The Startup Ideas Podcast - Is Gemini 3 a 10x designer? I Wanted Proof.

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

On today’s episode I stress-test Gemini 3.0 in Google AI Studio to see how good it really is as a designer, not just a code generator. Across the episode, I ask Gemini to redesign my personal website in a Windows XP–inspired style, build a restaurant analytics SaaS dashboard, and create a workout mobile app inspired by the “Brain Rot” app. Along the way, I experiment with prompts, visual annotations, and reference images to see how well Gemini takes feedback. By the end, he’s rating each build. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 00:54 – Personal Website 15:48 – SaaS 21:52 – Mobile App 26:35 – AntiGravity 27:17 – Final rating and takeaways Key Points Gemini 3.0 can now generate full, styled web and mobile UIs (not just “purple Tailwind vibe-coded” layouts) when given strong prompts and references. greg-take-02 A Windows XP–themed personal site, built from a screenshot and a short prompt, impresses Greg enough that he considers redoing his actual homepage. greg-take-02 Visual annotation inside Google AI Studio (drawing on the canvas and commenting) is a powerful way to refine icons, backgrounds, and layout without “speaking designer.” greg-take-02 A restaurant analytics SaaS dashboard (“Chef OS”) shows how combining Dribbble shots + Teenage Engineering hardware as references pushes Gemini toward more tactile, “real button” UI. greg-take-02 The “Gains” workout app, modeled on the Brain Rot app, demonstrates that AI can remix an existing product pattern into a new behavior-change app with streaks, goals, and a reactive mascot. greg-take-02 Greg’s big takeaway: good ideas + taste + references + Gemini 3.0 let non-designers ship highly differentiated experiences, raising their odds of standing out. greg-take-02 The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - get your free builders toolkit to build cashflowing business - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire-toolkit Become a member - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

Today we're going to test how good of a designer is Gemini 3.0 within Google AI Studio. So we're going to actually design a personal website. We're going to design a SaaS app. We're going to design a mobile app. And we're going to find out by the end of this episode, how awesome is it? Is it a 6 on 10? Is it an 8 on 10? Is it a 10 on 10?

And to be honest, the only exposure I had to using Gemini 3.0 in Google AI Studio was in the episode I did the other day with Logan Kilpatrick, from the deep mind team. It did a pretty good job at it. Actually, a very good job at it. And I wanted to go deeper and do an episode where we just kind of see, okay, you know, can, this thing go the extra mile? So we're going to do it together and we're going to find out how good it is.

So let's start off by designing a personal website. So I actually have a personal website. But I think it could be a lot more, let's put it, you know, nicer. I think it would be a bit a bit nicer. It's just quite basic. So I'm going to go ahead and copy the screenshot. I go to build over here. And this is where you're going to go and design or build your idea.

So you can use this to vibe code or you can use this to be a vibe designing. So you can see here that I've selected the Gemini 3 pro model. And I'm going to say I have a. personal web page, but I think it's not that well designed or could be better. I've attached a screenshot of what it looks like, but I want you to design this with more color, more freshness, and more, and just all around more interesting. Maybe you can make it a full experience somehow. I'm not giving it a lot of, I'm not giving it a lot of instructions.

I kind of want to see what it does. I could maybe say like, hey, I want it to be like Microsoft XP designed or something like that. Actually, it's probably a good idea. Let's make it look like a 3D experience, Microsoft. XP. Actually, not 3D experience. Let's make it look like an experience in Microsoft XP, except it's a personal website. The website domain is greggisemberg.com if you want to grab content from there. Okay. So I've gone ahead and given it a prompt. And now you can see Gemini 3 Pro preview is running. This is cool. that you'll see that it does, you know, on AI Studio and Gemini 3, you kind of see it shows its work. So it'll say like, you know, what it's doing. So you can see here it's actually creating the metadata.jason, the index.hml.

And you can, I think, yeah, hover over it and you can see what is happening. So it's using Tailwind CSS, React Application Entry Point. And by the way, I have no affiliation with Google. I do think that they are absolutely crushing it lately. And I think at 2026, they will continue to crush it. So I am bullish on them. And that's why I really want to get to use their products more and more, because I'm just seeing them just do a great job at, you know,

think about where they were 12, 18 months ago. They were literally building Google Bard, you know. They went from Google Bard, lamest name. to their cursor competitors called Ultra Gravity, way cooler, right? So you could just see that they're taking a lot more seriously, and I think that it's really going to be, you know, it's Google AI versus Clode versus ChatGBT, BT, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google AI wins.

So it's still creating the app. We can go ahead on just to look at what I currently have. It's just pretty simple website. It does the job. It shares a link to subscribe to my newsletter. It gives different guides that people can download. It links to this startup ideas podcast on Spotify and YouTube. It shows here's all my portfolio companies and all the companies I'm working on.

And that's basically it. There's about me and there is a blog. There is a blog. So it's a very simple website. And I'm curious, you know, can Google AI, Gemini3.0, actually build something that doesn't feel like a purple vibe-coded app that feels just a lot better. Something that I would like, you know, update, update this too. Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup.

And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built ideabrowser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox, and it's all backed by high-quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search, what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building? And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GPT for ideas with it.

But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. Okay, so stuff is happening. So, oh, my God. Okay, so here we are. This is crazy. So we're looking here. It doesn't put Windows, right?

Because it's probably a copyright thing. But it looks like Windows. It looks like Windows XP. The notepad is over here where it says, like, Greg Isberg. the internet is my playground. I kind of love that tagline. It's taken the copy from my website already. You can see it has the links over here.

And then it's gone and created some like different, you know, applications. So there's the about Greg application, Greg's letter, which is my newsletter where I guess people can subscribe to. And then they have the different guides. So I just went ahead and clicked on guides. You can see like, look at this. This is a website.

This is crazy. How does this even, there's no way this works on mobile, right? Yeah. Well, actually works on mobile, surprisingly. So, you know, it has all my guides. It shows PDF and blueprint. The icons look really, really good. These guys, it says details.

These guides are created based on real world experience building, like checkout size, very high value date modified today. This is like, I don't know about you, but to me, this is like really, really awesome. I'm just going to say, let's just try to edit it a little bit. I noticed there are no icons for the applications, like idea generator or internet. Actually, it's not that there's no icons. It's just that the icons aren't hitting, right? The icons that you chose for the applications, like about Greg and Greg's letter, etc.,

they don't feel like real Windows or Mac app icons. Please make them more real. And let's see what happens. And the reason I want to see, like, can this thing design well, right? like, you know, can it take feedback well? That was one of the things that I was really impressed with in my chat with Logan Kilpatrick. And if you haven't seen that episode, we'll include it in the show notes in the description is how well it was able to take feedback. So let's just see if a non-googler like myself actually can get, you know, similar in good results.

The other thing that I want to ask to change is I do find like the white background to be I don't know boring. So I'm going to say I find the white background. Oh actually what's this? What happens if I click this? Right. So you can so there's a button here that's annotation. So add annotations to visually iterate on your app.

So it says draw and write on your app. review to instantly communicate your vision to Gemini. Yeah, so Logan was showing me this. You can highlight components, sketch new ideas, or add precise feedback right where it matters. Simply pass your visual prompts to Gemini and watch your app. Update live. So let's actually try to, we'll let this think and update this. And then after that, let's go and annotate the background.

Try to get it to a place where it looks a little bit better. And then once we're done that, we will move on to Canning. we design a SaaS app? I know a lot of people listening, you know, want to build a SaaS app, want to build a microsas, love the idea of doing that. But, you know, when they use platforms like lovable or other ones, they, you know, Replit or any vibe coding platform, they're just getting designs that are not, are not, not what they want. Not what they're not, not what's in their head. really, that's what it comes down to. I will say that Replit now has Google Gemini 3.0 available on, I think it's available as of today.

Let's check Gemini 3.0. Yeah, design mode. So they do have a new design mode to go from Idea to a live website. And that's also powered by Gemini 3.0. So they've gone ahead and updated the icons. This is what I'm talking about. I don't know about you. It did bug out here with popular guides,

but every other icon was done to perfection, in my opinion. This looks really, really good. We're going to do the annotation quickly. And I'm going to say, oh, wow, it's like actually here. You can see at the bottom once you click, you can add a comment. You can an arrow, rectangle. So I'm going to go ahead and say, I'm going to say

this white background is boring and doesn't give off Microsoft XP the classic blue skies and and green mountain please adjust so I just said

add this to chat I'm going to send that to Gemini. And now it has that context. It's such a simple idea, right? They basically just made like a image editor within it, but it makes it so much more. It's just, you know, this works best. All these platforms work best when you give it good references, images. So the better reference to images, you generally get more out of it.

So just FYI. So let's see what this does. And it's just crazy. Like it's really, what's blowing my mind, what's going through my mind right now is it really is like if you have good ideas, if you have ideas that are scroll stopping are interesting, you can stand out, right? Like a personal website, everyone has a, you know, a lot of people have personal websites like mine. Like just very simple about. but they don't have a lot of people don't have something like this and if you can stand out maybe that gets you the job you wanted maybe that gets you a client that you wouldn't have

otherwise gotten you know you never know what it's going to do and you know we're all in this game of how do we increase our probability of success right how do we stack the chips in our favor and good design really does that you know good design uh it's is viral. Good design is something that people talk about. Good design adds trust. So that's, that's why, you know, you want, you should want good design. So it's, it's been thinking for about one, you know, 110 seconds. Let's, let's give it a few more seconds and then move on to the SaaS app. taking like a little longer than I'd like you it's kind of like surprising that uh you know the whole website was created in 111 seconds but the background is taken so far 136 seconds

all right so it broke the icons but you know I do think the having the background looks nicer it didn't take my feedback around, it didn't take my feedback around creating the mountain. I think what I should have done is I should have just Googled like Microsoft XP background, posted it into as a reference image, and it probably would have worked. So I don't have time for it right now, but overall, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty damn impressed. This exceeded my expectations on this personal website, nine on ten for me. I don't know about you, but I'm probably going to be redoing my personal website soon. Next, let's go see how it does on designing a SaaS app. So right before this, I went on Dribble and I searched SaaS app and dashboard, SaaS dashboard.

And this came up. And I thought it looked like very clean. So what I want to do is I want to do. I'm going to go back to the build section. Just grab your idea. So I'm going to add the reference image. Let's go ahead and do that. Copy.

I'm going to add it right here. And I'm going to say, this is a dashboard I really like. I'm building a software that is a analytics, meets AI app for restaurants. I want it to be designed in a similar vibe. It's clean, it's modern, and I want the buttons to feel almost like real buttons in the real world. So just like simple language.

There's like design terminology for this, but I'm just keeping it simple for everyone. knobs, etc. Can you make this happen? You know what? I'm going to actually pull up a... I really like this company, Teenage Dot Engineering. The designs are really nice.

I just like their products. They do like audio and microphones and stuff like that. I'm going to take a screenshot of this, even though it's... I mean, this might just complicate things. I also included a photo of a teenage engineering product that's physical that I imagine the buttons could be used on the SaaS app. So that doesn't even make, that's not even good English, but let's just see what happens and see what it comes up with. in the past you know what what the vibe coded sass app would look like it would look like

the tailwind CSS like organize exactly how you think um some purple you know and uh you know i i i'm hoping that this is a little more elevated i'm hoping that this is a little more interesting I really didn't give it much data around like what are the product features and stuff like that. Like you might have seen on the Logan Kilpatrick episode, you know, you could use something like ideabrowser.com. If you're looking for a startup idea and you can just kind of take the startup idea and post it here and post it in into the prompt. So you can go ahead and do that. Or if you have idea of browser pro, you can just grab the product requirements doc, which is also known as a PRD. And it gives you exactly what you would actually give a product manager, the whole prompt.

And you can just copy this prompt, which is basically a product requirements doc, and just throw it into Google AI Studio. Or you can just build a product requirements doc on whatever it is you're working on. I think Lenny Richitsky has a PRD doc. Let's just see if he does. Yeah, my favorite product management templates. So he linked it here. I can include it in the show notes. But basically, a PRD means like, what is the problem?

What is the high level approach? What is the narrative? What are the goals? Ideally, you're giving this data to Google AI Studio so that you get the best, design product that, you know, and here we have. Here we have it. So that looks really nice. That looks really nice. The buttons look really nice. They've got that teenage engineering vibe. Oh, come on. That is cool. That is teenage engineering. I'm not really able to move it.

but it's created this AI analyst, ChefOS. Does this thing work? So it basically created a AI helper. OP restaurant is a fully operational on analyzing your data. Currently we observe healthy 14 active tables average ticket. This is something that you might be able to sell to a restaurant. I think this looks super, super, super good. Nice little animations here.

I like it. I like it a lot. My only notes on here is I should be able to move it. Oh, I can. You just have to click on it, but I should be able to drag and drop it. Just to make it easier. But look at that.

That looks sweet. So overall, I would say, I'm going to give this an 8.5. I don't know what you would give it. But I'm going to give it a quick 8-5, and this is one prompt. One prompt. Let's go ahead and write that down. 8.5 on 10.

The last thing we're going to design is a mobile app. A lot of you are interested in mobile apps and building mobile apps. There's definitely a huge opportunity right now to build a mobile app with AI. Right now I'm going to be doing a bunch of episodes on that, so stay tuned. And I want to get that out next week and the week after. But, you know, there's this app that my friend Yoni created. It's called BrainRot. And it's basically an app that helps you get off TikTok and Instagram and basically anything that gets you to get your brain rot.

So it's created this little mascot and it shows you your brain rotting real time. Anyways, the point is, let's just say we wanted to copy BrainRot. So let's go back to the build section, and we're going to go and we're going to say, we're going to copy here. Let's just copy this. So I've gone and just copied the App Store previews. And I don't know if Gemini 3.0 is good at designing mobile app. So that's what we're going to find out today.

I want to design a mobile app. I really like everything about this app called BrainRot. I'm even going to say it by my friend Yoni. The mascot, the gamification, everything about it feels to me like a blueprint for getting someone to do something. What? If you designed the brain rot for getting people to work out,

can you do it in the style of brain rot, mascot, warm, colors, beautifully designed? And I'm going to say, make sure you design this as an eye, as an iOS app. I don't know. I don't even know if it can do this. I don't know if this just does web apps. So we might be looking at a zero on 10 here.

But, you know, we like to try it. We like to push the limits here on the Startup Ideas podcast. There are other, as I mentioned on the show before, there are other apps that specifically focus on mobile. So there's an app called Rourke, build native mobile apps fast, there's an app called the vibe code app, which is by my friend Riley. And then there's another one, well, yeah, I think it's called Create Anything. Yeah, Create Anything.com. Createanything.com.

which has a lot of people recently are saying a lot of good things about it. I need to spend more time playing with it and I'll be doing more episodes on mobile soon. So it's still cooking. It says this response generates a complete react application called Gaines. A fitness. Gaines is actually a killer name. Killer name. It features a mascot that reacts to your workout habits.

Oh, let's get these gains. Are you kidding me? This is, it got the streak. It's got the goal. Maintenance mode. See if I click around here. Your activity, your gains calendar, your top contributors. That's really cool.

Imagine like it integrates with Apple Health. You can log it. It won't let me log it here. I click nothing happened. but I can imagine giving it more data around how it should log things and there's no settings but overall from a design perspective

the mascot kind of kind of is tough right it looks really good it looks really really good and I would say this is from a one prompt I'm going to give this an 8.3 on 10 I want to also mention

that Google has released something called anti-gravity. Antigravity is basically their cursor competitor. You can design using Gemini 3.0 in anti-gravity. But the designs that you are going to get, at least that I've tried, I haven't been able to get as nice of designs out of it. So, you know, maybe it's just me. Probably not. I don't think so. But if you want to get the most out of, um, Gemini 3.0, pro, you're going to want to go to direct to Google AI Studio. There you have it, folks.

Overall, like, I'm impressed. You know, like, we're getting scary. It's getting scary good. And if you just keep prompting it, I think you can get to places where you have an extremely well design app without any designers. You are the designer, right? You have to have the taste.

You have to have the reference images. And, but I think, I think you can go and design something beautiful. And we've exited this era where vibe coding produced not the most beautiful websites, not the most beautiful apps. And we're getting to a point that with the right reference images, the right prompts, you can get to a place where you design something beautiful. So, um, hope this got your creative juices flowing. Stop listening to me and just get your hands dirty.

Go play with one of these tools. Go play with Gemini 3.0. and build something and come back to the comment section. I read every single comment on YouTube, share this podcast, like it. So I know to keep doing these episodes. Otherwise, I don't know. I don't know what you like or what you don't like or if I should just not post at all. So thanks so much for spending your time with me.

We learned about how to become pretty proficient, I would say, at Google AI Studio Gemini 3.0 AI designer stuff. And until next time, have a creative day, my friends.