Day 318: Browserflow or Intention?

sales

I was thinking about what I’d like to focus on during the two weeks I’ll be quarantined inside my windowless hotel room in Taiwan, and the idea of doing a one-month sprint on Intention came up.

Intention is a fully-working, stable product used by thousands of people, and so far, I haven’t made any effort to create a paid plan. If I spent several weeks on it, I’m sure I could add user management, payment, and a set of paid features that many people would sign up for.

Here are the some of the features I’d been considering for a paid tier:

  • Daily unlock limit

    • Currently, Intention sets a limit based on how much time you’ve spent on a distracting site, but it’d be useful to set a limit based on how many times you’ve unlocked the site so that you’re not distracting yourself every few minutes. Several people have asked for this, and I want this, too.

  • Time reporting

    • In addition to tracking time spent on distracting sites, Intention could track time spent on all sites so that you’d have a complete overview of how you spent your time online. This would basically replace the need for Web Timer, one of my other extensions, and I could migrate users over if desired.

  • Data sync

    • After creating user accounts, I can back up people’s data in the cloud so that they’d be able to restore their data when switching devices or sync it between multiple browsers. Syncing across multiple devices is probably the most common feature request I get.

  • Weekly reports

    • Once I have data stored in the cloud, I can create weekly email reports that people can use to reflect on how they spent their time in the past week.

  • Focus mode

    • When people want to make sure they don’t get distracted, they can use Focus Mode to block all distracting sites for a specified period of time.

  • Cooldown

    • This is already in the product, but I think it’d make sense to make this a paid feature.

These features are straightforward to implement, but it’d take time to get them right. If I spent the next month working on it, I’m pretty sure I can complete these and launch a paid plan. This would also be a great time to launch a paid plan because Christmas is coming up and I can provide the option for people to gift Intention subscriptions to their friends and loved ones.

I’m also considering making Intention a lifetime purchase rather than a subscription. Or maybe do both?

Let’s say that I charged $79 for a lifetime membership in Intention’s paid plan. (I’d probably run this as a deal for all the existing users as thanks for being an early adopter before bumping up the price significantly at the start of 2021).

Currently, Intention has 6500 users. Let’s make up some numbers and see what a successful paid plan would do. If 5% of users converted, I’d make $25,675. If the launch went really well and 10% converted, it’d be $51,350. Even if less than 0.2% of users converted, it’d still bring in over $1,000.

Even though I’d likely make thousands of dollars just from spending a month working on Intention, I’m still hesitant to do it. I guess this speaks to how unmotivated by immediate revenue I am right now (or just how into Browserflow I am). Adding a paid plan to a completed product that many people love seems like a no-brainer and doing otherwise would just be leaving money on the table.

And yet! I feel some strong momentum with Browserflow that I’d feel like I’d squander if I changed focus. I’m starting to get inbound requests from friends of friends who want to use Browserflow to automate their work, and it feels like Browserflow is well on its way to connecting with people who would be happy to pay to use it. It feels like Browserflow has a much higher potential to be a successful business mostly due to its B2B prospects, which Intention doesn’t have (I’ve had a friend suggest that Intention can be B2B by morphing into some Big Brother surveillance software to help companies monitor their employee’s productivity in the age of remote work but even the thought of that is enough to make me throw up a little bit in my mouth).

So. Go for the (almost) sure thing, finally build a paid plan, and start making money from Intention? Or go for the home run and continue on with Browserflow?

Perhaps this decision is made harder by the fact that neither direction is final in any way — I can always add a paid plan to Intention later (although the timing wouldn’t be as good, and I’d lose out on months of subscription payments), and stepping away from Browserflow for a little bit doesn’t mean I can’t pick it back up. Then there’s the option of trying to do both by working on Intention’s paid plan while fixing bugs on Browserflow and continuing to onboard people, but I have a perhaps unreasonably averse attitude towards splitting my attention and time between projects rather than going all in on one thing at a time.

Man, I’m really good at the “spend oodles of time building things I love” part, but the “make a living” part clearly needs some work. Sometimes I think that having an ample amount of savings might be a disadvantage because I don’t feel a sense of urgency to start charging for things.

What do?