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

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel and creator of Next.js, reveals exactly how he uses V0 to build products, pitch ideas, and ship features at startup speed. In this episode, he opens his personal V0 work...flow, walks through the creation of his viral AI camera app (built in one afternoon), and shares a vault of free startup ideas you can build today, including conversational forms, AI opinion tracking, and multi-model research tools. This is a rare look inside how one of the most successful founders thinks about taste, execution, and turning ideas into reality. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 02:01 – Inside Guillermo's V0 Workflow 10:56 – Startup Idea 1: The AI camera App 19:33 – Advice for building taste and generating ideas 22:56 – Visualizing products in your head before prompting 28:21 – Startup Idea 2: AI Forms 37:34 – v0’s AI SDK 41:55 – Startup Idea 3: Notion-style document tool with promptable blocks 43:53 – Startup Idea 4: LLM Vibes Radar 46:26 – Startup Idea 5: Deepest research Key Points Guillermo uses V0 to prototype, pitch, and refine products—often building functional demos in 15-30 minutes The viral AI camera app was built during a lunch break as proof that Nano Banana is a "GPT-4 moment for image models" Forms are underrated primitives of the internet and ripe for AI disruption through conversational interfaces Always work backwards from the ideal interface, not from technical constraints Fewer pixels are always better—delete until only the essential remains Dedicated tools with their own URL and interface can outcompete "modes" in larger products Links & Resources V0 — https://v0.app V0 Community Templates — https://v0.app/templates AI Camera Demo — https://v0bananacam.vercel.app Vercel AI SDK — https://ai-sdk.dev AI Gateway — https://vercel.com/ai Vercel Template Marketplace — https://vercel.com/templates Next.js — https://nextjs.org 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/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: 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/ FIND GUILLERMO ON SOCIAL v0: https://v0.app X/Twitter: https://x.com/rauchg

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I sat down with Guillermo, the founder of Versailles, which is a $9 billion company. In this conversation, he dropped three powerful startup ideas that really got me to stop and think. We also went through V0, his vibe coding product, to tell us how to make money from it, how to build software from it, and how to use it to the best of its capabilities. I always find when you sit down with the founder of these vibe coding tools, they really, really give you the sauce around how to find two. it so you get the most out of it. I'm not sponsored by Versailles. I have no relationship with them. Just thought it would be cool to give you some ideas,
Starting point is 00:00:37 see how their platform works. I hope you find it interesting. At the end of the episode, I bought a domain that I'm giving away to one of you. I think it's an incredible domain that all you got to do, if you want it, like and comment, and I'm going to pick one person,
Starting point is 00:00:54 one person randomly to give it away. I can't wait to see what you build. Enjoy the episode. We got Guillermo on the pod from Vursell. Giermo, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? Well, hopefully they're going to learn a little bit about my system, how I think, how I use our own tools, how I prototype, how I come up with ideas. I have some ideas that I think are good, maybe most of bad, but some might be gems for
Starting point is 00:01:30 some of the listeners. Yeah, I like to work in public a lot. At Vercel, we do a ton with open source. maybe I'll share some of the things that we've been open sourcing that can be great starting points for people that are entrepreneurial and yeah cool and I just ask for one little commitment from you you know on this on this podcast we talk about sauce you know giving the sauce to the people so that they can you know can you commit to giving the sauce I'm all sauce all sauce all sauce no breaks yeah okay let's go let's let's let's let's rip all right so Greg, how familiar are you with V0? I'm pretty familiar. Okay, awesome. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:12 Yeah, I think I've seen some of your tweets. So what you're looking at here in case you're not familiar is the Vselle workspace for V0. So I'm literally showing you like all this awesome, right? Like our own workspace, how we use VZero. But you're looking at the favorites, which are mine, obviously. I created a couple things that I wanted to show you all. So by the way, funny little behind the scenes thing. this is how I pitch product.
Starting point is 00:02:39 We have a lot of huge enterprises using VZero. Yesterday, I met with one of the world's largest companies. They came to the office, and I basically did a version of this. So it's also a little bit of advice for people watching, like, how do you sell? Do you do decks? I try to show product as much as I can. So walking through a few things that I've created. So one that's one use case of V0 that's really interesting is,
Starting point is 00:03:05 free-form data visualization. So it's really hard sometimes to explain complex technical concepts that have to do with different things of the VARC infrastructure, et cetera, customers. So I use VZero a lot to basically give some prompt ideas and then come up with unique visualization. So like what you're looking at here is that
Starting point is 00:03:31 something that I think could have taken me quite a long time to create it with like slides or whatever. And the AI walks me through how to represent this, you know, how our fluid compute system works and create something that I can hand off to other teams. I can hand off to customers. You can hand off,
Starting point is 00:03:48 you know, I can further solidify my understanding of technical concepts. I actually use VZero for learning a lot. So that's a fun one. I'm actually really proud of this one that you're going to look at now. So if you're super familiar with Vercel, this might look like our blog. And so what I did is I started from the point of view of the VSEL blog and what it looks like.
Starting point is 00:04:09 And by the way, if you're if you're curious about how VZero works, it's all prompting. And so really what you're looking at here is that when I engage with my VERS team, I could take two routes. It's that one, I can make a suggestion based on like 10 Slack messages, or I can just talk to VZero, create something that I kind of like and then share with the team. So what you're looking at it here specifically is it's a pretty novel component. I think I've seen this only a handful of times on the internet. So when we launched the Vercel MCP, pay attention to this little component here and the evolution of the video, I suggested to the team that in order to highlight our partners of this launch,
Starting point is 00:04:48 which were Anthropic, cursor, I believe VES code as well, I wanted to highlight them front and center. MCPs are a highly, highly, highly technical concept. So I wanted to show you, okay, how does Vosell MCP work? And so I actually cooked on the entire component. Like you can kind of like jump to the different markers. And so then the team can take it, implement it. They can actually share and sort of copy paste a lot of the code.
Starting point is 00:05:18 And now this became kind of a foundation of our blog system. Whenever we have a change log or we have a new blog post, now we have this really cool resource. A little bit of a spoiler alert. We have the ambition that whatever you vibe code in V0 can actually become what we call remote components. Imagine prompting on a slice of a website and enabling anyone in your team or organization to do this.
Starting point is 00:05:44 So this is kind of like a little example of what that would look like. I'm basically like prompting the blog. I'm also pretty proud of this when I collaborated with our head of design on this. He sent me kind of like a rough sketch of, and I'll explain why I got so involved with this. We're launching a new product, or we launched, which is already kind of growing sort of exponentially. It's called the AI Gateway.
Starting point is 00:06:07 Greg, I don't know if you're familiar with things like OpenRouter or AI gateways. Yeah, open router we've covered. But yeah, you know, explain it a little bit. Yeah. So the main idea is that when you access models, you, one, might not have made up your mind about which one you need. Two, because of the insane demand for AI tokens, a lot of model providers are
Starting point is 00:06:32 unreliable or out of capacity. And three, you always want the best price and performance. And I will actually add a fourth one. You don't want to lock yourself into a model, even if everything that I just mentioned is perfect. You have the right model, you have the right provider, whatever. Like, it might not be the smartest thing to lock yourself in. So we created the AISDK, which is the universal developer experience for AI.
Starting point is 00:06:57 I'm very proud of it, particularly because I didn't invent it. My team did. I invented Next.js. I have that going for me, but this is something that emerged organically at VSEL when we're building V0. Maybe a metaphor for people listening. It's almost like the React of AI.
Starting point is 00:07:13 It's a very, very, very cool developer experience. So AI Gateway is very exciting to Varsel as a company because it's a new entry point into the Vercel cinematic universe, meaning you can adopt this AI gateway regardless of whether you're using any other VARC product. And so what I wanted to basically communicate of the team is a couple things. It's like one, and frankly, this is inspired by Apple. I have to come come out and say it. I wanted to create this subproduct navigation so that I can go to Vorcel.com
Starting point is 00:07:42 slash AI Gateway, and you believe that that's an entire company. In second, I wanted to show this really cool. This actually was my idea. This really cool animation that represents how easy it is to switch between models. It's like that easy. Also, like we wanted to represent that, you know, We support not just our own AI SDK, like I said, that React of AI, but there's other options, et cetera. If you go to the page today, does it look exactly like this? No, but that's the point. I was able to have this super high fidelity conversation with the team. And I did this on a way more ride back home. It was actually pretty fast for me to do. Let me jump to something that I think is interesting for also for people to understand how we build VZero.
Starting point is 00:08:26 Like, imagine that you have the ambition of building something like VZero. So I have a surprise for you. We use V0 to build V0. And so, and I kind of nerded out hardcore on this, by the way, because of many, many moons ago when I was 16 years old, I created a component like what I'm about to show. So I'll explain the growth mindset here, like from a growth hacking perspective.
Starting point is 00:08:48 Whenever you share a Vercel deployment, you're going to see them throughout the web as dot vosell. The way to think about this is like, this is like the Varsel marketing machine. And what I mean by that is that we're actually spending any marketing budget. You asking for the sauce, this is the sauce, right? Like, we created such a great product, hopefully, that people build, ship, and then say, it's almost like saying it was built with Versel, right?
Starting point is 00:09:14 And it can be toys, it can be big ideas, it can be your next startup, et cetera. And obviously we support custom domains. But with VZero, I also wanted to preserve that identity. It's almost like a communication. It's like a significant bit. You want to communicate that the thing was built with VZero. And so by default today, you might have already noticed this. We default to like V0 as a prefix of the things that you ship when you hit that button
Starting point is 00:09:39 publish. But I was noticing that when people were customizing, they were nuking the V0 prefix. And so I wanted to both give them the freedom to nuke it, but also if they don't mind it, keep it, just like they're keeping the adversely load app. So notice that if I select text and I say Guillermo talks to Greg, I'm not nuking it. But if I go to the beginning of the input and I press delete, I'm deleting that entire token. And if I press Command Z, it comes back. So I couldn't have imagined describing this with any other tool.
Starting point is 00:10:13 I would have spent more time putting words down. And you know that batch little token thing that you've seen on Facebook when you do an ad mention? Well, imagine it says, I actually had tried to do that, to be completely honest. And no one understood what I was talking about. So I just went ahead and built it. And because VZ is so smart, like things like the, you can tell it, well, when you hover, do this,
Starting point is 00:10:38 select the text by default, all those kinds of things are just prompts. And 14 prompts probably took me like, I don't know, 15 minutes. So really cool. You know, I could keep going to some of this. We do all kinds of like product specs, but I also wanted to show you something that, kind of became, what I almost say,
Starting point is 00:11:01 like the foundation for like a real product almost. Did you see this on X, by the way? Okay, so, and this is connected to something I think really relates to your audience, which is that I've posted all of these free ideas threats. And no one picked up on this one. So I'm actually going to like, you know, point this out of the people.
Starting point is 00:11:22 I think one person paid attention to this one. So I had this concept of an AI camera. the idea of an AI camera came from a frustration that my relative loves to take photos of the moon. And like, no, no this, but like, they're so bad. She loves the moon. Heart goes out of her. She's obsessed with this thing. But they're just so bad.
Starting point is 00:11:48 And I was thinking also the, I just upgraded or downgraded, you could say, to an iPhone air. The camera got worse. And so I was telling my team the other day, I don't mind because I love this slick form factor. And also because I believe that in the future, cameras will be inputs. Or what do you take with a camera will be an input, not an output. And why is it going to be an input? Because every photo will go through an LLM or an AI model. And so that was kind of like the idea.
Starting point is 00:12:20 And so I actually, because I got this iPhone and I was telling the VZero team about it, at v0 we don't have dev rels we have vibe rails it's someone that vibe codes to show the potential of the tool and so he built this i took a selfie of myself um when i was in london i believe and then i took another one and so uh let's see it here so i opened it so you can the idea is that you can choose uh between different filters um actually because uh let's see kill bill Because I'm from Argentina. I'm going to go with Argentina. So,
Starting point is 00:13:01 photo goes in. So it was actually quite easy to prompt. The success of this, and by the way, what I mean by success is like it went quite viral. The success of this speaks to, okay, that actually looks like me a lot.
Starting point is 00:13:18 The success of this speaks to just how simple we made the interface, which I'm really proud of. You know, obviously it's inspired by the, iPhone camera. We used really cool prompts for the different styles. So I'm going to go, let's see, let's do another one. I'm going to go with maybe more focused. I'm going to go with Disco now. Okay. So when Nanobanana came out, I told my team, and by the way, for people listening,
Starting point is 00:13:46 I still believe this. Nanobanana is a GPT4 moment for image models. And you can create amazing things. I think there's going to be a lot of great consumer products that come out of this, little great utilities. I was showing this off. By the way, the meta work here. When I was in London, I was obviously pitching to companies, startups, etc., like what VRcel and VZero can do for you. And I was in a lot of meetings where like this was kind of like the, you know,
Starting point is 00:14:17 the memorable bit of the pitch, taking a selfie with someone and like showing them what VZero can do. So I actually ended up executing on that idea. So from the free ideas thread. So that whole product that you showed me, you made with V0? Yeah, 100%. And how long did that take you? Say it again? How long did that take you from start to finish?
Starting point is 00:14:44 So it was lunchtime here in SF. By the way, you know what's funny about the importance of, and by the way, this is not just me patting myself on the back because I have a lot of bad ideas. Like, you should see my team, my chats with my Deverell team. But I do think it's in the age of AI, and I think obviously this is going to resonate with you preaching to the choir. The value of ideas is pretty freaking significant. Why?
Starting point is 00:15:09 Because I pitched this idea to a lot of people, and they were like, I don't know what you're talking about. Like, oh, that's cool. You're a CEO. I'm not going to be, I know you, but like, I don't know to be mean. But like, a lot of people kind of ignored it. But the day that we're at that lunch and I saw that the lens of the iPhone just, gotten worse and whatever, I pitched it hard.
Starting point is 00:15:28 And it's like, guys, we have to actually do this. And so, you know, most of the process is actually downloading it into the prompt. And so there's a lot of debate about like, is prompt engineering a thing and whatever? I'll say it again. If you have a vision in your head and if you're able to explain it in English, amazing things can happen. So I think it was mostly, so I explained it to my colleague and it told him. And in the beginning, he first didn't get me. So it goes back again to, like, sometimes you might get frustrated with AI.
Starting point is 00:16:01 But remember, like, us humans are also not flawless in that department. Like, explaining yourself really, really well using the right metaphors, et cetera, is really important. One thing, by the way, that if anyone wants to continue to riff on that idea, which I encourage, is, and by the way, you can actually open it in V0. So, like, when you click this, you're going to go to the V0. When you click built with V0 here, you're going to go to the template. So I had originally pitched it as Instagram in the sense that I wanted this to be a preview of what the different filters are going to look like. We implemented it as like the different types of like photo, portrait, whatever, which makes it super relatable. I think that has a strength for sure.
Starting point is 00:16:46 But there's another version. And this is what's excited about AI because like the models are going to keep getting better. So the first pushback that I got was, oh, no, that's going to cost us a lot of money because you're going to have to do 20 nanobanana runs and whatever. So we started litigating like, well, but you could do, maybe you could prompt nanobanana to give you a grid of all the permutations. And then you tell VZero to slice it. Because like the vision was just like Instagram invented filters, we can invent AI filters. So you could have seen Guillermo's solar pun. almost like a little preview, and then they click it,
Starting point is 00:17:24 and then we do a higher fidelity AI pass. So I think there's a lot more to do with this particular idea, but yeah, 100% V0. There's a nanobanana template. So if you go to the V0 community, there are a lot of really amazing starting points, right? So we have all kinds of templates that you can use to use as your starting points.
Starting point is 00:17:49 There is if you want to create games, landing pages. I mentioned data biz is really big for us, especially for teams that throw unstructured data, CSVs, whatever. There's really cool components that can
Starting point is 00:18:04 when liquid glass came out, like everyone lost their minds and started trying to create like different versions of liquid glass. So this is a great place to get inspired, frankly. Like, I have my own contribution here. I guess I cooked, huh? So I love particle effects.
Starting point is 00:18:27 And so speak of the value of vibe coding, we're hosting a happy hour with AWS at ReInvent about VZero. And we didn't have a promotional artifact that I felt truly proud of. A lot of people, I think, that listen to us are always curious about, like, how do you get big on eggs? how do you get a lot of impressions? And I'll tell you, you know, the, like, just because you have a lot of followers, it doesn't mean that you are putting things out into the world that people are interested in. So, like, I actually use VZER a lot to cook on visualizations of data and things like that. That, yeah, so for example, when NextJS came out and we wanted to communicate that in the past 12 months,
Starting point is 00:19:12 it had over 500 million downloads. and then over previous 12 months they had had a ton of downloads basically 500 million in 9 years and then 500 million in 12 years I used V0 to create my bangor tweet so there's a lot a lot of cool stuff here to learn from
Starting point is 00:19:32 Yeah one thing I'm learning about you is I know you say you don't have You know you have bad ideas and good ideas But you do have a lot of good ideas And you have a lot of good taste Like you're able to, you know, think of, okay, Instagram works like this, therefore I'm going to use that as a reference to put it into V0. So, you know, what advice do you have for people who are trying to, like, build their inner Guillermo, basically?
Starting point is 00:20:04 Yeah, so you mentioned something really cool, which is that what comes out of me is good ideas. what started out was probably a ton of ideas bad, good, medium, whatever and then there's a filter that happens for sure. Yeah. I try to be unless it's more guy.
Starting point is 00:20:24 So like what I put out, I have some degree of conviction that it might hit. You also talked about the idea of well, Instagram exists, therefore you can bring this over to this other product and whatever. I do think that that's extremely,
Starting point is 00:20:39 extremely, extremely important to basically like accumulate a bunch of exposure hours to products in general. So even just from what I've been doing here, you might have gotten ideas about how V0, how I think about V0, right? Like you see the way that we have the community with templates, projects, search, like little nuggets of like how products work that I think are really interesting. I'll show actually something also super cool. Notice that when I've been opening these V zeros, they're in full screen, so they're ready to be shared.
Starting point is 00:21:18 So I care a lot about the first impression that a product has on people. And so I can reveal the chat, but the chat is not interesting to the presentation that I've been doing. So I wanted to also communicate that to the team, and I basically created this mini V0 inside V0 to basically show like imagine a world.
Starting point is 00:21:39 And by the way, the design ended up being quite similar to what ended up landing at the end. Imagine a world where it's all content. Everything is computer. And we hide the chat. So there's one version of Vizero that was like so much chat in your face. And the nugget of this idea
Starting point is 00:21:57 or like the origination of this idea came from watching people use the product. A colleague of mine that works on XHS send me a photo of his girlfriend working on a VZ for her education class. And she had a big desktop monitor. And I saw that half the screen was chat. And the other half was the content that she was working on. And immediately I had the idea of like, well, that doesn't seem right.
Starting point is 00:22:28 And so the TLDR there is that you have to always be rethinking your assumptions, trying to observe how people use your products in the real world. And you know, whenever something doesn't work, I never think, well, it's the fault of the user, it's the fault of the people, I don't have followers, whatever. It's the product. It's the design. It's the idea. When you were creating, let's say, the nano banana photo selfie thing, did you prompt
Starting point is 00:23:04 fee zero with the reference image of Instagram, or were you plainly using English and just explaining what you wanted? I think it was all English in this case, which kind of speaks to like, there is one defining characteristic that I do want to point out is that you have to be able to visualize things in your head. And if not in your head, like, you have to have some close reference so that you can guide this system, right? And so all of this that you're looking at, It's just maybe paying more attention to the details, right? Like, if you open the camera app, there is subtleties to the border. There's subtleties to the background.
Starting point is 00:23:44 There's subtleties to the gradient. Another big thing that it might seem small, but it's actually freaking huge, is that a few of the initial passes were overly complicated. So there was a process of trimming stuff down and deleting. If I could actually give one lasting piece of advice to everybody, including my own team, and myself, it's always delete, delete, delete. There should be as few buttons, links, et cetera, as possible
Starting point is 00:24:14 on any given product. And I think we kind of nailed that here because, like, how much attention can people give you, right? Like, five seconds, 10 seconds. Another not minor thing is this is actually a very good mobile product. So by having less UI, you are almost forcing yourself to have a good mobile product. What's very interesting about this little app, if you go to it, v0 banana cam.versal.com. Is that it's almost impossible to believe that this is a web app.
Starting point is 00:24:52 It feels like you just unloaded a native app, which also speaks to the insane potential, I think, of this vibe coding platforms. because we're soon going to launch the VZero mobile app. You're going to be able to create apps like this on the go. And we're actually putting a lot of work into the model, the context, etc., to make them really good on mobile devices out of the box. So, TLDR, fewer pixels, always better. And remember that most people don't have time and are on their mobile phones. So you have such a little window to get this stuff right.
Starting point is 00:25:30 By the way, this, just for people listening, like this idea that you had, like the V-Zero Banana Cam, the 20 different filters that you had, if you wanted to, you know, create an app that, you know, just did a little bit of cash flow and was a fun project to do. You can unbundle this and just do like Wes Anderson cam as an app, right? I mean, there's just so much to do with this. And you can, by the way, again, you can,
Starting point is 00:26:00 click opening v0 and you can start prompting. There's so much to do with this. Yeah. Because I mentioned also that the original idea, by the way, I also will give credit to my colleague who suggested to focus it more on selfies. Because let's analyze the ideas thread for a second, right?
Starting point is 00:26:16 A.A. Camera was the first idea. And I was thinking a lot about another inspiration for this, by the way, it was like we took a business photo with a group at a large bank. and it was so awkward that we had to take like five or six. And I joked, because obviously the conversation that we had had had AI, I joked to them saying like, oh, don't worry, AI will fix this. But in reality, it didn't.
Starting point is 00:26:41 Like, we took a lot of bad photos. And we took six of them. It was awkward. The lighting was bad. I was like, guys, like, so to give you a context, this was an high-rise, New York City. the background was all sun and the skyline of New York. And I remember thinking to myself, AI has seen that freaking, I mean, it's beautiful,
Starting point is 00:27:06 but it's seen this skyline a gazillion times. We are very clear on the photo. The lighting is not good, but our bodies are very clear. All it should take is, by the way, it shouldn't even take a prompt. And this we didn't explore with this idea, but you could ask AI first to critique the photo. So that process that I did of saying,
Starting point is 00:27:31 oh, the photo is garbage. I'm sure GPD5 would do as well. And so once you get the critique from GPT5, you give it a nanobanana. And so this is why I also believe that people sometimes fear that like the one model is going to take all the jobs. In reality, most cool things happen when you combine models, combine ideas, market it well,
Starting point is 00:27:52 focus it well, create easy interfaces, et cetera. So I think since we're riffing on other things that people could do, the automatic perfect photo app where, or the lighting fixer photo app and whatever, especially if people can build the muscle memory to always go to you when they're taking that kind of photo. So by the way, it's fun to compare it now because like, I believe that AI camera was probably the best of the bunch,
Starting point is 00:28:24 but it wasn't necessarily the one that people got the most excited about. So what other ideas are in this list? This created a lot of excitement that I'm still bullish. So I might cook on it at some point, but obviously I encourage people to try it too. So I believe that forms need to be disrupted with AI, period. All forms. contact sales forms.
Starting point is 00:28:50 We're going to be doing an experiment on Vursell.com for this. I think other, I heard rumors and other big tech company is going to try to do like a conversational sales form. I think it's going to be really interesting. Because like the classic thing is, so if we go to Varsela.com slash contact and then go to contact sales,
Starting point is 00:29:11 we do have personalization here. Like we're trying to like eat our own dog food, right? So like it knows that in from the U.S. It actually knows that I'm coming from an enterprise, so it's asking me a few more questions, et cetera. So we're constantly doing experiments on this, but like, what if you didn't have to fill out a form? And some people, by the way, might think, like,
Starting point is 00:29:30 why don't you just ask nothing but like the email? Well, interestingly, we've done the experiment and like we get such an insane amount of input that to triage and get more signal out of it, we actually do need more information sometimes. to actually be able to prioritize who we talk to. And so we do need more information, but a chatbot could ask you for the follow-up.
Starting point is 00:29:56 And so that's an experiment worth doing. The other one is, and by the way, type form, I think cooked. Like, I wasn't trying to, like, tell type form, like, sorry, guys, like, it's over. Quite the opposite. I think type form is really inspiring here because they created a, I'll say this in earnest, a revolutionary UI for forms because they broke it
Starting point is 00:30:20 I think they empathize with like the problem of like I don't want to see the daunting list of 100 questions I want to see only one question at a time and going back to like fewer pixels are always better I think a type form maximizes
Starting point is 00:30:35 the chance of success and minimizes the chance of error by just having the user do one thing at a time but conversational AI is also asked for one thing at a time And so imagine if you had basically an interface where you define the data that you want and then you let the AI create the intake interface. It might have elements of a form, by the way, but it might just be purely conversational. So, I mean, two questions.
Starting point is 00:31:08 One is how big of an opportunity do you think this is? and two is if you were going to prompt V0 to do an MVP of this, how would you do it? Yeah, so how big can it be? Well, forms, I think, are the most underrated, like, fundamental particle of the internet, right? Like, nothing happens unless, like, the most interesting thing of the internet is capturing input from somebody.
Starting point is 00:31:36 It's a primitive. Forms is a primitive of the internet. Yeah. So the TAM, and when I sound like, want to be entrepreneur here, like, the TAM is the entire internet. The TAM is the entire world. But I do think that, like, I think for this idea to succeed, though, maybe it needs to be narrowed down to, like, it's not just forms with AI, but like a specific use case. One company that I think has done phenomenally in this idea of, like, we're making forms more whimsical, more domain specific, et cetera, is partifle. I see partifle as like a really cool specialized form of sorts.
Starting point is 00:32:09 And so the idea is big. The problem is that I cannot yet tell you, like, the exact incantation is going to get big. So that's your job. But I'll tell you, people have the need to create Google forms or type forms all the time. And they're willing to pay for those products. And so what I would focus on here is, like, can you demonstrate that by creating a more AI-native interface? And by the way, when I mean AI-native interface, I want to be really clear, is for the submission side, as well as the creation side.
Starting point is 00:32:41 Because what if there's the fastest way to create a form on the internet? Because you just paste what you want to know. Like build me a form. You're not even going to say this because this is going to be like, cool folder builder.com and whatever. You're going to say,
Starting point is 00:32:56 need data on what this user thinks about my product. And because I want to qualify them for early access VIP application, like something like that. And so AI is amazing because AI is so good at knowing what the information that you're after is. And so it's going to save you a lot of time. Most foreign builders have all this like drag and drop and click and select the type of the question and whatever. No, no, it should all be AI. The other thing that you can set out to prove is that you can have a more dynamic conversational UI to submit.
Starting point is 00:33:36 maybe even there is a way where you reach out of people through voice or text message. And like the form submission actually happens in a pure conversation way, but in an ad hoc conversation. So how would I start prompting about this? Like I said, I always worked backwards from the interface. So I would probably start describing to V0. Well, I want a conversational chat app, but it's for designing forms. the goal is that the user can talk in natural language. And then as they're typing and submitting,
Starting point is 00:34:12 they're seeing on the right-hand side what their form is going to look like. It should use LLMs to parse the input. And I'll get something out, right? It may take me maybe like one or two more prompts to get it to look like I want and to make it work well. And then when I have something, I start playing with it. And I can start seeing if it feels right. The other entry point of this can be imagine the ideal,
Starting point is 00:34:38 imagine if you have a vision for like the ideal submission UI. So one thing that I'm a really big fan of, and you're seeing that in action with V0, is hyperlinks. So imagine put yourself in the shoes of somebody that receives your really cool hyperlink of your form. So it's like super cool form.com slash in the title of the form. And then imagine what interface do you want them to see? And so it could be actually something like very interactive.
Starting point is 00:35:09 It could be something that was like, I just have a few questions and maybe it has a little character. Or maybe it's like very sober. And it says like, you know, complete this questionnaire to get X. And maybe it looks like chat jibati. Or like you're just going to, maybe it looks like a chat interface. And so maybe I'll start prompting a visual with like, build me a chat interface for a that is like Google forums, but way more simple. Probably AI already knows about Typeform.
Starting point is 00:35:38 So, like, you can tell it. It's somewhat inspired by Typeform. And the goal is that the AI will ask me a bunch of questions in order to meet this data structure that the creator is after. Because I think what's really cool about dynamic conversation interface is that you don't want to let the user complete the chat until you got. what you wanted. You got the first name, the last name, the street, whatever, like all of those things would happen conversationally. I also would explore, you know, if I'm asking for an address,
Starting point is 00:36:16 like what is the right input for asking for an address? So it's like more of a Google Maps thing. At some point, I will say maybe the screen splits into two. So imagine if like when you're you're asking for a location because now we have all the, all of the space in the world, we split the screen into two. And on the right-hand side, we show the map. And the right-hand side, we show the input. So, yeah, this is kind of an encouragement for people to think about,
Starting point is 00:36:48 okay, forms are a big deal, and there's going to be something new that uses AI and turns it upside down. By the way, what you just said at the end is, potentially a good prompt for, you know, chat GPT, which is like, hey, I'm trying to create the, you know, a conversational AI Google forms killer. I need help imagining what an interface, which might, you know, be super clean, super fast, super beautiful to use that's different than anything that's out there. Give me three or four ideas. And sometimes that could become the, the fodder for. for what you end up putting in V0. Yep. I was going to also say, if you're more comfortable with engineering,
Starting point is 00:37:39 what V0 is going to use under the hood is this AI SDK that we created. I mentioned it. It's like the React for AI. And we have a lot of really cool templates for it so that you can get started with something that's already been built. So I'm going to show you,
Starting point is 00:37:56 I think it's chatSDK.dev. So this interface right here, if you go to try it out, you're going to see this is basically an open source chat GPT. I call this open source chat GPT for Enterprise. And the main idea behind this is basically you can mold it into whatever you want it to be. So I'm going to ask it a question first.
Starting point is 00:38:23 I'm going to say hi there. So it's using Grog Vision models. It's using the ISDK, obviously, so you can bring whatever model. Something really cool about this is we are big fans of this concept of what we call generative UI. I'm going to ask, what is the weather in San Francisco? Notice that it's responding with that UI component. I believe the future of this AI conversational interface is going to be this intertwining of chat-enrich UI components.
Starting point is 00:38:58 But perhaps my favorite thing about this demo that is pretty wild is let's ask you to write an essay about Silicon Valley. Look at what's going to happen. When it calls, it detects and calls the tool for writing, it splits the UI into two. We also use this pattern in V0 itself, and this is all open source. So imagine this concept that I just showed you, but for that conversational interface that we're just talking about, where when I get the next question, I might actually get a much richer interface for answering that question. Maybe this is a really cool interviewing UI. Maybe this is a really cool aptitude test UI.
Starting point is 00:39:41 Maybe this is the future of how you give students a really cool interface for a test. It's like, hey, I'm your digital teacher. Like, let's evaluate your skill in math. But, you know, when you're teaching kids, in education and AI, especially for children, something that I'm really passionate about it, I've been thinking a lot about recently, imagine if one of the steps in the test needs a little virtual game for testing math and addition. And so this is a beautiful thing about VZero. It's like all of those things that I just talked about.
Starting point is 00:40:13 We have examples of games. We have examples of like all kinds of UIs like this one. So I do think the positive videos are kind of endless here. I want you to do one more idea. And I just want to talk about the template stuff. So what I think one good idea for people is to go through the templates and be like, okay, this is, you know, this is a really cool idea. But if I focused it on this niche, then I think like this for education or this for K through 12 or this for fintech or this for whatever. And, you know, I think that a lot of people are just creating their own stuff.
Starting point is 00:40:56 when they could just be seeing what other people have done and just duplicating it and focusing on a niche. Yeah, there's also OSS vibe coding platform. I'm extremely proud of this one, the team really cooked. Again, this is a little bit more advanced. Yeah. But we basically open-sourced V-Zero, if you think about it. So we have a bunch of models here,
Starting point is 00:41:20 and you can say, build me a little to-do list app. Okay, I have to sign it to Vercel. You can do it at your home. But what you're going to see is that when you start creating this, we're going to write an application here on the right-hand side of the screen. We're going to create a sandbox for every creation. This is basically like open-source replet, if you will. Another really cool starting point from the VSel template marketplace.
Starting point is 00:41:48 And again, these two are a little bit more advanced. If you are not that comfortable with coding yet, I would start with the V-Zero community templates. You mentioned going back to some ideas. So maybe I'll show some of the ones from the most recent ideas thread. Yep. Okay, so, oh, wow, speaking of vibe coding, this one, the inspiration for it, so it's a notion style document tool where every block can be vibe coded.
Starting point is 00:42:12 For instance, if you need a chart, it just a matter of adding a block backed by a prompt. These blocks could be live, reactive, and revaled it, no, no, no. So this one came, this one is like taking this element further. and realizing that you probably instead of wanting to write everything, you want this to be like promptable blocks. Yeah. Could be interesting for like data viz tools. You mentioned like in terms of like niches.
Starting point is 00:42:40 It could be a really cool way of creating like very interactive essays. The idea there was why are we writing everything from scratch? You know? And why are we limited to the five or six types? of blocks that the document tools have invented and decided for us if we now have AI. I might decide to like here, I want, you know, it really, like, right here, I want like a mini game or I want a very, very cool chart or, you know, another inspiration for database I think it's going to be big is, have you ever seen those videos that showed the growth,
Starting point is 00:43:21 growth of a thing when another thing was big. It's like the top one is like a wide rectangle. And then it walks you through the years, 2020, 2021. And then you see all of the players reshuffle and advance and whatever. The best data visualizations on the planet are not rigid. They're not part of like the line chart, the pie chart, et cetera. They might have elements of navigation, et cetera. So this is a big idea.
Starting point is 00:43:47 Like I was trying to think like, what is the future of documents with, with This one, again, like, I feel like it's underrated. This is like AI camera vibes because the, I think I mentioned the what, sorry. Can you read the idea? Yeah, the LLM vibes rater. Periodically ask AIs for opinions and rankings. What's the best burger in SF? Who's the best candidate?
Starting point is 00:44:14 Data visualization could look Google Trends E. Usisar, I mentioned like a nerd thing of like, you don't want to like query the AI on demand. You want like a really good caching system. And so there is a technology that Retzel has called ISR. That's really good for this, especially for high traffic websites. This tool can help the world become more aware of biases in AIs, be the wirecutter for everything, entertain, inform businesses and how they're falling in or out of favor. The idea is that this is kind of like a content virality idea. And it's a good. good way to like zing the AI model vendors. Like everyone loves to expose biases in AI and like
Starting point is 00:45:00 there's a thing that had gone really viral during the last US election when you would ask it about Trump and different models with great different things. And so there is almost like a polymarket but of AI responses thing. It's almost like a free content generation engine that I think is going to interest people. What does Chachibati think is the best burger in SF? A lot of this, I think in order to nail this idea, you have to find, how do you visualize those questions and the question selection so that it sparks people's interest and then ride news cycles so that when something interesting happens in the world, you're able to
Starting point is 00:45:44 go to this site and find out what the AIs think or whatever. I also think that the timeline is also super cool. You can almost be like an archive.org, but for what LLMs have been steered to thinking. If you can discover interesting patterns over time, that can be huge. Like you ask, you know, Claude or Grock or whatever, like, who is the smartest person in the world?
Starting point is 00:46:10 And like, you see it changed, like, in 2020 was this, in 2021 was this, in 2022 was this. or I think I don't know exactly what, again, like, there's a lot here, but I think there is, there's something that could have some potential for vitality. Give me one more idea. All right. This one I actually think I might build at some point because I need it.
Starting point is 00:46:33 Like, there is asking an LM, it's okay, the prompt or idea is deep est research, emphasis on est. I noticed that when I really need to study a topic in depth. I don't want to bank on the viewpoint of a single L.M. Many times they fire up, chat GPT, GROC and the reflexity and Claude in a bunch of tabs. I would love a tool that uses all the available intelligence on the internet to produce the best possible report. Key, tell me how the experts, aka AIs, differed, especially if they have contradicting facts, figures, or conclusions. So, have you heard of this being done before?
Starting point is 00:47:15 Oh, but I'm obsessed with the name Deepest Research, by the way. Yeah, take it. Yeah. Also, I'm going to, I was just seeing if deepest research.coma.a is available. It's $30,000, which honestly isn't crazy, but. It could also be deepest.a.i. I'm, would you say deepest.aI? I was thinking that, yeah.
Starting point is 00:47:39 Because I also think people underestimate how important it is that you build something that is so simple and effective that you return to it by typing the URL. Because maybe you have an instance where you got exposure through it on X. You clicked the link. Maybe you didn't have quite the use case for it at that time. But then you're going to be in a conversation or something and you're going to say like, oh, shit, I need to do the deepest research here. And you need to be able to recall that URL and then type it into a mobile device.
Starting point is 00:48:14 And this is why I was insisting on, like, the AI camera being successful because it was mobile friendly. And so you need to be able to, like, get back to the URL quickly. So I think short here might pay dividends. I'm going to buy the domain deepest research.net. And which is kind of like old school 90s vibe because that'll be the... I do like a dot net. The dot net is under... I actually think is criminally underrated.
Starting point is 00:48:42 and I'm going to give it a, you know, if you want to compete with Guillermo, because he's going to do this in the future. Well, keep in mind that the way that I execute on this is like I open source things. So like you might actually take benefit from it, but you should race me to it for sure. Race, race Guillermo. I'm going to, for people, I'll just pick a random comment and I'll give it to, I'll gift it to someone and let's see who builds it. Okay.
Starting point is 00:49:09 Yeah. And to give you some more context on this one, I think the people that select into this kind of thing are going to be highly, highly, highly qualified buyers, I think. You don't do deepest research of like, you know, what kind of banana like grows in the Mediterranean, whatever? Like, none. But it's going to be for people that are doing financial stuff, that are doing competitive research that are like, maybe they're like really stuck on a bus. and like they need like every angle explored and whatever. You might want to have some prompt presets, like select the level of the kind of analysis that you want to do.
Starting point is 00:49:51 And the prompts would be like kind of like your secret sauce. Like maybe do like analyze critically. Find edge cases. Tell me about public opinion. So there might be by. by putting this tool in front of users, you might get into some really cool, like, what kind of research do you want to do?
Starting point is 00:50:17 And again, like, you know, what's really interesting about the world? You can argue that chat GPT will continue to get super sophisticated and will eat every startup and whatever. But what I find is that some products are so important or some capabilities are so important
Starting point is 00:50:35 that they always deserve their unique entry point. their unique URL, their unique interface dedicated to that problem. And you might actually out-compete the giants in things like this, much like what I think Chad Chubit is doing to Google. Because what ChachapT is doing to Google is that I don't think to go to Google to ask this long, like long-form questions with prompts, and I want to engage in a chat. So it's so hard for Google to compete with Chabit-T because the best they can do,
Starting point is 00:51:07 is do that AI overview thing, right? But pay attention to what they called their chat GPT. AI mode. You have to go into a mode. You have to go to quote unquote a different product in order to compete with chat GPT. And so my argument is you can do that to chat GPT itself. Because when I go to chat GPT,
Starting point is 00:51:30 in order to do deep research, I have to get into a mode. And they're trying their best to route and whatever. get into that mode and I want all of this new capabilities. Maybe there's buttons. Maybe there's levels of depth of research. It's like a pro tool for deep research. Damn, I want to do this idea. I'm like, I don't want to give away this domain to someone, but we'll give it away. We'll give it away. All right. I think we're out of time. I unfortunately, sadly, I want to keep going, but yeah, it's, there's a lot to do with this. Sadly, we're out of time.
Starting point is 00:52:07 One thing I, my biggest takeaway from just talking to you is it really is, like the limit is your ideas, you know, coming up with good ideas. The tools are out there. This fires me up. Gee, thanks for coming on. I'll include some of the links in, you know, like the templates and all that stuff. In the show notes, I'll include where to find G on X. anything else you want to leave people with? No. If you do build any of this, just ping me on X.
Starting point is 00:52:42 I love to take a look and maybe give you feedback. I appreciate you, man. I'll see you next time.

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