Day 401: But will it make money?

sales

Earlier today, I chatted with some friends about Browserflow and brainstormed possible business models:

  • Charge for running flows in the cloud
  • Charge for collaboration features (e.g. a team can all share a private collection of flows)
  • Create a marketplace where people can build and sell flows and I’d take a cut

All of the approaches above would allow making the extension free (and possibly open-source), which would be great because it would help foster a community of people building flows for all sorts of sites and use cases. The desired end result here is that I can go on Browserflow’s gallery, type in “Gmail”, “Twitter”, “focus”, or any service/keyword, and see hundreds of flows that people have created and shared. Instead of having to create my own flows, I can get see what other people are automating and use that as inspiration. This would spur adoption, get more people using Browserflow, and we can all sit around singing kumbaya while all our tedious work is automated.

I brought all this up with my roommate Tina, who responded with a question: “But will it make you money?”

My answer: Eventually…?

If I wanted to build a product that got as many users as possible, the above approach would be the way to go. It has a viral marketing loop built into it where people share flows they find useful with their friends/followers and people download Browserflow to try it out. For example, I got a burst of people signing up to get access to Browserflow after my friend David wrote about a flow that he made for focused reading.

But what would be popular isn’t necessary the same as what would make money.

Tina gave it to me straight: Browserflow has enough features to solve people’s problems, so I need to focus on finding people willing to pay for it, not building more features.

It’s the same real talk that Shiva gave me almost 100 days ago. Did I do anything about it since then? Of course not. I spent the last several months playing in Taiwan rather than working and now that I’m getting back into work, I’ve focused on what’s fun and easy (coding) rather than what’s required (marketing & sales).

One of major takeaways that I had with my conversation with Tina was that I need to focus on selling solutions, not on selling the tool. Most people aren’t interested in building their own flows — they want a ready-made solution that fixes whatever problem they have. Engineers like me find tools like Browserflow cool because we have the skills to play around with it and exercise our creativity, but my target market isn’t engineers. If I’m trying to make this into a business, my target market should be people who wouldn’t even think to automate their workflows because they don’t know how or they didn’t even realize it’s possible. They’re the ones willing to pay $30 a month for a service that saves them a bunch of time; I’d probably struggle to convert engineers and productivity geeks like myself into customers even at $5 a month. My personal struggle is that I want to give Browserflow to other engineers — it feels really nice to have my work appreciated by people who understand what’s involved in making everything work (not gonna lie — figuring out how to scrape Twitter was a freaking pain in the butt and it’s super gratifying to know that someone knows and appreciates that Browserflow takes care of DOM recycling). But coder street cred and GitHub stars don’t put food on the table.

Here’s the plan:

  • Identify promising niches and reach out to people offering to help automate their workflows
  • Build a few flows that’s solves a real pain point common in that niche
  • Scale up reaching out to people in that niche offering the solution (market the flows, not the tool!) for a monthly subscription
  • Repeat

Tina and I also talked about money and my motivations. One of the reasons why I’ve been a coding hermit treating my work like art projects rather than businesses is that I’m not very motivated by money (at least right now?) — I’m content and secure with what I have. But, at the same time, I recognize that building a business now will be helpful for funding various future things that will be more cost-intensive (supporting my parents? family and kids? funding a indie maker community house? spending months traveling and meditating? donating more?). None of these things feel urgent though, which is why I’ve been fine living off my savings and straight chilling at $120 MRR or whatever Hide Feed is pulling in these days. I spend very little time thinking about the future these days (almost certainly due to all that time spent meditating), but even without fixed goals, trying to make a business out of my work seems worthwhile.

Note to self at this stage: Stop building based on what I think people want. Start selling. Build only what’s necessary to sell more.