Day 224: Week 33 Plan

status

Week 32

This week felt incredibly restful, and I got more done than I expected! I intended to see what happens if I gave myself no agenda or weekly goals, and here’s what I ended up doing:

  • Read a ton of sci-fi short stories (Ken Liu and Ted Chiang are both amazing)

  • Built a system to create accounts and login to Browserflow on browserflow.app that seamlessly syncs with the extension

    • I used Next.js + Vercel’s serverless functionality for the first time, and boy, is it nice to use

  • Onboarded a close friend and all of my housemates to Browserflow

  • Fixed a long-standing issue with Redux memory management that caused significant performance problems

I feel recharged and excited again, which means that setting aside expectations and trying to take it easy did its job.

Week 33

Since this worked so well, now I’m wondering whether I should continue in this fashion and work without expectations or to resume my previous approach of setting weekly goals. The former feels enticing because of how nice this previous week felt, but there’s a reason why I started these weekly reflection and planning sessions: It forces me to prioritize. Otherwise, I’d work on what feels fun or easy and would likely ignore difficult but necessary tasks.

What is the most important thing for me to focus on at this stage in Browserflow’s development?

It would have to be answering the most common question that comes up when I talk to people about Browserflow: “What would I use this for?”

That requires two parts:

  1. Creating demos of things Browserflow can do
  2. Making it easy to discover and try different flows

The first part involves me developing flows myself and inspiring others to do so. The approach I’m taking is

  1. Identify pain points that can be solved by Browserflow
  2. Create and share a demo of how Browserflow solves it
  3. Get people to sign up for the beta, learn to use it, and create their own flows

It makes more sense for me to focus on getting developers to use Browserflow to create flows rather than getting everyday folks to use a pre-created flow. I’m thinking of it like how OpenAI went about releasing access to GPT-3: They released it first to people who want to build on top of it which led to people creating and share cool demos.

The second part requires developing some kind of flow gallery or store that allows people to browse flows as well as upload the ones that they’ve created. That’s going to require some major effort to build, but it’ll be key to helping people discover what Browserflow can do. PhantomBuster does this quite nicely on their homepage:

For the first part of generating demos, I need to make it easier for others to learn and use Browserflow. That makes me think that I should invest more time into improving the usability (e.g. autocomplete) and creating an onboarding experience. Right now, I’m the bottleneck for people learning to use Browserflow — I have to onboard them through a 45 minute video call to walk them through the service and teach them how it works. Perhaps I should focus on removing myself from that process by creating an in-product onboarding flow. Even if I get many more interested people signing up to use Browseflow, it won’t do them any good to have to wait until I’m available.

Or maybe that’s okay? Maybe I should have it be a highly personal, high-touch onboarding experience to build a relationship with everyone using the product? And if I want to scale, I can allow existing users to invite their friends with the expectation that they’ll onboard their friends. I’ve already had that happen in one case, but perhaps that’s too much to expect in general.

In summary, here are the different pieces that come to mind when I think of what’s most important to work on:

  • Goal: Generate more demos

    • Make it easier for others to create flows

      • Create in-product onboarding experience
      • Improve usability and functionality

  • Goal: Create gallery to discover and use flows

    • Allow publishing flows and importing them by URL

So much to do!

Decision: Since helping others learn to use Browserflow is going to be key in generating cool flows and demos, I’m going to focus on improving the onboarding experience this week.

Snippets

  • Browserflow

    • Create guided onboarding experience that walks people through creating and running their first flow

Once I have that first guided experience, it should be easier to create other ones for learning about the more advanced uses of Browserflow (variables, loops, etc.).