Day 404: Choosing My Users

sales

Several days ago, I wrote about how if I wanted to make Browserflow into a sustainable business, I should focus on B2B rather than B2C. My plan was to identify tasks that met the following requirements:

  1. Recurring tasks
  2. Provide business value
  3. Annoying to do manually (takes a long time, requires lots of context switching, is error prone, etc.)
  4. Can be automated

Once I identified tasks that met this criteria, I’d create flows to automate the process, and then pitch it to people on LinkedIn who are likely to find it useful based on their job title. It’d be an outbound process where I’d cold message randos — something that I’m not exactly thrilled about.

But what if I could make B2C work?

In the past few hours, I’ve had 9 people sign up for the Browserflow waitlist because of a tweet by my friend David where he showed a flow he made for saving URLs to Roam:

https://twitter.com/Bieber/status/1360620153134792709

This is exactly how I had envisioned Browserflow would grow:

  1. Someone would make a cool flow
  2. They’d share it with their friends/audience
  3. Some of them would install Browserflow
  4. Someone would make a cool flow
  5. (Repeat)

In that post where I decided to go B2B, I said that “I’d probably struggle to convert engineers and productivity geeks like myself into customers even at $5 a month”.

I still think this is true. But there’s clearly demand for Browserflow from power users, so I should test my assumptions.

There are two ways that starting with B2C might actually work out:

  1. I discover that there are enough productivity people who are willing to pay for Browserflow
  2. Browserflow becomes popular enough where B2B sales happen because power users want to use it at work

Instead of trying to talk to people in operations & support and hunt for use cases, what if I built for the use case that’s already knocking at my door? My most popular Browserflow tweet by far is the one where I showed how it can save article snippets to Roam.

With my recent realization that being solutions-oriented rather than tool-oriented is a better way to sell, I think maybe the solution I provide is a bunch of curated flows for improved knowledge management (e.g. by integrating with David’s Roam Javascript functions). I can start by providing a fantastic tool for the Roam and Notion communities and branch out from there.

My long-term vision is to have Browserflow be ubiquitous. I want Browserflow to help millions of people save time, take control of their data, and use technology on their own terms. My end goal is to make money from charging businesses and use that to provide a generous free tier for individuals in the same way that Notion does.

So how do I get there?

Right now, it feels like my choices are (a) convince strangers that I can help them (B2B, cold outreach) or (b) provide value for people who are already coming to me for help (B2C).

I know the latter path is going to be much crazier (more feature requests, more bug reports, much more activity overall), but I want to give it a shot.

BUT! That doesn’t mean releasing everything for free without any plan for making this into a business.

I’m going to email everyone on the waiting list and tell them that the first 10 people willing to pay $20 for the private beta will be onboarded first and get personal help from me in building their flows. $20 is not so much that it’s cost-prohibitive, but it’s enough to select for people who are willing to pay for something that they’d find valuable.

This is further down the line, but when I release Browserflow, I think I’ll go with a free 14-day trial rather than providing a free plan. Even though the goal is to eventually provide a free plan, I think a 14-day trial has a similar effect to the $20 beta fee: It selects for people who are willing to pay if they find Browserflow valuable. Someone who isn’t interested in paying at all probably wouldn’t even bother trying out the tool because they know it wouldn’t be free after 14 days. Once there are enough paying users where Browserflow is humming along as a sustainable business, I can look into providing a free tier but that’s going to be a while.

First step: Email everyone on my waiting list. This is what I had on my TODO list for weeks without following through on it, but I really gotta do it this time.

And if it turns out that no one’s willing to pay $20 to join the private beta? Well, I can always fall back to my B2B plan.