Day 521: Onboarding Flow

product

okee, quick notes about the onboarding flow that i (finally!) started working on

goals of the onboarding flow:

  • walk everyone through how to run a flow
  • show interested people how to build a flow
  • motivate people to use browserflow

the assumption here is that everyone who uses browserflow will want to run their automations but only a subset (the creators) will want to / will be able to build them

i liked how the shortcuts app on ios uses a shortcut to (1) explain how shortcuts works and (2) show examples of what you can do with shortcuts, so i’m going to do the same by having an onboarding flow that users run when they install browserflow

the challenge with showing examples is that the most interesting things you can do with browserflow involve reading and writing to a spreadsheet (having some sort of stored state) as well as running things in the cloud. i’m not sure whether i want to walk people through connecting their google account and running stuff in the cloud during the onboarding flow because it’d make it very long — for now, i’ll just have a few demos that don’t require these things to show what they can do with browserflow.

now this would be where it’d be super useful to know which niche i’d like to target, but since i’m still unsure about that, i’m going to just have three fairly diverse examples that will hopefully get people’s automation juices flowing (since i’m targeting creators for now per this post).

examples i’ll demo:

  • web scraping: scraping rotten tomatoes for top movies filtered by year

  • browser task: taking a screenshot of a some website and saving it

  • the last one i’m not sure about

    • form filling? not super exciting but it’s a somewhat common use case

    • it’d be nice to showcase moving data between apps or even using an existing app but i want to avoid running a flow that accesses someone’s logged in state b/c (1) they might not have an account and (2) it’d be a bit unnerving to have a service you just downloaded access another account

      • e.g. i wanted to download a kindle book from project gutenberg and upload it to a gmail email but opening someone’s gmail for them during the onboarding flow seems a bit too freaky

    • i’ll think about this some more

long story short: yay i’m finally building a basic onboarding flow