Day 516: Browserflow Creators

I’ve talked before about how Browserflow has two distinct classes of users:

• Creators: Developers / low-coders who will build custom flows
• Consumers: People who just want a ready-made solution and are either unable or uninterested in building their own flow

For creators, I need to provide documentation and examples to make it easy for them to build their own flows.

For consumers, I need to provide an extensive gallery where they can easily search for existing solutions.

Browserflow is built to make it possible for anyone to become a creator, but since it will still have a learning curve, I expect most people to be consumers.

To start with, I’m going to focus on the creators because they’ll be ones creating flows that get used by everyone else. If I focus on consumers, I’ll only attract people who want to use one of the existing solutions I’ve built, which is not that many. In other words, I’d be the bottleneck.

The person who best represents the creator persona for me is my good friend David Bieber who has written extensively about his usage of Browserflow (example) and is single-handedly responsible for sending over tons of people to my little project.

For my launch this month, I want to make sure that it’s as easy as possible for those creators to get started with Browserflow and build their own flows. Eventually, I want to also make it easy for consumers to get started with Browserflow, but that won’t be my focus in the short-term.

(Journaling is great — I initially titled this post “Browserflow’s Gallery” with the intention of writing about all the improvements I need to make to the gallery experience in Browserflow, but while writing this post, I realized that I was assuming that I should optimize for consumers which I don’t think I should.)

This decision makes it much easier for me to decide what to prioritize before the launch and what kind of language to use on the marketing site. Later on, I’d want anyone to come to browserflow.app and see things that appeal to them, but for now, I’m going to focus on developers and low-coders who are interested in putting in the effort to build customized solutions for themselves.

The long-term goal is to build an ecosystem where a vibrant community of creators are constantly creating new flows that anyone else can use.

So, to summarize, the current goal is to make it easy for other makers such as myself to build flows using Browserflow, not to optimize the experience for people who simply want to use Browserflow for a very specific use case. Eventually, I want to make it easy for them, too, but doing so now feels like inviting everyone to a farmer’s market where there are no farmers.