Day 286: Shortcuts for Everything

marketing

When I describe Browserflow to people, I usually tell them it’s a tool that helps you automate anything in the browser. Or sometimes I’ll use the cheesy, marketing version and tell them it gives you superpowers in the browser.

The problem is that no one has any idea what that means. “Superpowers in your browser”? Sounds nice, but that could describe anything from a tab management extension to an extension that throws up Marvel characters on your screen at random intervals.

“Automate anything” is slightly better, but the word “automation” doesn’t mean much to most people except for growth marketers who would like to Add You To Their Professional Network. If you were to ask people “what’s something you’d like to automate?”, most people would draw a blank because people usually aren’t thinking in terms of automating things.

But if you were to ask them, “what’s something annoying you have to do regularly?”, I think you’d get a lot more responses. A friend of mine asked if he can get onboarded to Browserflow because he uses labels and filters in Gmail to adds all newsletter type emails to a “Newsletter” filter. The problem is that it takes nine clicks every time he wants to add a new address to that filter.

Here’s a demo of Browserflow doing that automatically:

With the recent addition of the command palette / launcher that lets you easily run flows from any page, it became clear that another way to describe Browserflow is that it allows you to create shortcuts for anything.

Many of the use cases that people have wanted to use Browserflow for fit that framing:

  • Scrolling allllllllllllll the way up in a Messenger thread

  • Extracting and adding notes to Roam/Notion/Substack

  • Unfollow everyone on Twitter

At the same time, some important use cases are more one-off tasks and don’t fit the “shortcuts” framing neatly:

Despite that downside, I think positioning Browserflow to be a tool that you use on a daily basis rather than something you reach for every once in a while to perform some scraping task makes a lot of sense. The scraping tasks will also be a lot more compelling once there’s cloud support. Since I’ve built everything so far to work locally in your own browser, it makes sense to focus on use cases where that’s a unique strength rather than a limitation.

I’m really excited about this shortcuts angle because it feels like it’ll make it easier for people to come up with their own use cases and share their solutions with other Browserflow users. With this reframing, Browserflow is more of a local productivity tool like TextExpander or Alfred than it is an automation platform like Zapier. Of course, with the tech that I’ve built out, it makes sense to build support for automating things in the cloud because there are a ton of use cases there too — but for now, it feels like helping people get things done locally is the way to go.