to wear a Silicon Alley Reporter t-shirt every day of my life. Literally every day of my life, I had a Silicon Valley reporter thing and they'd say, what's that?

36:36What's Silicon Valley reporter? And I gave the t-shirts out constantly. So think about branding. I think really getting into the real world is so crucial. The real world activation startups never do these, but there's a place where all the lawyers are going. There's a place that all the accountants go. I don't necessarily know where that is. I don't know what conference it is. I don't know what bar it is. Yeah, I don't want to go to the accountants thing, but I'm sure it exists. Maybe not for me, but there is a place where accountants right now are talking about accounting stuff. It's up to you to go find those people.

37:10And you just have to ask them when you do your customer interviews, where they hang out. Let's move on. Part two. So this Scott presents four different questions that he thinks founders should ask themselves in order to really dig into understanding what their offering is, what their brand is, and how they should be communicating with the public. Let's take a look at that clip. So first, why are you motivated to build this company? And I would recommend everybody answer these questions. And I'll share this slide deck afterwards. But this one will go back to when you're tired, when you have that second job, when you don't want to do it, when you cannot find product market fit, why are you motivated to keep building?

37:51And next, what does Appley Ever After look like for your customers using your product. This is my favorite one. And it's because it's a vision that is so clear that people can see it. My favorite example of this is Microsoft's old vision statement, which is a computer on every desktop and every home. And what that gave is the engineers to understand, well, I know how big my desk is. And we have to fit that entire component that big. So you give constraints, which is really good. And you have to be able to give that really clear picture. Here I'm using an example of Elon Musk always talking about going to Mars.

38:31They've created renderings of what that could look like. So it's a very clear scene of what that actually looks like. And we can build towards that. So it's your vision statement. Next is your mission. So vision and mission often get confused for each other. I found that mission is the how. So how are you going to make this vision become a reality? So this is a little more tactical. So we are going to do this, make this vision become real by and then filling in the blank of those pieces. These are also really helpful frameworks for your team to just get aligned to be a multiple people that are building.

39:05It's helpful to go back to your North Star of what you're actually trying to accomplish. Your values. So what actions are rewarded or disciplined? Typically what I found that values work best. and you know i don't know if anybody's ever been in a corporate environment where they have the values on the wall and it's like integrity or all these things and then you're like i just saw that person steal and nobody did anything about it and that that shows you that it didn't really mean anything and so if for me if uh for one of our values is be a great partner and so that means i've said here's the value and for me my promise is i will respond with an x amount of time or if If I realize that we're going to be late, I'm going to be the first one to speak up.

39:49I think setting a culture is another way to say that last one is, you know, like, how do we accomplish the mission? What are the characteristics here? You know, I think you guys would agree on a podcast like this. I'm like, details matter. I always say details matter to people. You do. Details matter. What? I've been saying that for my entire career. And the reason I think details matter and effort and hard work matter, these things, you can be very proud of what you've produced, whether it succeeds or it fails, if you have craftsmanship and you really focus on those details. We've worked on the details for this very podcast that you're watching, details around, you know, wardrobe, details around sound, details around lighting.

40:32And if you work on details, one of the things I found just as a culture is then when you take on a new project or you're doing some new effort, everybody just brings that mentality. What details matter in this? How do we make it better? And they're empowered to think, hmm, we have this new idea, we're executing it. How do we make it just a little bit better in 10 different ways? If you make 10 aspects of a product 10 % better, it's twice as good. I'm doing that right now with the founder of the university. I became personally engaged in it and I'm looking at every detail because if the leader doesn't do that, then everybody else just does what we did last time.

41:19That's what we always do. I'm always trying to break people out of, well, that's the way we do it here and say, well, how can it just be a little bit better and bring that attitude to everything? So we were doing as a silly, stupid example, when we do founder university on Thursdays, we have breakout sessions. And they were randomly breaking people out into rooms using this cool feature on Zoom where you can just create breakout rooms. How many people per breakout room? You break it out. And I was like, that's interesting. It's random. It's exciting. It's easy. You just press a button. And then I was like, you know what?

41:54I don't have my team engaged with the founding university teams. So how about we do this? Everybody does a pod of 30 of the companies in the program. And every Thursday you meet with your pod. So you get some consistency, you build some relationships. That's actually better for founder. And they have one person at our firm who they build a relationship with, as opposed to like a thin relationship with three or four people at the firm. We did it last night in this new format I came up with. And I think this is cohort 10 or 11. 10. 10. And I mean, it was dramatic, the feedback and how much better it was.

42:32Yeah. Last night, Lon, you did one of the pods. Yeah, no, I ran a pod. I was very worried people were going to be like, Lon, I'm migrating my cloud infrastructure. I have some API questions, but that did not happen, thankfully. It was great. It was great. And I think the founders really did appreciate just not even the me of it, but just having a smaller group. Like, they got to know one another by name. They got to sort of talk about one another's companies specifically. A lot of them had been sort of, they were going through sort of similar parts of the process and could relate to one another on that level.

43:06And there are conversations you couldn't have possibly had in a big room with 150 people that you need that breakout room of 10 to 12. And then people can sort of, it's a little more interpersonal. So yeah, I thought it worked great. You know what this reminds me of? The incrementally improving your output in your work and your project. It reminds me of that Mark Andreessen clip you had the other day, Lon, when he was talking about Steve Jobs and his approach to work. And that, what was the quote? Like, he only would tolerate first class work. Right. Yeah. You have to be shooting high. Yeah. If you're not, if you weren't like a first class producer or something, like if you weren't like really giving it 100 % every day, he just wasn't, he wasn't interested in having non-high performers around.

43:44And he executed on that pretty well. Any other, any notes from these questions that stood out to you, gentlemen? One of the questions? I really liked that Scott was focused on, And like, I like the phrase happily ever after. I think so often the focus is on that one interaction. I want to like sell you the thing. I want you to use the app or download the app even. Like, I feel like I work for a lot of companies where that's the thing. It's like, we just want people to download the app and then we want those numbers to go up and then we're fine. And I like the focus on, we don't just want you to download it.

44:15We don't just want you to try it. We want it to work. And then it has in some way, in some way, right. In some way, it has improved your life, even incrementally. And now you're in a new situation. Do that for each of you to do it for This Week in Startup. What should the outcome, what should happily ever after be after people watch this episode, Alex? Okay. I think happily ever after for viewers of This Week in Startups is an increasing percentage of the viewership starting companies. Great. Awesome. I like it. What do you got, Lon? Yeah. I mean, I think that's what I was going to say is overall, our goal is to give you a lot more confidence.

44:51whatever you're, if you're working for a startup, if you're starting a company, if you're investing in a company to feel like you've learned something from this community, you have that extra confidence that I've, I've listened to these guys. I've heard all of these examples. I can do this myself. Well, I just did vision. You just did mission per the framework. Yeah, that's true. We did. Yeah. I love the outcome that people after they watch this are more informed. They will make better decisions, right? In their personal life, their professional life, and even a little entertained along the way.

45:25So they had some enjoyment after it. They say, hey, that was kind of fun. I like a little fun in it. You know, I like those guys at camaraderie. So I like this concept of laugh and learn, laugh and learn. So Lon, I want to get more cold opens and funny bits going on here on the show as well. You surprised me with some bits. I get some bits going to get that creative juices. I also like the three of us and the team to have fun doing it. I'm always trying to, you know, if you can have fun and combined with that, you're doing great work. I like that, like a little levity while you're doing your best work.

46:03I think, you know, one of the things Steve Jobs did is, and, you know, I knew Steve and people who worked for him. And I'd met him a bunch of times. There's a lot of like projection that goes into a larger than life personality. But the truth was he hired really well. So if you were there, you were qualified to do the job. Now, did you do your best work or not at any given moment? That's when he would let you know if he thought this was your best work. And I always took a note on that. I will tell people just very, you know, matter of factly, this isn't great work. This is okay work. This is good work.

46:41It's not really great work. Let's go a little faster. And then I'll compare it to them, especially in the day of AI. By the way, your work product is something that AI would have produced. You need to look at what AI can do today and maybe do it a little better. And so that candidness with a little bit of fun, and hey, let's try to just do a little better each day at whatever we do. I find that is more exciting for me to come to work. anyway this is a great framework it's a great talk scott i just want to personally thank you for doing it i'd like to have scott come on the pod um and he does a really fun thing where he uh i i people i call it savage my startup where people tell me their startup idea and i just give them like brutally candid i kind of do that privately now in small groups because founders like it but some people find it a little disturbing but he does a really good thing where he um kind of looks at people's web pages and tries to improve them in real time and talks about what he likes about them, what he doesn't.

47:42I think a live clinic like that, where we line up 10 audience members, they show their product, or we just pick 10. And we said, what do you think? How would you improve these? And we just picked 10 high profile ones. Yeah. I think the cool thing about what he does too, is that he goes in totally cold, which is not an experience. Like a lot of the time when you're showing somebody your website, you've already kind of set it up for them. Like, okay, so here's what we're trying to do. It's a marketplace. Right. And he goes in and he's just pulling it up and just in real time trying to figure out what do you do?

48:12What are you selling me based only on your website? And it is a novel approach. And I think I think a lot of the people watching learned a lot from that because sometimes you would show up and be like, I don't know what this is. Like I that's something having to do with AI. It's something having to do with, you know, call centers. But I don't know what you're selling. You know, the start date of founding university cohort 11 yet. Do we have that date? I don't know what I'll add, but let me look it up. Yeah. Founder.university is the website where you can apply. It says summer 2025 is all I'll see.

48:43So it'll probably start in August or something or July. Right now it's April. Yeah. So we're going to have this as part of the innovation, like a week in person. We're going to run people through like a very intense program. You have to take a week off, come to that, or you can do the virtual and kind of self-paced thing. but if you want to be part of the next founder university which will have a hundred teams in person working really hard for a week which would be two or three hundred people it's going to be quite exciting i might limit it to 50 but i'd like y 'all to to consider coming you need to have two or three people on your team who are all builders are capable of building stuff and you want to have product velocity those are the tips for getting into founder.university okay and we have one more design clip or are we good?

49:30Well, we've got two more if you want to watch it both or we can pick one. All right. So part three, this was Scott's approach to understanding logos in terms of logo design, ideal aspects of your logo. And he also talks, I thought this was really fascinating, a little bit about color theory and how to pick the right color for your logo. Oh, I love color theory. Yeah. This was really fascinating to me. Let's take a look, Alex, if we have that pulled up. Here's a quick comparison. I did a search on, I think, Fiverr or 99designs for best logos. This was on the left side and then on the right side you'll see maybe a few companies that you recognize.

50:06There is a framework for this. So on the left side there's I find that a lot of founders I work with when we're doing logo design they want to fit everything that all the meaning of their company into a single mark which is very challenging to do and I would actually argue is not usually the best decision to do anyway. And on the right side is more your logo should be more of an identifier versus an explanation and you'll you'll find that you're able to get much smaller and in a world where 50 or half of all internet browsing is done on mobile devices having some sort of icon or symbol is critical nowadays so there needs to be some sort of element there and also you'll see colors i would stick to one maybe two for your brand to be known as absolutely when i say what is the color of target nearly like everybody would know it actually tell me what is target's color red red everybody was yelling red what about chase bank blue blue safe stable um what about how about uh anyway we can keep going but you get it really quick and so when you see it your your brain reads color much faster than it reads words and so you're giving a feeling to somebody right away.

51:19Yep. There's one of these brands I want to ask about that he talks about. We want to make sure it scales. So again, it has to go down to whatever a favicon is, 35 pixels high to your logo. A favicon is the tab in your browser tab. It's usually a good idea to start with. And then being able to scale out. Now about color. So quick crash course on color is your color does mean a lot. so the color red will actually increase your heart rate when you see it whereas blue is on the other end of the spectrum will cool will slow you down and it brings a sense of calmness and build stability like yeah uh and so that's why you'll see most financial banking is blue and health yeah he says health care to hospitals something like that orange is energy orange is playful i love orange and blue that's why the launch logo is always orange and blue is our colors purple is the one that's really fascinating to me because you would think taco bell would be like a red like that like i purple is a it's an odd one is quirky that's odd and quirky in my mind that's why yahoo used it etc it's a quirky color green is um i think nature organic like whole foods being green yes uh yellow i don't understand who uses yellow yellow is a very weird color mcdonald's they've got on there hertz rent a car is yellow hosted i don't like those brands buy yeah i don't like them either yeah yeah this you just mentioned brands and logos i don't like so he makes these are like little blocking and tackling tactics that you really got to get right and um you know people like to do a logo in one when people think about logo construction they they think about it in one medium i'm looking at my web page i'm looking at my bottle of beer and what he's explaining here is that real logo architecture and design is thinking about it holistically across all possible medium so when i do logo design and i've done really good ones in the past um the mahalo logo was award-winning the inside logo was award-winning the launch logo is award-winning um just people really love those and uh the guy i used for mahalo which was the one i was most proud of jonathan hicks i believe is his name and um this was like one of the most talented logo designers and he charged you know this is 15 20 years ago he charged yeah there's the mahalo logo it was stunning um and that was a variation on it there were other ones without the bait in it but he made this beautiful plume era that we could use the mahalo was you know hawaiian playful and man it worked everywhere jonathan hicks uh and then that's when we added learn anything to it uh when we had some educational content yeah yeah i remember that we debated learn everything or learn anything um and uh we were just way ahead of our time we and we thought about using ai to and machine learning to try to accomplish some of the tests but it didn't work it wasn't it wasn't ready for primetime yeah it wasn't ready so mahalo today would have been pretty amazing um putting it aside i liked to get a mug a business card stationary a website a mobile website an app logo icon uh the favicon which is a little tag and if you try to if you saw that plume era in any of those locations without the word mahalo it was very evocative you would think mahalo and i did the same thing with inside which was lowercase with brackets And the inside logo with brackets on either side is the brackets are what in an editorial context, as you know, Alex, your editor might put in there.

55:03And you know, the editor, like literally in the New York Times, if you see brackets or some of these publications, the editor's notes would go in the brackets. So I was like, okay, that's a real insider pull. Put the brackets on either side, make it lowercase, kind of like typewriter-y, old school, like gritty editor. You're inside, you know, with an insider. And I love the movie The Insider. So having some thoughtful things about it, why you're building it, what you want to evoke. I wanted with Mahalo to evoke a playful, warm place, feminine and masculine, you know, all at the same time. So I just love doing this.

55:37It also gave us a theme, too. We played around a lot with the Hawaiian tropical theme. Like when we did Mahalo Daily, it had that sort of like tiki torch opening. And yeah, it was so much fun. Yeah. Yeah. Scott Baer and the name of his firm. Again, he's got a design firm. We'll put it in the show notes if you need a designer. He's great. He's director of strategy for L-U-N-O-U-R, Lunor. L-U-N-O-U-R, Lunor. And so if you have a really great talk you want to give to our founders and you really want to spend time with them and donate a couple of hours of your time to our founders of Founder University or The Accelerator, we'll blow you up here and hopefully get you a couple of customers if you really work hard.

56:14Yeah, he was great. He did do that in real time. He pulled up a lot of our FounderU companies and he just like, you know, ripped them apart. But in a constructive and fun way, people loved it. They were lining up to send him their websites. They were, they were like, roast me. So here's our final segment with him. It's just some great, some principles for designing great looking websites, apps and products. All right, let's go. So first is start what feels like too much white space. On the left side, you'll see that everything is equally spaced. Where on the right side, you'll see that it's grouped.

56:47People scan in general. And so you want to make your product scannable. And also you'll see there's space in between. And what's helpful about this is it's the way we talk. So I will say something, a pause, take a breath, and then move on to the next thing. Your product should also feel like that. And then simplify where possible. So on the left side, it might be a little small. I can see everybody squinting, so I might need to decrease this. It says name and it puts her name. Job title puts her job title. Where if you're in the product every single day, you can see on the right side, it just has her name, her title, her email.

57:24So if you go through your product again, make it faster. Make everything that go try to reduce as many clicks and as much reading as possible in anything that you build. next is prioritize values on the left side if i were to say what do you see first most everybody says heart rate where on the right side you see the 82 bpm which is really what you want to see if a nurse is looking over at a unit i want to save her a quarter of a second just by getting her what she needs to fast this is so important is yeah clear primary action by every time i've asked this what's the thing the first thing you see is this big red delete button we're on the right side it says publish here's a massive principle i have in product design which is make your product more sticky and valuable so i never want to visually promote something that deteriorates my product and so you'll see there's different button states here on the right side and we'll get into actually the next one which is a filled primary a secondary kind of faded background and then the delete is this link style so it's really subdued so as i go through anybody's product uh or when I design products, I really like to have one primary field button on the page, just because I almost want you to like change everything on your text to a different language.

58:41And for you to try to figure out what to click because the primary buttons are so clear. Hmm. I like it. That guy is absolutely fantastic. Also, I want him to like narrate to me at night. Cause I feel like his voice is very calming. Yeah. It's a soothing talk. Yeah. I agree. These are just great, simple design principles that you probably wouldn't have been exposed to naturally. And he presents them in a very concise way. So thanks again to our friend Scott. If you would like to come to Founder University, founder.university. And what I'd like to do, Lon, is if you could deputize somebody on the team to redo the Founder University website, that would be fun too.

59:19As a project internally, we maybe take his advice on it. The thing I really love is never ending scrolling pages on mobile. I noticed some people, course people, you know, people who do courses, they do it. So here, like turn your startup idea into a reality. Apply now, learn more. Yeah, I feel like he would say that text under turn your startup into a reality too much, too small. Way too much. I feel like that would be the Scott take on that. Yeah. And what we should do is you should scroll up and then get those details. We invest, you know, 125%, you know, 25K investment for. Right. Shorter, clearer.

1:00:00Frontier. Frontier. Yeah. So lots of work to do here. And again, we're looking at the desktop. We always want to look at mobile first because about 70 % of people experience your website on mobile. I do feel like color we're doing good. He said like black and white is very like respectable, like, you know, conservative, like trustworthy, like Apple is, you know, black and white. And I feel like we're doing the energy and black and white, you know, night mode. All right. This has been another episode of this weekend. Startups follow X.com slash lawns, L O N S X.com slash Alex. I'm X.com slash Jason.

1:00:36I'm also Instagram.com slash Jason. And you can follow the show. just type in this week in startups it's typically twi startups and go ahead and post a comment or like some of the shorts we're doing we're trying to wake up those we have a this week in startups clip channel on youtube if you can go follow it that would be helpful if you're an og uh and uh founder fridays is for founders by founders founder fridays dot t-e-c-h dot tech from the dot tech domains which are really cool domain name uh founder fridays where you get together with a pod of six other founders and every first Friday of the month, you get together and you share learnings together.

1:01:15We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye.