Day 416: so many requests

even though i only took in 10 people off the waitlist for browserflow’s private beta and even though only 2-3 of those people have been actively sending feedback, i’m also losing track of all the different requests that are coming in

the problem is that browserflow has an incredibly large scope which means there are infinite areas for improvement

for example, here are some of the requests that i’ve gotten in slack:

better links to docs from the product
make it clearer what importing a flow will do
allow seeing the internals of a flow before importing
specifying a selector for the “Scroll” command is confusing when you want to scroll the entire page
make it clearer when commands are indented
provide guidelines for rate limits when automating popular sites (e.g. twitter)
allow launching a flow for a particular row of data in a table
show a “add command” button between steps in the editor
allow selecting a tab in any window
allow focusing a tab and the window it’s in with a single command instead of two
expose global variables for things like current date, timestamp, etc.
allow renaming files when downloading files
allow placing flows in directories for improved organization

most of these features fall into the “yup, that’s a good idea and i definitely want to work on it, but it doesn’t make sense to work on that right now”

so this raises two questions:

what does make sense to work on right now?
how do i keep track of the requests so that i can work on them later?

i’m going to focus on the second question because the first one is a whole post in itself. so far, i’ve been creating github issues in browserflow’s private repo to track these feature requests that i’d like to work on some day but not now.

the major downside of doing this is that (1) if i miss a request, it doesn’t get tracked (aka i’m the bottleneck) (2) people get no visibility into what happened to their request and aren’t updated when it’s resolved

if i’m struggling to stay on top of this for just 10 people (plus a few more from existing beta users), this is going to be impossible when i add more users.

i need to develop a system where i can keep track of what people request without having to do everything myself.

the system i have in mind:

create a public repository just for browserflow bug reports / feature requests
encourage people to file issues there
once something is fixed or if i decide not to pursue it, i’d update the issue

this gives visibility into the progress of things and also means i don’t have to be the one tracking all the issues. my job would simply be to keep them updated / close them if they don’t make sense.

the downside of using github issues is that non-developers need to make an account to participate but i’m okay with that for now.

i think the best idea would be to pay for a specialized feedback tool but that gets expensive very quickly so i’m going to give this a shot first before going that route

working through user feedback was my original motivation for building browserflow (i wanted to automate pre-filling an email in gmail from a user’s feedback in google sheets) and now we’ve come full circle. i’m still strugglin