The Startup Ideas Podcast
My honest review of AI Product Designer backed by Y-Combinator (v0 Users Need to See This)
Wed, 05 Mar 2025
In this episode, I test Polymet AI, an AI product designer tool, by creating a YouTube analytics prediction SaaS concept inspired by a viral tweet about predicting tweet performance. I compare Polymet AI with V0, keep in mind that while Polymet required multiple prompts and offered less feedback during the design process, both tools ultimately produced usable designs. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro02:33 - First Impressions of Polymet03:57 - Startup Idea: Predicting YouTube Engagement05:03 - Initial Design Prompt10:11 - Polymet’s First Design Output: TubePredict11:04 - UI and Functionality Issues and Debugging16:08 - Polymet’s Second Design Output17:44 - Debugging pt 220:48 - Prompting v0 22:30 - v0’s Design Output 23:41 - Polymet’s Third Design Output24:49 - Comparing v0 and Polymer and Final Thoughts on Design Outputs27:36 - Conclusion and Recommendations for AI Design ToolsKey Points• I test Polymet AI, a new AI product designer tool, that claims to help non-designers create production-ready designs• I compare Polymet AI with v0 by having them design a YouTube analytics prediction tool• Both tools produced functional designs, but with different user experiences and output quality1) First impressions of Polymet AI:• Clean interface similar to ChatGPT• Includes voice input (huge plus!)• Image upload capability for reference designs• Credit-based system (250 free credits to start)• 50 credits per page generation2) The design process with Polymet was... interesting.PROS:• Named the product "TubePredict" automatically• Created decent landing page copy• Saved version historyCONS:• Slow generation (2+ minutes)• No progress indicator (frustrating!)• Initial designs missed the mark completely 3) After 3 attempts with increasingly specific prompts, Polymet finally delivered:• Clean, modern interface• Detailed A/B testing dashboard• Statistical confidence indicators• AI suggestions for optimizationBut the communication was ONE-WAY. No feedback loop!4) Meanwhile, v0 showed its strengths:• Real-time reasoning as it designed• Conversational approach ("I'll create a SaaS that...")• Faster FEELING process (transparency helps!)• Ability to ask clarifying questionsThe difference in experience was NIGHT and DAY.5) The final designs were surprisingly similar in quality!Polymet's strengths:• More detailed product features• Hover states built in• Actual code generationv0's advantages:• Slightly more polished visually• More "glassy" as requested• Better feedback loop6) MAJOR INSIGHT: The future isn't about finding ONE perfect AI design tool.It's about using MULTIPLE tools strategically:• Generate initial concepts in one• Refine in another• Mix and match their strengthsJust like we do with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.7) The REAL lesson? Knowing design terminology matters!When I specifically requested "glassmorphism" instead of just saying "glassy," both tools performed MUCH better.The more precise your design vocabulary, the better your AI design results.8) Would I recommend these tools? YES - but with expectations in check.Two years ago this would have been MIND-BLOWING.Today, our standards are higher.But for quick prototyping or inspiration, both tools deliver value in different ways.Notable Quotes:"Two years ago, if I would have seen this, I would have been like, 'Oh my God, everything has changed.' And now our bar for all these AI products is so high that the output needs to be incredible for you to really use it in your workflow.""How do you get the most out of them is just you use all of them, you realize what's best for each individual product... There's these nuances that make these products better."Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideasLCA 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/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/
Chapter 1: How does Polymet AI compare to other design tools?
Today's episode, for the first time ever, I had heard about this AI product designer, YC startup called Polymed.ai. Everyone's talking about it, how it's this AI product designer that you just write some English and it's going to pop up these beautiful designs, production-ready code. And I wanted to try the product.
So I tried the product for the first time ever, live on camera, and you'll see the results. I also give away an incredible... multi-million dollar a year startup idea in the process. And at the end of this episode, I compare it to V0 by Vercel, which is probably the most well-known product in the AI designer space. The question is, are AI product designers here? You'll find out in this episode.
Just watch to the end. I hope you enjoy. Okay, this is going to be really fun. So I saw this tweet from Y Combinator about this app called Polymet.ai. It helps non-designers create production-ready designs in front-end code with AI. Now, I've seen a lot of products claim they can do this. I use V0 a bunch to do these sorts of things.
But I noticed that the output for some of these designs were just looking really, really beautiful. So I was thinking what we can do today is I just signed up to PolyMet. By the way, it's not sponsored or anything like that. I just thought it would be cool to play with it and use this AI product designer app together for the first time.
I'm literally going to give it an idea, which, by the way, I think could be a multimillion dollar a year business. I'm going to give it to that idea and see if it creates a beautiful product. Does the idea of an AI product designer, is that just a catchy hook for X that goes viral? Or is this something that works and that you can start using in your everyday workflow?
So together we're going to go and play with it and see how it goes. So I just signed up and I guess it auto-creates a first project for you. And again, if you're listening to this on audio, startup ideas on audio, you might want to check out the YouTube to see what's going on in screen share. So basically I'm looking at this first time ever. It's almost like ChatGPT but for design.
So we can go ahead and write what we want to build in here. It's cool that it has the microphone because sometimes, you know, actually more recently I've been just like recording my voice and saying what I want. And I'm happy that more products are doing this. I'm happy that it has a upload an image right over here. That's huge because what you can do is, oh, they even have a picture of that.
Create a property finder interface similar to the one in the image. The interface should display property listings. So you can actually go and literally on a napkin draw out a wireframe of what you want, upload it to polymet.ai and it should work. I do this sometimes on vZero if you're a watcher of the channel, listener to the Startup Ideas podcast. You might have heard me talk about this before.
I find that's a really good way. But let's just get into it. So what is the idea I want to work on
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Chapter 2: What was the startup idea inspired by a viral tweet?
Chapter 3: How does the AI product designer Polymet work?
So together we're going to go and play with it and see how it goes. So I just signed up and I guess it auto-creates a first project for you. And again, if you're listening to this on audio, startup ideas on audio, you might want to check out the YouTube to see what's going on in screen share. So basically I'm looking at this first time ever. It's almost like ChatGPT but for design.
So we can go ahead and write what we want to build in here. It's cool that it has the microphone because sometimes, you know, actually more recently I've been just like recording my voice and saying what I want. And I'm happy that more products are doing this. I'm happy that it has a upload an image right over here. That's huge because what you can do is, oh, they even have a picture of that.
Create a property finder interface similar to the one in the image. The interface should display property listings. So you can actually go and literally on a napkin draw out a wireframe of what you want, upload it to polymet.ai and it should work. I do this sometimes on vZero if you're a watcher of the channel, listener to the Startup Ideas podcast. You might have heard me talk about this before.
I find that's a really good way. But let's just get into it. So what is the idea I want to work on
um today is i saw this this tweet um this guy eddie who by the way is a 17 year old i think yeah 17 year old one exit two viral apps had a really smart idea that got you know 3.2 million views he says built an algorithm that stimulates how thousands of users react to your tweet so you know it'll go viral before you post so i think this is a really great idea i wish it existed but i wish it existed for youtube
So I wish I could basically say that if I use this title and this thumbnail, I'm likely going to get this amount of comments, likes, subscribers. Now, of course, YouTube has some A-B testing on thumbnails and stuff like that. But I think a more deeper product like this would do really well. So I'm actually going to go and just screenshot this. I'm going to go ahead and just screenshot this.
I'm going to save it. I'm going to go into PolyMet, and I'm going to say, I have an idea for a startup. It's basically this concept, which is an algo that tells you if or how well a tweet will do. I'm going to go add this before I forget. Boom. Okay. I want to do this with YouTube. So many YouTubers want to know how, if they change their title, okay.
Change their title, change their thumbnail, et cetera. By the way, I'm putting et cetera. There's a bunch of other product features that I probably should be thinking about. For example, does the length affect the amount of comments you're going to get? If you make it shorter, will you get more likes? That sort of thing. But let's see if it's smart enough or if it's more literal.
Again, we're learning this together. I've never used this product. So many YouTubers want to know if they change their title, change their thumbnail, how will it affect engagement. I want you to create a SaaS that does this. Make it... I don't know what this is called. By the way, I wouldn't call myself a designer. I'm a product person. I'm more of a product manager.
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Chapter 4: What are the pros and cons of using Polymet AI?
It says, AI-powered analytics to optimize your YouTube content and maximize your engagement. I actually didn't expect it to do copy like this, but not horrible. Optimize every aspect of your content, A-B testing, engagement prediction. It doesn't feel super glassy to me. I don't know about you guys, what you think. But let's go. What happens? Do I click here?
When I click on analytics, nothing happens. When I click get started, does something happen? It just made a black screen of death. So when you click get started, nothing happens. Good to know. So what sucks about this is I don't really see the product, right? Unless I click see demo. So I'm prompting it now. This is a bummer. I was hoping to see how the product would work.
This is just a landing page. Why didn't you create the actual product? I'd like to see images of the product on the landing page so that people know what they are signing up for and I'd like to be able to click see demo and see how the product is working and click around to see how it could work. The last thing is I want to make it more visually appealing. This is It's fine.
I think it's fine, but I think it could be a lot more interesting. Let's go to perplexity, let's say. Basically, let's ask perplexity. I forget the name of the design term for when something is glassy. What is it?
called it's minimalist and glassy i mean am i making this self up there it is glass morphism that's what it's called that's what i want so the reality is you need with all these a lot of these tools it's as good as the prompt that you can do it right so you do need to know design terms and like what's trending and what people call taste to get the most out of it so
Also, I feel like you didn't make it glassmorphic. Please do that. Okay, we're going to hit enter and see what happens. So it looks like you can expect to wait about a couple minutes. I guess if you go and open up Instagram or you go on X, that...
that's not good but if you actually like sit there and like think about okay how do you want it to look right now um it's it's not the end of the world right like i'm trying to think about it like what do i want um so you basically use these breaks for for good things right don't just go and go open up instagram and and then open it back up in two two minutes i don't think that's great
But I think we learned a really valuable lesson here is that you do need to know design terms to really get the most out of any of these AI designer stuff. When you go to Polymed's website, AI product designer at your service, well, not really. If it was an AI product designer at your service, it would start asking me questions about what kind of vibe did I want? What do I want to call it?
And it would just, it would get to know, it would try to extract my taste and my vibe so that I can go and translate that. Or it just might know what the trends are, right? And based on what I saw, it didn't feel exactly like it was the most beautiful website. I don't know if I, again, this is my first time using this, so I don't know if I just steered it in the wrong direction.
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Chapter 5: What insights were gained from using multiple AI tools?
Literally connecting to your code base works with existing tools. It sounds like the dream. So I'm optimistic. I'm always optimistic. I'm one of those. I love playing with new products and I think it's helpful to play with them just to see if it is going to be a game changer for you. Oh, here we go. Okay, it's actually like, it's not fully glassy.
I wish it was more glassy, but it's starting to look pretty good. See to predict an action. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about, like an image. But what am I looking at? Is it just an image of analytics? Okay. Yeah, so this doesn't... Okay, let me click on it before I make a judgment call. Okay, I asked it to click.
When you click see demo, I asked it to be able to play around with it and nothing happened again. But I see on the right-hand side, I guess this is... Okay, these are my two prompts. Okay, very cool. So you don't lose, this is actually really good because you don't lose any of your images or any of your designs. They're on the right-hand side. And it looks like there's a rollback button.
This little button here, you can press. Okay, so, okay, cool. So you have A-B testing, AI prediction. I mean, the images aren't useful, right? they're not useful because I guess you need to design... Yeah, you probably just need to design... You got to tell it exactly like, I don't want load time versus bounce rate. This is just not relevant for the use case of YouTubers.
So we're going to give it one more prompt and we're going to try to get it to... To design to predict, basically. We're going to try to get it to design to predict. I think they did a better job on the landing page overall. It looks clean. But I think with the product itself, come on. You can do better. Let's see what we can do. What can we say? I'm just going to talk to it honestly.
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Chapter 6: Why is design terminology important for AI tools?
I don't think you did your research The example in prompt number one that I gave you was a beautifully designed version of an AB analytics product for X. And let's go ahead and include it again. Sometimes... AI forgets things. So we're going to include it here. Maybe let's actually include... Can we include another image? No, it's pretty much the same thing.
So we're just going to include one image here. Okay. Let's go reattach it. I'm going to say I've reattached that image... Again, so you can reference it. And this is the inspo for creating a similar type of product but for YouTubers. Do you have any questions for me before you design it? Sometimes I do this with Claude or ChatGPT.
I'm like, before you go ahead and vibe code or whatever, let's just straighten some things out. Let's measure twice, cut once. So I don't expect it to have questions for me, but if it was an AI product designer, realistically, if I asked that, it would respond, right? So I'm going to say I'm very disappointed about how irrelevant the product images look.
They look like dashboards for website analytics. Okay. Let's see what you can do. All right. So we're generating the page and we're seeing what we can do. Should we, for fun, just compare this to v0 and what would happen, right? Like if we, let's see, let's try this. Okay, so we're going to put back the prompt. We're going to add this image and we're going to see what v0 does versus Polymit.
First of all, I just got to say I love what vZero is doing right now. It's giving me the reasoning of what it's doing. Instead of being in a black box like PolyMet, I feel like I'm actually talking to someone. I'll create a SaaS application that helps YouTubers predict how changes to their titles, thumbnails, and other elements will affect engagement.
Based on the image you shared, I'll design a glassy, minimalist interface with colorful calls to action that allows for A-B testing of YouTube content. I feel just way more at ease with vZero right now. I don't know if you agree with me at all, but just looking at this, I feel like, okay, they know what they're doing. Okay, it's still loading. I'm wondering if V0 is slower, faster than PolyMet.
It definitely feels faster, right? Because you see what's going on. You're seeing what they're thinking. But is the actual... outcome faster? Maybe not. Polymet took a minute or two. I'd say at least a minute to do each of the designs. I'm not timing this, but this is like 45 seconds a minute. It feels more fun to look at this. Okay, we've got it. Wow. Could you believe how similar it looks?
And it literally just copied the... the image I gave. I can't believe it. Okay, cool. Wow. But it actually built it. It actually built the product. So you can see version A, original content, title, description, thumbnail. And you can predict the performance. Wow. This is amazing. This is amazing. With AI recommendations. Apply AI. Based on our analysis, version A is likely to perform.
So this is, from a design perspective, very similar to PolyMet. But... but it went a bit deeper. It definitely just like literally copied the image I sent, which is, you know, not great, but that's horrible. It's like literally copying it. But I think this is actually really cool. Like I would use this product. I would totally use this product.
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