0:00These days, too many founders think launching is all about spending a ton of time and money to produce [music] a slick video and hoping it hits. But my guest today, Farza Majeed, has a totally different approach to launching and going viral.
0:13This is everything we shipped this week.
0:14Well, shipping, right?
0:17He's the founder of Hey Clicky, [music] where his posts regularly get millions of views.
0:21My formula is always the same.
0:23This is who I am. This is what's going on. This is what I'm working on. Let me show you. Everyone wants a story, and so how can a demo just be a mini story?
0:31And today, he's going to share [music] his playbook for how to create videos that actually convert.
0:38[music] Farza, thanks for being here.
0:47Before we jump into some of your advice, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, how you got to this point?
0:51Yeah, started my first company when I was 13, selling stuff on eBay. 10 years later, started getting into software and built a online school for kids, which I did with YC in 2020 with you. That turned into a company called Buildspace, which became one of the largest schools for people who wanted to work on their own ideas, and now working on Hey Clicky, a new interface for AI.
1:10Doing videos has always been kind of a core strategy for you for how to reach out to people, and especially with Buildspace and now with Hey Clicky, it's how you've gotten a lot of attention for for your your products and your businesses. How have you thought about that and talk about your progression from when you got started with video up until now?
1:27Yeah, I mean, to this day, I just love making videos, making online videos for people. And these days, I'm working on my own company, and so the story that's in front of me is actually my company's story. And so it's been really fun to just tell that online. And it just so happens that making videos in 2026 is really good for business, too. So, yeah.
1:44Yeah, tell us about that. So, you've been making videos for over a decade, publishing them online. Talk about what's changed. Like, what is different now in making launch videos and getting attention for your product in 2026 that's different from how it was over the last decade?
1:58Yeah, I mean, you know, we I mean, you were in YC together in 2020. You know, you as my partner. I mean, yeah, back then, you know, you were doing you had to do stuff like post a Hacker News, post a Product Hunt, go to Reddit, like find the right subreddit. You know, like that those types of launches. And things have changed so much now. There are so many new channels now where our users are living across all all products. It doesn't matter what you're working on. Could be drones or AI or like whatever a dating app. Your users are on many new platforms. Mostly algorithmic platforms like X, LinkedIn,
2:27Twitter, YouTube. The biggest change is you're not really making posts anymore. You're actually just constantly launching all the time on these on these algorithmic platforms.
2:36Yeah, we see that a lot with founders in the YC batch where they think a lot about they have to put in all this time and energy and money to make some big fancy launch video and coordinate this big coordinated launch in the hopes that that's going to be their big moment and everything's going to take off. But you don't think about it like that. Like I think your perspective is very interesting on this.
2:55Yeah, there was a time where that was the the meta. You know, like you got to do like a fancy thing and make it a big deal cuz you got one shot. You get that TechCrunch article or you get like that the press in the New York Times or something like that. You needed something kind of nice to go with it.
3:08But now all the old media is kind of just gone. And so now what's working is like a video where I put I say hi and I talk about my product is probably going to perform way better than like a $20,000 produced video by the New York that I posted with the New York Times in terms of actual engagement and traffic and like other things. And so it's a crazy world now.
3:26You don't need any of old media stuff anymore. And if you have a phone and a laptop, you're so much more powerful.
3:31And so yeah, the I think that now we keep calling these launches and I think that that is what these are. These are mini launches all the time. But in my mind, I never consider it I do consider it a launch, but not in the sense of like this is a big launch. This is a big thing. It's not like we're launching a rocket, you know. It's funny. I'd rather call these demos instead of launches and I just love shipping just demos constantly.
3:52And the more demos we can put out as a company, the better. At my company, I'm always like, well, what are we launching this week? That's more of the question.
3:59And we work backwards always from the launch of whatever we're working on. So for example, I'll give you a small example. If we have a feature we're working on, well, we talk about it, sure we talk about the feature, how it feels, etc. But, then I ask, "Well, what's the copy on the Instagram caption? What's the first What's the hook? Uh if we put If we make this a a video about this?"
4:15And not that like it needs to have a good needs to go viral, but we should talk about it because how we communicate to other people is just as important as what we're building. And so, I'm it's at every part of the process. It's not like we make it and then magically I make a hit video or something. That's never how it works. It's always like we kind of know it's a hit before we even start like working on it cuz it just sounds good on paper.
4:34And so, I can show some examples of that, but I I think a lot of people um see videos that you publish that go viral and get a ton of attention, and they almost think that it happens by accident because you just seem, you know, so comfortable and natural and off-the-cuff, but that's not how you do it at all because you're trying to figure out the hook before you even do the video. So, maybe um it'd be interesting if you could pull up a video, walk us through it, and then maybe walk us through the process of how you created that video, what goes into it before you've even actually started shooting anything.
5:02Totally, totally. My uh philosophy on a lot of the launch stuff now is just how can we just show like almost like the process of what I'm doing versus show the ending of what I'm doing. Uh I think there's a lot of value to being like, "Hey, I'm this founder person and I just got this much money and this is my product and this this is my fancy DSLR and these are my good my my wonderfully edited video, you know, with me in front of a nice office." You know, but I'm sure we've all seen those.
5:28You see those every day. I saw like five today for sure.
5:31And those have a purpose, but to to me that becoming like the kind of like thing that people are reaching towards is really annoying. And so, uh I try to always do the opposite and just do what I think is right cuz again, that's a one-time thing. You want You want a channel cuz why are we even launching, Aaron? Why are we launching? What's the reason?
5:49We're launching to get users.
5:50Exactly. We're not launching to like get a bunch of clout on the internet and make people think that we're smart. We're trying to actually get people to use our thing, and that means having a channel that we can keep on repeating and find users from. And so, uh yeah, I'll show you one example here.
6:03This one's a perfect example. This is like the launch of of a Clicky. So, this is Clicky. Clicky is this little blue guy that follows your cursor on his user computer. And it's basically an AI teacher that can teach you anything.
6:16Honestly, I thought the demo was not that good. I remember I showed it to you in office hours, and you're like, "Oh, you should post this. It's actually kind of cool." And I I think one day you asked me again about it, and uh I ended up saying, "Okay, all right, I'll I'll post this."
6:31Cuz even for me, I've been doing this for years, like 10 plus years, and even I sometimes I'm like, "Oh, I don't want to post it. It's not good enough." But I was so wrong. That's so wrong of me for you to even think that. And so, I recorded this video in the office 5 minutes before dinner, and I posted it, and after dinner, it's just doing numbers. And now this is my company.
6:48Isn't that That's a crazy thing. It was just a random side project that I then even just open source cuz I thought no one would even care about it. And uh here I am working on it 6 months later as a real company, right?
6:58Yeah, and so this was nearly 3 million views. Uh how how important was this video in actually even giving you the confidence that you should keep working on this?
7:05I do not care about the traffic at all.
7:08Uh the views looks really wonderful, and people will say congratulations, but what are the actual numbers? And so, I actually don't care about this number at all. I was like, "How many people downloaded it?" And so, after this video, I think 7,000 people downloaded it. And then I looked at who's like retained 4 days later. And if you ask me why I'm working on the product today, it's not cuz it went viral. It's because 7,000 people downloaded it, and about 100 people of the 7,000 kept on using it every day for 5 days straight. That got me so inspired. I reached out to those 100 people. I talked to each of them,
7:36and I was like, "Oh my god, people are using this for things I would have never imagined." And the users are what inspired me to keep going forward. Of course, there's so many little things I could talk about of things I'm doing just subconsciously at this point. Maybe you could help me think through it, but even just the headline, just like just casual. I built this thing.
7:58Why is it important? It's like That's how my brain thinks. I've been writing for like a decade plus. And so, to me, it sounds dumb to call a tweet poetry, but like I care about how long things are. I care about uh the different the different parts of the story that I'm telling here.
8:12And I remember this even back to your Build Space days when you would send your regular marketing emails to the community. I would get those, and that's how you wrote, too.
8:21feel like the typical marketing email that somebody would expect to get. It felt like Farza was writing to me. Even when, you know, it it wasn't like you directly sitting down and doing the thing, it felt like that.
8:34Totally. One thing I do a lot is It depends on the platform. This is Twitter. I'll just kind of go, I don't know, some random person's tweet here. Maybe like this one. And I'll literally change this text to my my tweet's text. Hm. And I'll just do this.
8:50I'll be like, "Did my eyes stop?"
8:51I'll just ask myself, "Did I myself stop on what this is saying?" And if I stop, that's like step one for me on testing if I myself would kind of check this out. And so, that's kind of my number one rule for got regardless of Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, anything.
9:03Am I going to stop on this?
9:06Am I even going to read the first sentence? Cuz if I don't read the first sentence, there's no way I'm I'm going into this. Also, like, look at the first frame of the video. It's very purposely Xcode. Why? Because I know that initially curious developers are probably going to be interested by this.
9:20Not like actual video editors, right?
9:22So, it's purposely Xcode. I purposely zoom in right here to this part to show cuz the part is so small. The part is like this little triangle that kind of helps you out. Most people when they're scrolling see the first 3 seconds.
9:34Everyone. So, this is click Zoom. And I go, "Oh, what is that?" You know, at least at least while you're while you're scrolling.
9:40Yeah, and you're moving it around so people can see that there's something moving there.
9:43I think that, um, you can go into details all day, but the reason I got this I know this stuff now is because there's hundreds and thousands of videos I've made that nobody has cared about. Yeah. I think that's the biggest thing. Like, yeah, I I don't want people to watch this video and think, "Oh, I got to make this hook and do this and this."
9:58And so, this was this first one off the cuff. This was almost entirely unplanned. And so, a lot of this was just you and instinct and how you put this together based on things you've learned. Walk us through another video that that maybe you planned out a little bit more in advance cuz one thing that's surprising to me, you actually write a script for all of your videos and I think anybody that's seen one of your videos would be surprised by that because you seem like you're just talking off the cuff.
10:22How do you do that? Like you you're very prepared but it doesn't seem formal and stuffy and like you're reading.
10:28How can you teach somebody else to do that?
10:30If I like reading it, then that means it'll probably sound good if I say it out loud as well.
10:35But not always but sometimes. And so this is one example of a script I wrote um for a video that I did yesterday. And again, it's just super simple like do I enjoy reading this? Like would I read this if I just someone texted this to me?
10:47Yeah, what's going through your head?
10:48Are you imagining the audience uh listening to this or how do you evaluate if something is actually good and interesting?
10:54For me, it's always I'm the audience.
10:56Like would I be interested in what what the script is saying? And so honestly, this script is actually not that strong um but I still recorded the video cuz you got you got to be launching. In the first kind of little bit am I getting across what I'm doing? Um why is it important? Like you can get across so much in just 10 seconds. What you're doing, why it's important, let's get into it. You know, that's what the first 10 seconds of any kind of video should be about cuz most of these videos are 1-minute long, right? It's kind of a movie, you know, a movie is an hour and a half, 2 hours and the first 20 minutes is just a setup.
11:26It's a 2-hour thing. And so for a video that's 1-minute long, you need a setup but it should only be like 10, 20%. So I write this down and so in this case, I said, "Hi, I want to share a new demo of our of our new a demo of our new agent interface." When talking to our users, blah blah blah um and then getting into the demo.
11:42And so for me, this is kind of this is just kind of how I think through it, you know, before I get in front of the camera. The worst part is being in front of the camera and you're like, "Ah, what am I saying?"
11:52You know, like you have you have nothing to ground yourself.
11:55It's good to ground yourself, yeah.
11:56You start with the script and then you move on to some of the visuals. How do you think about what that first shot should be? It's so important, right?
12:02It's the first thing people see when they're scrolling.
12:04I'll show you a quick example of one of our videos. So this video actually did really good on YouTube. Uh this is like a brand new fresh YouTube channel. Like we literally made it and then posted this video 3 days later.
12:14And this is one of our highest converting videos, despite being 19,000 views. Yeah, this video, I think it did like 3 million views on Twitter, Mhm.
12:2120,000 on YouTube, and like some crazy amount on Instagram as well. The same video. So, it kind of did it across We posted just everywhere, you know, just to see what happens. But yeah, I mean, the way I like to do my videos is who is the person making this thing? You know, like, just show yourself. Show your face very clearly. This is you.
12:39This is your personality. Just be proud of who you are, and um confidently tell the camera what you're working on. Cuz if you think it's cool, then I think you'll find at least My thought is always at least one other person will think this is cool.
12:50And that's who I'm talking to. I'm talking to that like one other person in that world that may think this is cool. And so, yeah, I always start with a very clear "Hi, this is what I'm working on."
13:00All you got to do is press and hold at 10 plus control, [music] start talking, and whatever you're saying will stream in as text into whatever text box your cursor is on. For example, if I'm on Apple Notes, I [music] can just say "Great, that's how it works. Um can you give me an example?"
13:13Hey, today I have to ship [music] three things. First, skills, second, memory, and third, this bug that this one user gave about dictation.
13:20Okay, that's pretty cool, but this is like every other product I've ever seen. There's nothing special about this.
13:25So, that's pretty cool, and honestly, many products already do this exact thing today. But here's the thing, when I'm writing, I often don't really know what I even want to say. [music] So, check this out. We're shipping So, then like, I frame the problem for myself.
13:38I'm not saying "Everyone has this problem where they don't know what to write." Like, I'm not involving everybody. I'm only talking about myself. And cuz these are my problems, cuz I'm always building stuff for myself.
13:49screen away dictation. [music] It's pretty cool. I've never seen anything like it before, and I want to show you. Let's say I want to write Again, that's just me being myself, which is like, "Hey, I want to show you."
13:57You come across very natural here. Um was that easy for you to do that in the beginning?
14:02First of all, this whole video is scripted. Every every line that I'm saying, I wrote like 3 days before.
14:07And I said it and I I I I will say it in my head like over and over and over again, in the shower, uh going to work, and I'm always like, "How should I say that line? How should And by the time I'm in front of the camera, I've already visualized it like 10 times.
14:19And it's so funny, after this video we were finished it, I told Vikrant, uh, the person uh, who I make videos with, and I'm like, this is the worst video we've ever done. Uh, it's not even worth editing it. And he's like, no, bro, be quiet, shut up. Uh, I'm going to make it and then we're going to post it. And so again, it's good to have the team also be really like, hey, we made this, like, we're going to put it out. It doesn't matter how cringe we think it is, like, we'll let the audience decide. This video did 3 million views on Twitter.
14:43And people went crazy over it. And it's so funny, I thought it was horrible. I just thought like, this is so this is so bad. So this is one of the situations where I was wrong. And I think founders, I mean, me especially, think something we made is bad, or I made is bad, and then I don't want to put it out cuz it's going to make I don't like how it sounds or feels, I'm constantly forcing myself to put it out. It's not natural for me to click post. Um, but uh, sometimes it is.
15:07Sometimes it's not. Yeah. And so this is one example where I was like so surprised uh, that people even cared to begin with, cuz I thought it was just a pretty simple thing.
15:15It's interesting, um, I I've heard you talk about this almost like demo-driven development where everything that you're working on, you're almost working backwards from a demo that you want at the end of it. And that's kind of the proof that the thing is ready to go, it lets you test it out, and then you get to the end of it and you're like, let's just publish the demo.
15:31The most important thing in my company that I try to always and every company I've ever run is, you know that feeling when you're working with someone, often on the team or a co-founder, and you're like, yo, check this out. That, you have to like be so aware of that, cuz that is the thing that you could probably talk about online. That check this out is exactly like that raw check this out, is exactly how you should be kind of presenting yourself on the internet. In this case, you know, sometimes I go a little bit more fancy if I want to, but sometimes I'm also just a guy in a a simple video, and in the YC office. And
15:59then sometimes, maybe once a quarter, we'll do a polished launch, where it's like, this is like something I'm really proud of, I want to make sure it's talked about properly. But generally, we're launching like demos every single day almost.
16:12It's interesting, now that everybody can, um, put out videos and and do launches every single day, how do you stand out in that world? It seems like um people that are spending lots of money and trying to do fancy produced videos, that's an effort to try to get more attention and stand out and and seem, you know, polished and and further along than you are. Um but you take the opposite approach. And so in a world where there's just so much content and so many videos that are out there every single day, how do you think about how
16:40you try to stand out and how others can, too?
16:43I never think about like that. I always just think about like I'm I I want to talk about something. I think it's interesting. And there's got to be one of the person out there that's that thinks it's interesting.
16:52And when I click post, in my brain, I'm always I'm always like if this gets zero attention, zero views, I'm still happy I posted it. You know, because I'm glad I got something out there. I think that should be the mentality everybody has working on their company launching 2026. Like you can't be thinking about it. By the time I hit post, I've already forgotten it. Um I'm looking at it maybe a week later.
17:14How do you do that? I feel like most people when they post something they're, you know, incessantly just refreshing and trying to see are people liking it, who liked it. Um but you launch and you walk away.
17:24you get to that point?
17:25I mean, you just put so much garbage out there. I put so much garbage out in the world at this point. Not like bad stuff, but just like stuff that I wasn't like this is I didn't think that I didn't think was good.
17:33And people forget the next day. I can make something right now and post it and people are going to forget the next day.
17:39That's just how attention in 2026 kind of works, you know?
17:42And so this is like a perfect example. This is 2021. Mhm. It's a year after YC. I'm like a I'm a solo founder. I've been a solo founder at ZipSchool and a solo founder at Buildspace, solo founder now.
17:52It's not like I'm that Yes, I know how to put a camera in front of me and edit it, but I'm not a fantastic editor. And so this is back when I was working on ZipSchool, which is an online elementary school, and I wanted to show off the new classes that we were launching for our users. And this is the launch video.
18:06Hey there, ZipSchoolers. Faraz from ZipSchool here again to show off four new classes that we just added yesterday to ZipSchool that we are very excited about. The first one is called Mars Perseverance Rover Landing aimed at kids ages 7 to 12. And this class covers the Mars landing that actually Honestly, it is not I'm already checked out watching this video. And What would you do differently? What are the mistakes that you're making in this video?
18:27I think that's the important part. It's not about that. It's about the fact that I posted it and then it got 23 likes, which by the way is more than zero. It got more than zero views. It got more than zero comments. It got one comment from a guy.
18:41I got a bookmark. So like I launched.
18:44This to me is a launch. And I know that sounds dumb to maybe some, but to me this is exactly what launching means. We did something new at the company. We talk about it to the into the world and it doesn't matter if we got 23 views. If there's a chance that we get more than one view, we should talk about it. And so this is a super small thing. This is like an everyday thing in my company where we have cuz we have new classes dropping everyday almost. And so I just make it I'd be like, yeah, let's talk about it. Maybe one day I'll talk about it and one of the
19:12classes will be really interesting and get picked up and go super viral, which never happened. But the fact is I made the videos. And over time I I got so much better at just knowing like how should I talk about products? Cuz think about it like I'm good at making videos in general and writing stories, but talking about products is hard. How do you come off without sounding schilly?
19:31How do you come off without sounding fully yourself? And it's hard. This is funny. This is a launch. This is the first day I worked at my company, December 1st, 2020 and I shipped a landing page. Aaron, there's no copy. There's just a link and there's some weird video I made in Canva and I posted it.
19:48And that's a launch. To me I launched a landing page. Right? In my eyes. And by the way, in this instance I had like maybe a 80 followers or something. So no one was watching what I was doing. And this is just continued. What is this?
20:00Uh I'm pretty excited for the next four years or the USA for ZipSchool for the world. It's going to be great.
20:10And so again, I've just been posting these for just years. And so over time you you build up You know, it's like it's like basketball. You just keep on keep on going like, "Oh man, this is getting closer." And you internally are smart are human being, you're smart Yeah. you'll slowly get better. But if you don't take a thousand shots, you're not going to make the that that the the 5,000th shot, you know?
20:30Clearly, your advice is just put it out there. Don't worry about it. Just put it out there. You need to get the reps.
20:36What are the things that you've learned in the five years since then?
20:40The tips that you could give people now in order to improve their videos and start from a better starting point than you did when you were first doing this.
20:48Totally. I want to be really clear. All my videos are like look very produced, uh but that's because it comes very naturally to me. To make a produced video for me will take like an hour. Um but for other people may take longer.
20:58So, while I'm showing this, I kind of want to be clear like you don't have to produce your videos. It could just be an iPhone video and it'll still do really well. So, this is one of those videos where I just knew even when I when I when I wrote the script that it was going to go big.
21:09Uh it has now 21 million views on Instagram. And believe it or not, this one video is still driving a lot of our traffic. So, that's how these algorithms work like they'll keep serving the content to people uh to more people that want to see it. Also, I've made this video an ad now. So, I'm running Facebook ads now on a video. So, yeah, there's a lot of benefit to making videos for your company.
21:27Last week, I went super viral for an idea that I built that I thought was actually kind of terrible. And this week, I'm somehow in Y Combinator? Let me show you what Okay, so just that hook.
21:37Like what what did I say? Um last week I went super viral for something I built that I thought was kind of ridiculous or whatever, bad. Um cool, like that's interesting. And now he's in this thing called Y Combinator. I've heard of Y Combinator. So, I was kind of targeting that niche. And then a very simple, let me show you what I'm working on. I had it's My formula is always the same.
21:55This is who I am. This is what's going on. This is what I'm working on. Let me show you.
21:59Show you what I'm building. It's called Clicky. It's a little AI buddy that lives next to your computer cursor and teaches you anything in real time for free. Let's say I'm learning how to color grade in DaVinci Resolve. Instead of going to a YouTube video, I just got to ask out loud and Clicky will literally tell me exactly how to get there and even point at it for me.
22:15So, again, a little pretty produced, but again, this this took us like four to six hours to make because we just had done this. But again, even if this was a simple video where I'm like, "Hi, this is what I'm working on. Check this out."
22:26And then I turn the camera to literally show my computer. I think the effect may not have been as big, but again, you just start and you make like 10 of those then. And you get really good at talking about stuff. But again, like that video, super clear hook, a very clear like why you should why you should care right now while you're on your scroll. And so a big thing that I always do when I watch videos on the internet, regardless if they're mine or not, is I ask myself, am I bouncing? When am I bouncing? And so if I go to Instagram Reels anytime, and this is what I do a lot actually. I
22:55watch a lot of content, not for entertainment, just to kind of study. And so I can go to Instagram Reels.
23:01page to block my long-distance girlfriend and post my weight loss journey.
23:05First of all, this is a random video we just stumbled upon, right? There's so much to learn.
23:09Dark background, light on his face, kind of a cool little caption at the bottom where it started 2 months ago. You kind of want to know 2 months ago what?
23:18You're just curious.
23:19Right, what happened?
23:19And so I'll mentally take that as a note and be like, "Oh cool, like maybe we can make a video that uses this as like a template. Maybe it's like 2 months ago I was working on something and I didn't really know what it was and then tell the story." And so again, I'll just keep doing this.
23:34Okay, so this song just hit 2 million streams.
23:36You had a spell when you You wanted to know where I've been.
23:40It's all Welcome back to features we should have released 6 months ago, but we're un-releasing them now.
23:45This is cool. This is what startups should be doing. Yeah, so I'm seeing a lot of this now, but mostly like younger founders, which is cool.
23:50There's almost something like self-deprecating about it. You know, yours is like, "Ah, I had this thing that I thought was terrible." And they're like, "Ah, this is the stuff we should have launched 6 months ago." And this guy's like, "I broke up with my ex-girlfriend."
24:04Everyone wants a story. And so how can a demo just be a mini story or what you're saying be a mini story?
24:09Yeah, and you I've heard you talk about this where it it's not actually you in the video, it's the character Farza. And and it's almost like all these people they're a character that the audience can identify with and ultimately root for potentially.
24:22Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that like when a founder talks to the camera, like you come off as a certain type of way. And so, um totally, sometimes I'm like, yeah, like I am not playing a character, but like I'm a character to the people.
24:33Like when someone watches me on their little TikTok feed or their Twitter feed, like I'm just like random character in their eyes. I'm not like a real I'm a person, but I'm kind of a character. I'll show you guys this, too, which is just something we've been doing that our users have been loving. Uh it's not going viral, but our users have been loving it. And it's just these little Actually, some of them have been going viral, which is pretty cool. This is everything we built this week.
24:56So, ClickUp had been uh had some problems about like the integration and orchestration of the agents. Now, ClickUp has a new brain, and it will feel way more smooth to spawn the agents, to control them, to pause them, and you're going to see a lot of improvements overall. A lot of people complaining about like ClickUp is keep following uh them, so I made a fix for them.
25:15So, there's no there's no hook. There is no attention. There's no story. It's just we're a group of people, and we want to tell you what we're doing. This almost has a million views on Instagram.
25:25Why do you think these are so popular?
25:27I think that this is the most important thing I think about like companies making content. What we are doing on a day-to-day basis at our companies is so far-fetched from what most people think is actually happening at a company. And uh to just give them an inside look of what's actually going on in your process is so cool, and it gets them excited. It gets them interested in what you're doing. What I'm so against and so anti is talking about my life as a
25:56founder on the internet. You will never catch me making those videos about this is a this is my day as a YC founder. Never. Uh like I'm not trying to like tell you about my life and tell you about like my my my that stuff. I'm trying to show you like what I'm doing and why uh in new ways. And I think that um most companies just never show their process.
26:14For most companies, uh big companies, Apple, Meta, you just see Mark Zuckerberg on the stage, and he's showing you his Meta glasses. But a lot of people, especially early adopters of of products that uh you know, that I'm sure many YC founders are working on, uh are interested in just like, "Who are these random group of four guys and girls that are making this AI product and how are they doing it? And just telling we make these videos in 10 minutes and it's just hey, just get up what are you doing today? And yeah, it's interesting. Um it's funny when we
26:43started making these we just made them just to stay accountable. Uh cuz it was uh it was good to kind of tell the people what we kind of stand up but in front of the world and so uh that was kind of the idea and I mean now we now we do these every two weeks and it's been really fun.
26:56Yeah, that's really cool. Um I I think another thing that comes across here is not even just the words that you're saying but like the joy that is in the videos and I think um people see that in your personality and I think they see that in the music that you choose and everybody's kind of like clapping and supporting each other as they're giving their update and it's just like positive vibes are coming through the video and how do you capture that?
27:19Uh see this is so weird because this is where you just have to be yourself. I keep saying that. People always say how do I start making videos about my company or videos about what I'm working on or awesome presents. It's always the same feedback. Make take out your iPhone, click record, go go go uh selfie mode and talk about what you're doing for 30 seconds and post it to your Instagram. Post it to your TikTok and then post it to Reddit and Instagram or Reddit and YouTube or whatever. And you know how many people take me up on that?
27:47Almost like maybe 1% 2% of the time people will actually do it. Why though?
27:51If I told you right now I mean maybe you're different I don't know I don't you're probably different you're you're Aaron Epstein uh but if you if I tell you to point your phone and record a video uh how does that make you feel?
28:00And then post it to your personal Instagram. What do you do?
28:02you get nervous about it like what am I going to say? How am I going to look?
28:05What if people think it's stupid? And all these thoughts I think go through people's heads and they're they're afraid of high school friend follows me. He doesn't care about this what I'm working on like nobody cares. But see that's the thing like there's so much value to you got to be cringe for a little while actually to learn how to not be cringe.
28:24And so a lot of people will like post their first video and be like this is this is horrible I'm not going to post this. But then yeah I think the important part is to continue doing it.
28:31And so again every day as a founder, founders watching on YouTube at YC, you're spending 8 hours on your laptop making magic, smiling, seeing things that you find are interesting. If you just spend even 10 minutes to step back and ask yourself, "What's something I did today that made me smile or was interesting or felt new?" And just talk about it, and then show it, and then click post, and then close it, back to work. That's all you have to do. That's what it means to be launching, I think, in 2026. Just to show your work, cuz that is what
29:00launching is, right? When you launch on TechCrunch or New York Times, like, you're showing your work. But in 2026, you show your you can show your work every day. And you can actually get an audience just by showing your work every day.
29:12of people think, "Well, I'm not targeting Gen Z or whoever stereotypically TikTok users, Instagram users. Therefore, I should not use that as a channel to try to acquire my business customers or I sell to procurement or whatever." But it sounds like your argument is like, "That's not true. There's all kinds of people using these platforms. They're real humans that happen to work at companies where they could be your customer Oh, yeah.
29:35and would be interested in seeing your products, right?
29:37Yes. Everybody in the world is on Well, not everybody in the world, but a large majority of the world is browsing through these platforms.
29:46Yes. We found that design agencies really loved our product. Like, three of them that found us naturally. So, the question became, how do we get more design agencies? Now, well, well, I'm curious, what what what what what would you do if you take yourself back like to founder mode Aaron?
30:01Oh, I don't know. Probably the default for a lot of people is like, go look on LinkedIn and, you know, try to find people that list the place they work as a design agency or go to communities that they hang out in or like specialized design Totally.
30:13websites or something.
30:14And those are all actually pretty good.
30:16You should do those things. But at the same time, do you think a design agency founder is on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube? Do you think they're on these platforms? The answer is probably yes.
30:25It's probably a lot of them. And so, we started making TikToks, I remember. I don't have the the account pulled up here that was just targeting agencies uh design agencies. I would literally say, "Hey, are you a design agency? Or or or hey, are you a the founder of a design agency? Stop right there. Let me show you something really cool. And then that's how we found like 50 design agency leads just through TikTok. And these videos didn't go viral. They each on average had like 4,000 views.
30:48But it was about 4,000 targeted views.
30:504,000 targeted views. So, the goal of my goal is never to go viral. It's just I want to talk about what I'm working on and I want to make sure it's listened to by an audience that would be interested in actually interested in what I'm doing.
31:02How do you think about the different channels?
31:04Every channel is different. I'll say off the bat, Twitter is our worst is in historically I've I've been making stuff on Twitter for like 10 years.
31:11The worst conversion of any channel.
31:13Like this video, the original clicky video, got 7,000 downloads on 3 million views.
31:19If you do the math there, it's like less than 1% or some crazy low number.
31:23It's very low. Screen aware dictation, this video, right? 2.9 million views on Twitter. But the conversion rate onto those people actually making accounts was horrendously low. This YouTube video has 20,000 views. But do you know what the conversion rate on this video is? It's like 20% to them actually downloading the app.
31:41So, the chances of you watching this video and downloading my app is 20%.
31:44Do you think that's something specific to the channel or is it something Yeah, I know. Every channel is different. Think about it. I'm on Twitter. I'm just like doom scrolling basically. Not really doom scrolling. I'm just scrolling through random stuff all the time. And so, for YouTube, I don't know I it was so surprising. And so, historically actually YouTube is for most companies the best performing channel in terms of conversion.
32:03But our numbers are very low. 872 subscribers, 20k views. Like I'm not Mr. Beast, you know? But again, if you do the math, this leads to a very real number of signups. And this video will keep on performing. That's the most important part.
32:17This YouTube is a library that will last for decades. Twitter, you got your moment once and you're gone.
32:22Instagram is another one that's so important.
32:25All of our traffic I think 70% of our traffic is Instagram. This is where you got to be smart. You're like, I'm not trying to go viral. I'm trying to make tell people what I'm doing. But I'm again like down the funnel, how many people actually converted?
32:38It's worth checking out. And so, that's what I think people should always make their video and then start make the first couple of videos, but then start to ask themselves, "Hmm, maybe I should make my For example, our link in bio is {slash} IG. Mhm. Why? Because then I can track like wait a second, what was the conversion rate of people who hit {slash} IG and downloaded my app?" Or if they landed on their phone, sent it to We have a little button that lets them send it to them themselves over email. How many of them clicked that? What was the conversion rate? And so, by posting on all these channels,
33:07you start to see not only where I'm performing views-wise, but actually just like who's Where is my best channel right now in terms of the audience that I'm looking for? And again, for us, it is by far Instagram, and it's it's not even close. I think you're basically using the same content for every channel. Yes, I I do make videos for specific platforms. So, most of our videos we make for Instagram, but then we post to Twitter. Whereas some videos we make for Twitter and then post to Instagram.
33:34What is the difference between one that targets one versus the other?
33:37So simple. I mean, Twitter generally doesn't like vertical videos. It likes 16:9. So then this For example, we have this drawing video. So, we built a system that can draw directly on your screen. It can draw polygons, arrows. This is super optimized for Twitter. Cuz just look, let's let's just watch it muted and imagine I'm scrolling my feed.
33:56Okay, guy in front of blackboard, AI draw screen, I'll watch. It's like it's that quick. It's like AI draw screen, blackboard, he's drawing things, Cloudo Fest demo, click. You know, like my brain thinks like that. What are the quick Cuz nobody's reading this entire this entire damn thing. And so, this is optimized for Twitter. This video is optimized for Twitter. But, what was surprising is we posted the exact same thing to my Instagram, and it performed even better. And you would think that
34:26like this type of video wouldn't perform that good, but it has like millions of views. And it's a vertical video cuz on their phone, it looks even worse. It looks like this.
34:33Well, one thing that I maybe a couple things that I know about you are you have a very high bar for yourself and the things that you put out there. and while at the same time almost ironically you're very comfortable putting a lot of things out there.
34:46Um and so you I hate to use the word taste, but like you've been doing this so long that you have a high bar and a good sense of of what you would be excited to watch and you just naturally have a very short attention span. You get bored and you like want the next thing and if you're not getting that then you move on and I think that serves you very well with the videos that you're creating here.
35:09Yeah, either I have good taste or I just put out so much stuff and some of them just hit.
35:13That's how you get it I think is you you put it out you put out a lot of things and you continue to improve and that that levels up your work.
35:20Totally. I think I have more the latter where I just put out so much stuff and some of the some of it works and again we're looking at the stuff that's working, but so much hasn't worked.
35:27Like my old Zip School videos like nobody cared.
35:29But this is what this is a perfect example. This was a super simple video. Basically, just a quick story here.
35:36I found out that with GPT real time you could generate shell commands. I can control your computer in real time. And so we can watch it real quick. All right, check this out. No hands. Ready?
35:45Hey Cookie, can you please open up Spotify and play ACDC for me? Maybe uh Back in Black. I love that song. Rock on. It's playing Back in Black now. Amazing amazing. Cookie Hey Cookie, it's a little bit loud. Could you turn it down in Spotify 50%? It's so loud.
36:01[music] Got it. Lowering Spotify to 50% so it's less intense. Okay, thank you. Hey Cookie, can you open up my So now I'm going to keep going. And this is actually a fun one. Stripe dashboard for me in my browser. Let's see if we made any money today. Opening your Stripe dashboard now.
36:19Oh man, $140 in a day is not And so to me that was just one little moment in the day where I was like, oh my god this AI model could do this. I didn't check if anybody did it before.
36:31I was just like, I'm going to make a video. Turns out I did something very novel. And um again the examples I used playing a song on Spotify uh and lowering the and lowering the volume that's exactly the first use case that I had as a user myself.
36:44And so again, always building for like the version of myself that's kind of watching out there. Cuz if I think that's cool, I think someone else would, too. And hey, look. 3.8 million views on Twitter.
36:53Really good. But again, then Instagram, 4.6 million. You know, people always say like you got to be super like your brain has to be rotten when you're scrolling Instagram, and you got to have a lot of quick edits and blah blah blah. Like there's not a single cut in this video.
37:06Yeah, there's no cuts in the video, but there are beats in the video.
37:11That you do a very good job with. You know, we see you first. You say, "Hey, no hands." So right off the bat, I'm like, "Oh, no hands. He's just talking to this thing."
37:20Which is the hook that I think gets people to watch.
37:22That's all purposeful.
37:23Yeah, then you play the song. Then you lower the music so that you can continue to talk over it, and it responds to that as well. Then you pull up the stripe stripe dashboard, and somebody goes, "I wonder how much money they made today."
37:33There's always there's Yeah, I'm always just trying to keep the story moving. I'm not trying to keep your attention.
37:37That's actually the wrong way to look at it. I'm always trying to I'm always like, "All right, where's this guy going?" Come on. You know, you're like, "Come on, keep going." When you're someone talking, like Let's get to the end of the story. Okay, you went to the movies, and I said you just keep doing that endlessly. And so um I I love that you said the word beats. Some of my videos are purposely made to just kind of like appeal to like the audience that just has no attention span.
38:02You know, for example, like this one. It has been 9 weeks since I built and launched my idea to the world. It's an AI that can draw directly [music] on your screen and guide you through any So that's one example of like a quick.
38:13I'll show you this example here, which is um talking about the beats just for once.
38:17Two weeks ago, I was in my apartment trying to figure out a cool idea to [music] work on. Two weeks later, I built this thing that's now being used by thousands of people every single day. And the crazy part is So again, I literally think about it like like like this.
38:31Am I still watching? I think as you make these videos again and again, um it becomes a lot more obvious to you as you do it. Uh we have this one guy at our office right now. He is 19, and he has this built into his head. Uh the same the same beat system. And it's It's like most people who work on videos a lot have this little beat system in their head.
38:48I think another thing that's unique is you actually um invest a lot in your early team, which is small, but a large portion of it is actually built to help you create and produce and get these videos out the door on a regular basis.
39:00Yeah, I mean I always say like I'm okay at videos. There are people out there who who are way better at me.
39:07My first two hires were I knew from the beginning, even before I started my company, it's going to be number one, a filmmaker, and number two, an engineer. And this number one is film is filmmaker for me. So that is the first one. Or whenever whatever order they can come in.
39:22Why was that so important to you?
39:23I don't want to put a ton of attention every day on making videos. I mean any founder watching, any founder in YC, like nobody wants to do that every day.
39:30At at some at some level you do have to in the beginning in the early days. And yeah, I mean look at my Clickey videos, like I'm forcing myself to just make videos and make stuff every day. At one point, you're like, well, this would be really great if someone's full-time job at my company was to kind of observe what we were doing and help us launch and constantly make it their their mission to make us look good when we launch as well and make us come off properly.
39:52And so that's why a filmmaker was one of the first hires I I made at this company. And at my last company, our film team was two people. We were only like a seven-person team.
40:00So even at this company, at one point at Clickey, we had three people making videos and one engineer. Um cuz it's so funny now, it's so easy to pump out more code and more software, but it's harder than ever to actually talk about what you are doing in a coherent way in front of an audience.
40:18Cuz now Aaron, you know, someone can clone my product in like two minutes at this point. But again, what they what's really hard to clone is the audience and the community that I built around what I'm doing and the energy around it. If you got an audience around your company, I'll say 100,000 people that was really into what you were doing, maybe enterprise AI, you know, uh maybe something around like photography or whatever, whatever your niche is, Mhm.
40:40that'd be useful. Cuz cuz that's why you know, I can make a video now about a new feature and like thousands of people flood my app.
40:46That's awesome. That's like every founder's dream, right?
40:49Tell us more about the gear that you're using today to to produce these videos.
40:52Yeah, so for demos on my computer, which is just like what I'm hacking on that day, I always use this thing called Screen Studio. I think it's like made by some indie hacker. It's just really good. It's record your screen, record your local audio, makes your cursor look good, and I think it costs like 30 bucks. That's like one level. Then the next level is like, well, videos that more include me in a more kind of like kind of native way, and for that I just pull up my iPhone. Literally just a selfie camera and just record myself talking, post, or edit on my phone even.
41:20Um I use on my phone it's Instagram's editing tool, it's called Edits, a lot. So when I I I do edit on my phone a good amount. So that's the iPhone.
41:29Nothing else required. But then there's like the next level where it's like you feel like you want to do something a little bit more kind of like thought through, cinematic, and that's where I use my Sony FX3. Sony FX3 or Sony FX3?
41:42The cheaper one. Along with a DJI mic.
41:44It's actually funny, the most important This is actually so important. I I can't believe I missed this. The most important thing in any video you make doesn't matter if it's a shitty Loom or a shitty like little video or your iPhone is audio quality. If your audio is bad, I'm bouncing. I've watched some some demos that are like 720p and just like the guy's in like a weird room in a basement, but his audio is crisp. And what he's working on is actually genuinely interesting, so I stick around. And so I don't care about the the rest of it. I don't care what he
42:13looks like, anything. I'm like, I can hear him and I can see what he's doing. That's it. Yeah. And so I think if every founder could just invest in one of the super cheap DJI mics, find them used online, or just any mic that's not your MacBook mic, your or your AirPod mics, those don't count, that would be really good. And then for editing on my actual laptop I use DaVinci. Yeah.
42:37And maybe the most important part of my stack he's not here right now, but Vikrant. Vikrant has made all the Hey Clicky videos. And without that guy making me look good and making us look good, none of this would happen. And so I don't want to sit here and be like I made all all videos and did all this stuff. Every video we just looked at, apart from the the Bad Zip School ones which were made by me, are made by Vikrant. And so, having a person that is actually talented at filmmaking, storytelling, writing next to you is like the biggest bonus a founder could have today. So, a big part of how I work with Vikrant,
43:07who's the person who helps me with all these videos, is we just brainstorm. We're like, "Hey, we made this feature. What should How should we make the video now?
43:16What are we thinking? Where should we do it?" And so, Vikrant is actually the main guy that's like, "Hmm, I had this shot idea." Or, "Hmm, I had this hook idea." Or, "Hey, I have this other idea." And often I'm the guy that's bringing the script and the song and the vibe that I'm going for.
43:31Cuz as the founder, I think you'll slowly find what are the things that you're good at in video making. There's some aspect to it. So, for me, I find I'm really good at writing and I'm really good at the music.
43:41And then Vikrant is good at literally everything else. From shooting to picking the set to editing after to, you know, all the little motion graphics he does. Just so talented. And then as the founder, me as Farza, I can go back to focusing on growth, hiring, making the product. I don't want to spend all my time on making videos, you know?
44:01I don't think any founder watching this wants to do that. And and look, I think a lot of these a lot of people watching probably can't afford to hire a filmmaker or like an actual person on their team. They're maybe just solo or they're co-founder.
44:11And what I'll say is, "Hey, go back to my old Zip School videos. Go back to Just scroll through any of my social media and look at all my old shitty videos and just start somewhere. That's the most important thing about making launch videos and launching today is you got to start. And the more you keep doing it every day, the more natural it'll become and slowly hopefully more people check out your product. Hopefully you can then hire someone that does it even better than you. So, for example, I'm not the engineer at my company anymore. I'm not the core engineer. I have someone that's a lot better than me.
44:41And same with filmmaking, same with design, same with every aspect of my company. But in the early days as a founder, you're doing everything.
44:48You're doing taxes, you're doing design, you're doing filmmaking. And so, you got to do everything. You can't be a little baby about it. You got to take out your camera and start posting some cringe stuff.
44:56Cuz in order to not be cringe, you must first be cringe, so Yeah. And then yeah, for all of my writing, I always use this thing called Free Write. Um it's free to download, freewrite.io. It's my app. I built it actually just for this purpose.
45:08Uh yeah, free, open source, you can check it out. Maybe this is one thing I should I didn't mention at all before is writing is so important. So spend as much time possible before the video uh writing it. So before you get in front of the camera and maybe record it, if you've never made a video, don't worry about this, but if you're like on your 15th, 20th, 30th video, try writing. Try writing for just 10 minutes about what the what it should be and then record it. Um you'll find that the more you think through it before you get to the video, uh the better it can possibly get. Cuz then you can catch a
45:37bad idea before it gets here.
45:39And that's it. That's that's that's that's my stack.
45:41I think you you have a challenge for everybody who's watching for something they can do today to get started, right?
45:46My challenge to everyone watching this is um if you've never really made videos or if you uh have never really talked about your work online, but you've been hacking, you've been tinkering, you've been working on something, super simple. Every day, just spend 10 minutes, take your phone out, iPhone or Android, it's okay, and then just record yourself talking about what you were doing to what you did that day, and then post it to your social media of choice, Instagram, TikTok. You know what? Make it Make a new Instagram account. So your your existing followers don't even know.
46:15You do just post it somewhere. And do that for 30 days straight, and I promise you, within those 30 days, one of those videos will surpass probably 1,000 views. And then you can look back and ask yourself, hm, that one did 1,000 views.
46:31Maybe the next one, and you can learn from that, and you can make the next one uh based off the one that got 1,000 views. And you can slowly get better and better and better. That's the challenge, yeah. 30 days straight, every day one video. Send it to me. Uh I'll be I'll be I'll be one of your likes uh if you're doing this challenge, and yeah, go for it.
46:47And it's never been easier to do this, right? To get that message out.
46:50It's never been easier. It's never been easier.
46:52Farza, thank you so much for being here. This is incredible advice.
46:55Anytime, man. [music] [music]
