Day 379: Reasons Why Browserflow Might Fail

product

There’s an exercise I’ve come across that goes something like: “Imagine a year from now, your business has completely failed. What went wrong?”

This is supposed to help you identify failure scenarios so that you can work to mitigate the chances of that occurring. Without trying to think of solutions, I’m going to list out all the potential game-ending scenarios that come to mind:

  • Google makes platform changes to Chrome that breaks Browserflow in a critical way

    • Manifest V3 is being released in Chrome 88, which rolls out starting today. I’m not sure just how much of Intention and Browserflow I’ll need to rewrite to support the platform changes, but I’m low-key scared that I’m going to be crying myself to sleep because something critical has changed.

  • Browserflow never launches

    • I lose motivation and stop working on it
    • I get hit by a bus 🚌

  • No one finds out about Browserflow

    • I’m unable to find a marketing strategy that gets Browserflow in front of interested customers

  • People aren’t willing to pay

    • Browserflow turns out to be a solution looking for a problem and can’t find a target market

    • Browserflow doesn’t work dependably enough to be useful

      • I’ve experienced a strange case in an onboarding call where there was some erratic behavior that I was unable to reproduce on my machine. I couldn’t tell whether it’s because they were on an older OS version, have some other extension installed that’s interfering, Browserflow has a flaky bug, etc. I wanted to buy her laptop so I could diagnose it, but me being in Taiwan would’ve made shipping that extremely expensive. The possibility of this being a common occurrence scares me.

    • Browserflow is too slow to be useful

      • Since Browserflow runs flows locally, it can only automate things as fast as the users’ computer allows. This may make Browserflow useless on slower machines. The solution would be running flows in the cloud where machines are guaranteed to have sufficient resources.

It’s kind of nuts that I started working on Browserflow full-time in May and still haven’t launched it. That’s 8 months! (To be fair, several of those months were me being in a daze or hyper-socializing and not working at all, but still.)

I intentionally eschewed the common advice to validate your idea before building because I was confident enough in the idea to go ahead with it (lol, this is the most common mistake people make and here I am making it), but it’s been long enough now where I need to switch over into validation mode and start talking to people. The product that I have is much more than an MVP (spent way too long working through a million edge cases for that to be the case), but it’s lacking from getting real customer feedback rather than thoughts from several friends who kind of used it / use it. I think I’ve been too heads down, so it’s time to correct that!!!