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- [00:00]
A
There's a way to create beautiful designs, beautiful websites, beautiful apps, beautiful motion. And I just learned about it and it's through this thing called Google md. It's using skills and the entire process of this is what we explain on this podcast. I had my friend Meng to, who's one of the best designers I know, come on and share his entire workflow to how to create jaw dropping beautiful designs that by the end of this episode, you will become a designer. You're going to be able to create better design than 99.99% of this planet. And what does that mean? That means that your startup, your idea, your app is going to have a higher chance of getting people to install it, to buy it, to share it. And we all can use that. So enjoy the episode and I'll see you in there. Meng, welcome back. Second time on the pod. By the end of this episode, what are people going to get out of this?
- [01:08]
B
Google just came out with Design md and this is one way to create a blueprint, to take one beautiful design, whether you made it or not, and then spread throughout all the formats and the mediums for your startup idea, right? So you can turn a beautiful design system that is created by a master in their craft, like a designer, and then you can turn that into motion design, a landing page, different sections of the landing page, mobile design, and so on. So a lot of people struggle right now with, you know, this idea. You know, they start really strong with one shot and then suddenly they get into the other pages and they suddenly have something more and more generic. So this is what we're going to be learning. I'm going to teach you all the tricks, remix, iterate. What is the design system? Typography, colors, all the things that people struggle in.
- [02:10]
A
Design perfect in your world. I feel like a lot of people are talking about Design MD in my world, not that many people are talking about it, but they want to be able to create jaw dropping beautiful designs even if they're not a designer, because they're, you know, we're using agents now, we're building startups, we're taking ideas out of our head. But, you know, we don't want a purple vibe coated website or app. We want something that's beautiful, that's consistent. And so I'm excited for you to explain what Design MD is. I'm excited for you to explain how you can actually get inspired by other designers and use some of their systems to create something of your own. Meng, thank you so much for being generous with your sauce. And tactics and tips and tricks. There's no one I look up to more than you in this regard. So thank you.
- [03:07]
B
Yeah, I just want to mention something before we start. People don't realize how hard it is to get the right distribution, the marketing. And I want to thank you Greg, because, you know, remember the first time I came to your podcast, I started with a $3,000 MRR and it shot up to 15,000 MRR just by going through your podcast. And obviously there's a ton of value over time. So you know, to those who don't know, like going to, you know, Greg's podcast is like the bucket list, like the number one thing you want to, you know, reach towards to. And yeah, I prepared presentation, you know, slides and all that stuff because like, you know, Replit just introduced slides and you know, we started doing, you know, hyper frames, we started doing remotion. So I prepared all of this. As a designer, I feel very strongly about this. So let me just share my screen. First things first. I realize a lot of people are Vibe coding their apps, their, they're Vibe coding their startup marketing and so on. Everything I do today, including this tool that I'm showing you, which is my own notion with slides, is Vibe coded and I made it by myself. So I also want to say that all of these images are all generated using the context of the title and I'm using the new GPT image 2. So with that said, I prepared the slides and I want to go through one by one what is Design md? But first of all, I just want to also preface on what we're going to be discussing the things that I want to teach everyone about design and how we get there and then we going to end with a demo. So these are the kind of five main points I want, I want to go through and then we, we're going to get started. Design, as I mentioned before, Design MD is just open source and I can find the tweet right here. They have a 10 minute video, you can watch it. Essentially what it means is that just the same way a lot of people are using agents MD or Skill MD or SOL md for those who are using Cloudbot or in this case it's open cloud now. So basically this is for designers and if you want to take the soul of the design and you want to bring that to the agent and you want to bring a design system, the colors, the typography that makes a design beautiful, well, you port it and you put it all into an MD file and then you put it into your prom as an attachment and then boom, you have a beautiful design. So this is what design md. And you will see extremely efficient ways to use this across multiple medium. Not just web design, but, but also, you know, like, you know, like motion design nowadays and slides. So you know, for example, quick break
- [06:27]
A
in the pod to let you know about a free workshop I'm doing that answers some of your biggest questions. The first is in the AI age, what are some categories that are ripe for startup ideas? I'm going to outline a bunch of those different categories, the ones that I think the most opportunity is. Second is there's a million AI tools out there which are the ones that matter when I'm trying to build a business. I'll walk you through that. And lastly, how do you actually build a business with some of these AI tools? So I'm actually going to show you live how I do this with my ideabrowser.com team and I can't wait to see you there. It's this Thursday at 12pm Eastern. And if you go to the show notes, if you go to the description, you can click a link RSVP and learn a few things. I hope it'll get your creative juices flowing. And I'll see you back at the pod.
- [07:17]
B
I'm gonna give you just some quick examples of what I created. So for example, when you have a design, right, you can sort of like take one design and using whatever medium, like whether it's React or HTML, you can create like a, a nice promo video or you can create like a slide. And this is all using the same DNA, which is the design md. So as you do this, for example, this is a slide and this is a promo video, you can see that this is two different approach to a design. And this is the result. And if you want, there's a ton of resources that allows you to save those design md. So one of them, obviously I created them myself, but they're totally free. You can just download them. Right now my Internet is super slow, so here you can see we have a lot of these design systems and it's essentially just one file. You click here, you download it and it contains all of this visual stuff, typography, colors, spacing. And if you look at the, you know, the markdown itself, if you've used markdown, it's essentially a structured text with tables, titles and code. And you can, if you read through all of this, you have the weapons and the arsenal to essentially prompt efficiently. And you can sort of commit this to memory and then it becomes your design. So it's very simple. You add all of this to prompt, right? And then it becomes the, the HTML or the Design md. The HTML is more like the sort of finished dish and the MD file is more like the recipe. The skills are like the ingredients. So you put it all together and it becomes your design, which is what I just showed earlier.
- [09:32]
A
And that's a big deal because you know why, like honestly why I wanted to have you on the pod is, you know, it's such an advantage to having scroll stopping design. Like the video you shared, like the MP4 there that you shared, that was beautiful. And so I guess my question is how do you, if you're not a designer, coming up with these systems yourself, like from scratch is really hard. So how do you, what's the process for. For finding, you know, for finding brands and identities that resonate with you.
- [10:24]
B
Right. So you know, coming back to the slide, right. Oftentimes, you know, people, they one shot something they saw like a beautiful prompt, oftentimes it's bigger than the code. They copy and paste that they have no idea how it's done and they also have no leverage on how to change it. So the first screen is not the hard part. So you know, right. Nowadays you kind of feel like you're the one who's always like telling AI what to do and you don't have control. And the question is like, how do you solve this problem which is a design drift. Okay, you start something, you're kind of satisfied with it, but then you get into the other stuff and it becomes completely different. So that's why we need Design md. And you don't want to end up something like this. You want to end up with a system, a process where you can bring, whether it's a screenshot, an HTML, a design md, or all of those ingredients and recipes. And back to your question, Greg. There's a ton of resources that share all of these things, but Design MD is new. Most places they share templates, right? We all know, you know, like you go to a template and obviously I'm taking my mine as an example, but you can go to any of the templates that you find on V0lovable. You know, all of these other place framer figma community for people who are more familiar with designs. And the problem with those is that they are highly close behind the techniques and the rectangles and the pixels of figma or Framer of webflow. But you know, then how do you tell that to an Agent and that's the big question. So nowadays you can go to new communities that share the actual blueprint, which is a design md. So for example, I want a design that looks like this, that has this animation, that has the blue color, that has these systems of, you know, beautiful typography and selections and buttons that, you know, I don't want everything, I don't want the whole template. I just want something to start with that I can tell my AI to start with that and then be consistent across the board. Now if you only provide a portion of it or something too specific, the AI tends to sort of like take that too literally. But if you provide something more like a foundational system, like a process agents MD and what and whatnot, then you get something that gives more flexibility to your system when you're going to be working on new designs or new mediums or, you know, you want to be consistent across the board.
- [13:31]
A
Cool. Yeah. I mean, when I see this, like, first of all, this is gorgeous. But what I would want to refrain from is like to your point, duplicating that and just creating the same cookie cutter website, you know, because there's, I'm sure you see this all the time. Like you, you know, you come across a website, it's a Shopify, it's a WordPress, it's a framer, it's whatever. And you're like, I've seen this website before, right? I've seen this website, but it's another brand, right? And that like cookie cutter doesn't work anymore. And it's the same reason, like, you know, you go into a downtown core city and like all the buildings look the same, right? And you feel like there's like hom homogeneous cityscapes that are existing now.
- [14:26]
B
Yeah. And I fully agree with you. Everything is so high, like the baseline is so high nowadays. But also the baseline is also very generic. What used to be wow, five, ten years ago now is generic. Which is funny because like if you look at the purple gradient, everyone was like, wow, purple gradient, I want to use that. But nowadays if you see something with, you know, purple gradients, you just run. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that we have evolved so much and humans have a way to solve new problems and to adapt. And I think that's the real intelligence. And so I think the question nowadays for me is how do you deal with taste, right? How do you design something? How do you make ultra quick decisions, right? To take something, whether is the ingredients, the recipe, the secret sauce, for me, the secret sauce is the design, right? Because, you know, you don't want people to run away from your landing page. You don't want them to look at your brand and like, oh, shit, this feels like, you know, just like the 1000 startup that I've seen over the past week. So if you focus on design enough, right, if you find these systems that you can bring to your own system that is flexible enough, then you can create something way more powerful. So I like to think of design MD like a design memory, and this is great because it can transfer between platform. So if you're working in lovable and you like what you've done, or in cloud design, and then you want to move it to Figma or you want to move it to, you know, to cursor or to, you know, nowadays I use codecs a lot. I know a lot of people use cloud code, but you can totally do all of that stuff because you can carry this design MD and then you can commit it to memory by telling your AI, your agent to remember. I mean, I do that all the time. Remember this, remember that. And I think agents nowadays are doing a pretty good job at trying to remember the workflow that you've just done, right? Because that workflow is unique to you. Like a lot of things that I make nowadays, I'm sure it applies to everyone out there who is making their own apps. First of all, for me, when I make apps, I look at what is the moat, what is something that I can do with my app, that notion cannot do, or Figma cannot do. For me, that mode right now is the fact that everything is local. So for example, this is all local. And because it's local, it generates these MD files across folders and nested folders that I can just open in Codex and open that folder and tell my agent, look, I have a Greg Eisenberg podcast. I want you to prepare all of these screens. I want you to prepare 10 sections or 10 notes or do research, and it has all of that knowledge and it can create all of those files in one single go, which I think is such a big moat nowadays, right? You can't like, sure, some tools can do that, but one, you have to deal with tokens, you have to pay for them. You cannot run locally and you don't have your own workflow embedded into it. But nowadays you have something like openclaw or Codex or cloud code that can do all of that. And it's so scary how good it is,
- [18:27]
A
100%. So you mentioned cloud Design. You mentioned all these different platforms. We're talking about Google, so Google Stitch is another one. Can you show us how we can go from MD file plus HTML to creating something?
- [18:56]
B
Sure. First of all, I just want to start with sort of like, you know, getting the MD file, but also focusing on the design aspect. For me, it's really important, but not everyone's going to do that. But I think it makes sense to start with that. So, for example, you know, I don't know if, you know, variant. Variant is also very good. Variant.com, you know, I like tools like this because they allow me to get into the sort of creative stage, which I think is incredibly important. And essentially what you want to do is just to remix. You know, click one button, remix, click one button, remix. You find something that you like, you remix, and so on and so forth. So that's why, you know, for me, as someone who build aura, I also find it incredibly enticing. So I go to community, right? And I find something that I like and. And, you know, I just. I just remix it really quickly in one click. I have a bunch of skills, like I mentioned before, skills are like ingredients. And, you know, if you go to some of these skills, you're gonna see that some of them are so, so powerful. And this is your moat in design, because you don't want to look generic, you don't want to have purple gradients. So the only way to do that is, for example, you create a skill for lasers. Okay? So I know it sounds funny, but whenever I create a landing page with lasers, everyone clicks on it. I don't know why, but people love it so much because they love special effects, right? You go to a movie, what, you know, you want to see special effects. You want to see, you know, the Avengers kind of, you know, doing these grand things. So that's the mode, right? Like nowadays, just having the typography, just having the colors is not enough unless it's a secondary page or unless it's something that is very serious. But if you're talking about a landing page or a promo video or, you know, a slide, you need a moat. So, yeah, you know, like, remix super fast. Blah. You know, like you're gonna remix this, click one button, you know, and then do that until you're happy. Once you're done with that, with that flow, then you get into the prompt, right? So each skill has a prompt, so you can copy this and anything. All of that stuff like DesignMD and skills are free. And this is not why you should be paying money. You pay money because of tokens. You pay money for the finished results, such as a template and sort of like the whole sort of automation and whatnot. So, you know, you're gonna go to a template, you know, like, I don't know, let's go to this one. And then you're gonna download both the HTML and the Design md. The reason why I'm saying HTML is that, you know, Design MD may not hold all the information that you need to create your first result. It does hold sort of like the typography, colors, the foundation, the spacing. Some of them, including my own, holds also the WebGL, which I find, for those who don't know, WebGL is the animation that powers the laser. Right. Without WebGL or 3js, which is for 3D, you don't have any of that stuff. You only have the typography and some of the reveal animations and some of the rules. So that's why these two elements here for me is really important. And that's what gives you these beautiful animation that makes your site a lot more unique. It goes from, you know, 0 to 50 or 50 to 80 real fast. And so, yeah, I would download the two of them and, you know, back to here. So we already had the demo, so I might as well show you guys. On Aura, you can go to Design md. This is where you're gonna find all of this stuff, the design. And then you take something that you like and you add it to your prompt. So the same way that I download Design MD and HTML, I add it to my prompt. And now I'm ready to tell what I want for my landing page. So, for example, I can say something like, okay, create a landing page for my startup call. You know, I don't know, like Aura. And I know really original. So. And then it's going to be a chat app that is, you know, that, that is using AI and that ships stuff to people, to their email, whatever. So let's see what it does. Okay, so now we have the Design md, we have the HTML, and then we're just going to create it. Let's hope for the best. But, you know, it's quite this, this. Obviously you don't have to use Aura. You can just use whatever tool that you want. I just wanted to show you that that's essentially what you're supposed to do. You download the two files or just the Design MD however you want that to be, and then you start creating your page through that system. And from there you can generate More elements, more sections, because you have the design MD always with you. And also you can bring that to another platform. It's not specific to one platform.
- [24:36]
A
And what's your take on Google Stitch? I haven't gone deep in it.
- [24:42]
B
Right. So for me, honestly, as someone who builds a startup using tokens, you know, it's really unfair to be honest, because they're able to give all of these stuff for free. And I just realized, you know what, like, I spent almost half a million dollars in token for my startup right now. Right. It's insane. So, yeah, you can do basically the same thing. I don't know if this is the correct one, but you know, like create the landing page for Aura and you know you're going to select web and you're going to select 3.1. Now what makes it different is that it has an infinite canvas. Oh, I don't know what's going on here, but it's also doing stuff differently. And this, this concept of like attaching design md, which I feel very strongly about, is still like new to a lot of platforms. So as someone who works in AI, your mode is basically, you have to be new. You know, you have like, I, I don't, I'm sure anyone can relate, but you always, when there's a new model that comes, you have to talk about it. Otherwise you're kind of losing a lot of that sort of edge that you have over all of these companies. So the same way with tools and the same way when you build a startup, you have to utilize all the best technologies and tools. And in this case we're using a design md, it's recreating exactly that foundation that we saw on Aura. And you know, it's going to create the same consistent design whether it's from here or on Aura. In this case, I use two different designs, so that's why we have two different designs. But if, you know, in this case I'm using auralist and the other one I use, the one that I click earlier. But you know, here I can just say, you know, create the footer and it's going to create, like add the footer and it's just going to create the footer. But you can see the design using this technique gives me exactly what I want. It also, you know, it also adapted to my, to my design, to my brand, to my copywriting. And then from here you can use skills, right? Like, for example, I love to use skills. Like if you go to skills, copywriting skill. So this is going to improve your copy by 100%. You know, it's going to look at your text and it's going to make it so much better. So skills, design, md, HTML, all of these things, if you merge all of them and blend all of them together, you create something really, really powerful. And to visualize all of this, this is a new tool that I built, which is called New Form. You can sort of like in one click, I turn this, which is a motion design, right? I go to prompt and I have all of these skills that I already saved. And then I can just click, oh, I want laser. I'm going to click on laser and I can just create another one and another one. So I love the idea of queuing, which is why we have a different products is because, like, queuing is such a powerful idea that I use all the time. Nowadays I create like 3, 4 products at the same time. I have like multiple chats with sub agents across all of them. So that's why, you know, I wanted to create something way more focused on the creative aspect. And on top of that, we also have the remix type. Again, all of these are prompts, by the way. Like, I'm not like, you know, keeping anything behind closed doors. You don't have to use my tools at all. But, you know, I just wanted to show you visually how it is, like, to turn something into mobile, right? Or, you know, if I go here to mobile, you're going to see that I have turned my designs into mobile design.
- [29:02]
A
Beautiful.
- [29:03]
B
You know, I mean, if you look at this, it's hard to tell if this is made by a human or by AI. But I can guarantee you 100% that this was made by AI. And from here I can just say, okay, I want a slide deck. Okay, I want, you know, a motion design. I want the hero section of, you know, and then I'm doing six design at the same time, which is so good, so good for the creativity.
- [29:30]
A
It kind of reminds me of how midjourney works. You know, on midjourney, you kind of. I haven't used midjourney in like a year and a half maybe. But like, that concept around, you can like generate multiple things. And what's really cool about this is like, you get into this flow state of like, okay, I want this, I want that. I'm gonna queue this up and it's really fun.
- [29:55]
B
I agree. Like, the concept of queuing is not new per se. I'm just saying, you know, a lot of the things that we do see here, it just transform into mobile and a Lot of the things we do can just be transferred so easily because we have this concept of skills and design md. Right? So one of your guests, for example, was talking and he calls himself like a skills maxi, which I find it really funny because I totally agree. For me, I don't put anything in my agents MD because I have my design md, which I use per project, and then I have my skills, which I use per workflow. And if you only change the agent MD oftentimes, you know, first of all, it costs a lot more tokens, but also it's too general. Like, it doesn't apply to every single workflow out there. So here I added the laser and here I turn it into a slide. You know, like, again, it's so, so fun to cue and to sort of like expand your creativity across all of this stuff. So you have something like aura lovable V0, which allows you to chat and sort of like evolve into something into a product. But I think what people sort of underestimate a lot is the design aspect, which is, you know, how do you come up with new sections that are unique? Right. How do you, you know, work on the creativity and how do you learn about all of this stuff? Because if you don't learn this stuff, you know, you're just focusing so much on the chat and you're just chat, chatting, chatting, and then giving commands and the AI to do all the work for you, then you're not making any decision, or at least you're not making the best decision for your product.
- [31:45]
A
Can you quickly go back? I'm just curious, more than anything, like the skills section of New Form, I think it's called.
- [31:52]
B
Yes.
- [31:54]
A
What happens when I click there?
- [31:56]
B
Yes. So you have access to. Right now we have 63 skills, but I'm adding more every day. So, for example, you have a skill for skeuomorphic design. For those who don't know, skeuomorphic design is kind of like the realistic design that Apple used to use before, the flat design. And it's a prompt. It's just a prompt, and you can copy this prompt and you can just tell your agent to use, you know, to use this skill and then to apply that. So, for example, you're going to have something a little bit more embossing, you know, something like, like this design, for example, you know, it has some of these, you know, shading and stuff like that. A lot of people still love that. I love that when it makes sense. So, for example, if you do like a DJ app, you might want something with a Little bit more realistic. You want a button that is lickable, as Steve Jobs says. Well, yeah, you need a skeuomorphic design, right? And we also have a skill for, you know, for the 3D. So you know, this, this little globe here that you put, well, that's 3D. And then you can move that on top of the text, which makes it look really nice. So a lot of like every skill can be anything. You know, it can be like a batch design like this one. And you can have all of these are also copyable. So for example, if you only want just the colors, you can just copy the colors or you just want the typography. So not only do you learn how to sort of like add to your arsenal all of these keywords that you did. What is font smoothing? What is size, what is system font, what is a body font? Or what is the secondary color? What is the secondary button? So all of these things are really useful when you, you know, chat with your AI agents and you know, sometimes I condense it into just one word. Okay, fix the spacing, fix the gap, you know, fix this, fix that. And it's just so powerful to learn all of this stuff because it's all part of the design md and it holds so much richness to how you can manage your design.
- [34:07]
A
And it must be cool for you because you've been teaching designers for years now and these are mostly, I mean trained designers now anyone is a designer.
- [34:23]
B
That's such a good point. Honestly. You know when, when I first started, nobody was using like most designers were not coding. And nowadays everyone is coding, including non designers. You know, before like 10, 20 years ago, everyone was using Photoshop and then Sketch and in figma. But nowadays everyone is a designer and everyone is kind of like downloading a template on HTML or design MD and then suddenly they have the most beautiful landing page. Sure they one shot it, sure they don't know how to change it or make it better, but they still have an amazing one shot, you know, one shot prompt. But what I want to teach here is the whole workflow so that you don't end up with just a one shot thing. And how do you, you know, can you guess how many prompts that I used to build these products? Just give me a number. How many prompts do you think I use? It's definitely not one shot.
- [35:23]
A
I don't know. Couple dozen? 20, 25?
- [35:27]
B
At least a thousand. Yes. This is how obsessive one can be when it comes to creating. Yes. Like I'm building four products right? Now, you know, aura new form. Well, this, I don't really count it as a product. I have Dreamcut, which I'm gonna be revealing soon. It's a Mac app. And, you know, I'm also rebuilding design code from scratch. So four products all at once. And I'm not even including a side product like this one, which, honestly, I love using it just because I'm able to tell my agent to write everything for me. And I'm able to just generate these images, these YouTube content covers using a history of my portrait that I save into this. Because there's no tool that does this, right? Like you. You build tools literally because nothing else is doing it. And there's nothing else that has a slider that says, okay, I want this to be exactly. Or I want this to be loosely inspired. Like, have you seen this UI before?
- [36:33]
A
I've never seen that. And I see a lot of products.
- [36:35]
B
Exactly. And the only reason why we're able to kind of get there is because we're building something for ourselves, right? And it's such a powerful thing. So if you look at the whole workflow, right? You. You start with a reference. Every. Every designer, every someone who starts drawing something, they always copy first. They always start with reference, the designer md. Or in. In most cases, they're just taking like copying a prompt, some, somewhere. And then we generate, we inspect, and then eventually using the designer md, you see? And then, like I said, you iterate. This is where I get like to a thousand iterations. And then you, you know, and then you remix it to turn it into more medium, such as the slide. You need marketing material, Instagram slides, promo videos, you need like, intros, you need, you know, something for your hyper frames or for your remotion, whatever it is. You're essentially remixing at this point because you're happy, because you've done a thousand iterations, you're happy with your product, you're happy where it's going. You feel there's a soul to it. Because I think most people, what they tend to forget is that humans, they don't see the soul across the street. We do. Okay? We, like, we're innate to that. When you can feel. I don't know how to say it, but Steve Jobs said it very well. When you use a product and when you really, like, take a magnifier and you look into it, you really feel the care that is put into it. It's not because we have AI that we can just skip all of that care, right? It just happens that that care is now residing into the prompting and the sort of the workflow, the claw, the open claw, you know, the things, the thousand iterations that I do. I've never worked more, more in my entire life on more products, on, like, on more prompts in my entire life than now. AI is not making me lazier. AI is making me more work more. And yeah, you know, and, you know, we, we get into the expansion and then we export our product and it becomes like a final product that we can ship. So iteration versus remix, this is a very important concept. Like I mentioned in my slider, iteration is when you're happy with the result and you wanna kind of like do small incrementations and remix is when you wanna build a new product category, for example. So I love the idea of iteration more. And I use this, I would say 90% of the time and 10% of the time, and then, yeah, I already did the demo. Okay, so we can talk about what has changed for designers. So what I believe is that everything is changing and we're doing a lot less of the moving pixels, moving rectangle and resizing things. We're doing a lot more judgment per minute. In fact, for me, the agent is more like someone who's doing a lot of the sort of the moving pixels and the coding and then I have to make the right decisions. I remember the CEO of Amazon was saying, like, if you make a really good, like one powerful decision in a day or a few powerful, then that change your entire business. And I think, you know, I agree with that. You have to make these extremely powerful decisions and also you have to make these incredibly, incredibly small decisions as well, just because the AI is not intelligent enough to make the smaller decisions yet. But eventually it's going to get bigger and bigger. The decision is going to become bigger and bigger. And then, you know, that's kind of what's changed. We're shifting our, you know, our creativity and we're shifting to something that is more, you know, looking for a high level. I've never done more marketing in my life. I've never done more YouTube videos in my life or slides and, and promo videos. So, yeah, this is what's changed. We're now everyone's like a creator. Everyone's like an Instagram, you know, filmmaker of some sort. So this is, you know, I think this is what's, what's happening. There's so many ideas that we can create. And yeah, you know, I don't want to get too deep into the slides. I want to get to your questions, obviously.
- [41:06]
A
Yeah. I think, you know, just your point around, like, you've never done more in your life. I think what's also interesting is, like, you're. You're a team of one. Am I right? Is that correct? Like, is that. Am I correct?
- [41:20]
B
I'm. I'm a team of many, but not because of what I'm doing right now. Right now, I'm kind of like a team of one. Like, all of these products I'm showing right now is me building them by myself.
- [41:32]
A
Yeah.
- [41:32]
B
But the reason why I still have a team is because I started in the days of design code, and I built this team that I grew really fond of. They started from nothing. They haven't gone to school like myself. I haven't gone to school to study design. I drop out of college, and then I learned everything on the field. I started my first job at 18, and then, you know, started my first company at 22. So, you know, a lot of, like, everyone in my team started from nothing. And, you know, I feel very attached to them, which is why I have them with me. But you're right, you know, like, all of these products, I started by myself. I work on them for a month, a thousand iterations, maybe more, some of them 10,000 iterations. And I arrive to a point where it's mature enough, and then we get to the team to build templates and videos and sort of like the material that expands on that. And, you know, I came across this quote, this fake quote from Steve Jobs on his final bed when he was passing, but apparently it's a fake one. But it was saying, like, if you want to go. If you want to go really fast, you start alone, you start solo. But if you want to go far, you need to be in a team. So that's what I think. Right now, like most of us, we start solo because we cannot go any faster. Right. We're like operating a fleet of 10, 20 agents all at once. And that's great, but eventually you need to get people with you. You need to be part of a mission, and then you need to sort of make these videos that feel more authentic you. Because people crave authenticity. They want real people, they want real craftsmanship behind all of these pixel at some point, because the cracks are going to show if you only use AI the whole way.
- [43:39]
A
Yeah. I think there's two types of people. I think there's the first type of person, which is what you're saying, which is go, build product, market fit, start scaling, and then flip from there. Hire a team. And the second type of person is the person who just loves being a lone wolf, you know, who just loves doing everything themselves. And I think what's cool about what you're doing, you know, you're essentially building a holding company of products as a one person business. Yes. You know, some, some of your businesses you're scaling with, you know, with people and stuff like that, but you know, the majority of it is being run by one person and you couldn't do that a few years ago. And I think more importantly than, you know, within the context of this episode, it's like you're creating beautiful products. Like these products that you're creating are stunning, they're nuanced, they look really good. And I want to end just with, you know, what, you know, in terms of building beautiful products. You know, we talked about Design md, we talked about skills, we talked about a lot of these other tools, variant aura, Some of the new tools you're working on. Is there anything else you want to leave people with in terms of how you can create jaw dropping designs?
- [44:57]
B
Yeah. So like I said, your only moat is you being able to catch up with what is going on. Because if you look at everything that is legacy, that is already solved with all of these big, big companies that have millions and nowadays hundreds of millions in the bank to tackle on these big things. So as people who are starting new ideas, the only mode that we have right now is just, we can, you know, just click a button and we can say we, you know, we found this new model, it literally cooked all the designers and whatnot. It's funny. I know, I know, we all hate it and it becomes a bit meme, but at the same time it reflects the reality in which we are today, which is that that's how we survive as a species. Right. We cannot compete anymore with the big companies and we have so many ideas in our head and we can finally realize them with just a few prompts at least to get to an mvp. And that is usually good enough to launch a product. And there's just so many ideas because of it. So for example, Design MD just came out and I already built like a bunch of features and I could totally build a startup out of that if I wanted to. Right? Qa Design memory. This is what's solved a lot by Open Claw nowadays is when the idea is like it has a whole memory inside your disk, inside your computer, you know, reusable taste marketplace. And I want to leave with one final thing, which is that taste is the Real value here. And when I say taste, I don't necessarily just mean design taste. Obviously, design taste is very, is very cool and it's very powerful. And I think that's my secret sauce. But for a lot of people, your taste can be, you know, like if you look at Barista, the taste of going, of making so many cup of coffees every morning, you eventually knows exactly how to do it. Taste in coding, taste in building apps, you have to just be surrounded by good design, right? You have to look at good designs, not just be served by it, but also to look for it everywhere. You have to use every app in your niche, you have to follow every, you know, makers and creators in your niche. And niche is the keyword here because you cannot compete anymore with people who are generalized. It's too difficult nowadays. We want authenticity, we want niche, we want taste. And if something looks like another thing, it kind of reduce the value by like almost 10 to 100x in my opinion.
- [47:47]
A
Right?
- [47:47]
B
Like, nowadays I see a website with purple gradient, I'm like, I don't wanna, I don't want to even wanna scroll anymore. And I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way when we see like a website that looks just like another one. So, yeah, develop your taste, rinse and repeat, you know, follow what's going on and you know, get, get that to that mode that you have and learn the workflow, like everything that I taught here, get your designer md, get the templates, learn about the skills and the prompting behind the skills, skills, and then I think you're going to be doing just fine.
- [48:23]
A
I love that. I also think a lot of us have second brains for our notes, our meeting notes, ideas that we have. But a lot of us don't have a second brain for design inspiration. So I think the idea of when you see something in the real world or on the digital world where you're like, this is really cool, capturing that and putting it somewhere where you're like, you can, you know, when you're, when you're trying to create something new, you can refer back to your second brain for creative inspiration. What do you think about that?
- [49:01]
B
100%. I mean, I think whether you call it a second brain or your creative side of the brain or, you know, something that keeps you going because, you know, we crave purpose, we crave to be praised, and you cannot get there, you cannot get to that purpose if you don't somehow get excited by it and kind of explore something new and adapt to a new reality. And I Think, like I said, taste is so, so important. This is where we develop that. We make all of these micro decisions super quickly in an instant. You can tell right away if a design is good or not, or if there's a care behind it or not. You know, you touch, like, a phone, like an iPhone, and you're like, you feel right away. This is extremely high quality, and you want to use this as your main daily driver. So, yeah, you know, please use your creative brain. Please use your second brain. Please use your, you know, your taste every step of the way. And don't let AI do everything for you. And even if you do let AI do a lot of things for you, make sure that it's part of the workflow that you already mastered.
- [50:13]
A
Right, Meng, I appreciate you coming on. I'll include links where you can follow Meng to get some creative inspiration, as well as links for some of the tools he's working on that you can go and play with. Go check it out in the description in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope you come back on soon again
- [50:35]
B
when Google or OpenAI and Cloud come up with something new about design. I'll be happy to come on again. I'm super, super honored to come here. You're a good friend of mine. You also come from the same town as me. You speak French like me, or at least your family do. So it's always a pleasure, Greg, and thank you so much. This means the world to me.
- [50:57]
A
I appreciate you, man. I'll catch you later.
- [51:00]
B
All right.
- [51:00]
A
Bye.
- [51:01]
B
Bye.