Day 291: Rambling about Money and Hiring

Oh my god. In a few days, it’ll have been five months since I started working on Browserflow.

I’ve definitely mentioned this in previous posts, but this is by far the hardest I’ve worked on a project.

For every product that I’ve built starting from June of last year when I started coding again, I’ve built projects for myself first and foremost. My assumption has been that there are enough people in the world who have similar interests and goals as me that as long as these products worked well, there would be people willing to pay for them if I wanted to make them into sustainable businesses.

This meant that I haven’t done any sort of “market validation” or similar step where I make sure that people actually want what I’m building. I’m just building based off of what I’d want and expecting that it’ll all work out.

As I inch ever so closer to pushing the private beta of Browserflow out into the world, I’ve started wondering whether this is something that people would actually pay for. I have no doubt that there will be quite a few people who will be stoked by the idea of being able to automate things in their browser, but they might all be hobbyist programmers who scoff at the idea of paying something like $15 a month to have access to Browserflow.

Michael has been using Browserflow to automate some things in Shopify, and he suggested that Shopify users might be willing to pay for something like Browserflow because it could save them loads of time for running their business.

If I were able to get a nontrivial revenue stream from Browserflow, I’d like to use it to hire people. I’d love to hire a developer to help me make Browserflow more stable and feature rich, a designer to make things better than just plain Bootstrap, and perhaps a marketer to come up with posts and other content about how Browserflow can help people save time.

It’d be awesome to have a team who can take care of the day-to-day so that I can investigate new directions like running Browserflow in the cloud which would be so rad.

I’m sleepy, and I don’t even know what I’m typing anymore. Good night!