Day 525: Week 76 Plan

status

Week 75

Goals

  • Routine

    • ✅ Sleep before 11pm at least 3 times

      • Yay! But… despite going to sleep early, my sleep quality’s been pretty poor due to a massive bird orgy that takes place every morning right outside our place at 5am. rip

    • ✅ Jog at least 3 times

      • I ran 8+ miles yesterday (usually I only do distances around 1 mile) and my legs are completely rekt
      • Also I’ve been running outside so I am getting pretty dark now

    • ✅ Stretch at least 3 times

    • ✅ Work out at least 3 times

  • Browserflow

    • ✅ Build basic onboarding

      • omg i finally did it

    • ❌ Add 3 example flows to marketing website

    • ❌ Invite 10 people from waitlist

Summary

This week was again great in terms of fitness and routine (except for sleep — I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night for some reason so there have been days where I’m just wiped before it’s even started), but not so great in terms of getting things done.

I finally built a basic in-product onboarding flow to showcase what Browserflow can do. It’s not exactly where I want it to be, but it’s Good Enough and that’s fine for now. Done is better than perfect!!!

Week 76

Well, here we are.

Two weeks ago, I committed to moving from closed beta to open beta on or before 6/16, and that’s this Wednesday.

Today, I thought through all the things I wanted to get done before launching, felt overwhelmed, and spent the rest of the day method acting as a stunned slug in a state of paralysis. Here’s what I think is happening: In my mind, this is a Big Deal — the culmination of this past year working on Browserflow. And unlike other times when I’ve launched things, I’m not at all sure about how to even talk about this product.

Let’s take a peek inside my head, shall we?

Builder DK: Hey, I guess it’s time to start sharing this amazing thing I’ve built.

Marketer DK: Great, what is it?

Builder: It’s a low-code platform to automate anything in the browser.

Marketer: Err… let’s try that again. What can people do with it?

Builder: Anything they want! Scraping websites, automating actions, taking screenshots, etc.

Marketer: bro this is literally the same conversation you had with ceo dk four months ago how have you made absolutely zero progress on this front??????

Builder: 🙃

In other words, I don’t feel ready to share Browserflow because most people will have no idea what to do with it. There’s this expectation in my head that if I’m going to open to this up and have anyone sign up, I should have a compelling message about what problem this is solving and why it’s valuable.

When I take a step back, I see that I’m making two assumptions:

  • I’m expecting this “launch” (it’s not The Big Launch but it’s still a launch) to be polished and amazing
  • I’m expecting Browserflow to be understood and appreciated by anyone who comes across it

These assumptions don’t actually have to be true though. What if I reframed this whole thing? What if I viewed this launch not as a big reveal, but simply as the starting point? Like, I just pretend that I’m just starting this product and that I’m simply doing what I should’ve done a year ago? Suddenly, the pressure disappears because I’m just sharing a work in progress and looking at feedback as a way to improve the product rather than as a validation of my efforts. I like that.

What about the second assumption where I want anyone to understand the appeal of Browserflow? Again, unnecessary. This stems from me having struggled big time deciding whether I want Browserflow to be an app (the solution is ready-made) or a platform (the user is expected to build solutions on top of Browserflow). Another way of looking at it: Do I want the end users to be creators or consumers?

In that post, I already said I wanted to focus on creators to start with and then transition to focusing on consumers, but I’m starting to think that I should be open to the possibility of just focusing on creators entirely and building a platform that they can use to provide great solutions to end users.

In fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Currently, the landing page is geared towards appealing to both creators and consumers, which dilutes the effectiveness in my opinion because it becomes generic glop that doesn’t resonate strongly with anyone. For example, one of the selling points of Browserflow is that you can automate sites that don’t provide an API because you’re interfacing directly with the web UI. But I’ve refrained from including the word “API” on the page because I know that most non-technical people will have no idea what that is. What if the header wasn’t “Automate the boring stuff” but something like “Automate websites without an API”? Much more specific.

What if I redesigned the landing page and targeted developers / low-code builders directly? I think it would actually lead to a much more compelling value proposition. In fact, Builder DK’s description of Browserflow being a “low-code platform to automate anything in the browser” will actually make sense to people. I can even go further and say it’s like “Puppeteer in your own browser” or “Browser automation as a service”. It’ll mean nothing to most people, but those who know will know — and if that’s enough to build a business off of, that’s good enough for me. In fact, if I could choose between the business of building a platform that others build on top of or selling specific solutions, I’d much prefer the former because flows will inevitably break when websites update and being responsible for keeping selectors up-to-date across hundreds of flows sounds like a huge maintenance burden. It’s like choosing between running the App Store or maintaining hundreds of apps yourself. Of course, I expect to maintain some key flows, but I’d like them to be examples that others use as inspiration to build their own solutions.

Here’s my strategy for this launch and for the next several months: I’m going to treat this as a starting off point with the goal of building a platform for developers / low-code builders, not as a ready-made solution for non-technical users. I’ll treat this direction as a short-term experiment that I’ll re-evaluate after some pre-defined time (maybe 3 months?) so that I can commit fully while knowing that I don’t have to be right. Perhaps in the long-term, I find that it makes much more sense to build and maintain a bunch of use-case specific flows (e.g. like Phantombuster) rather than creating a platform for users to come up with their own solutions (e.g. AWS, GCP, Browserless).

The last piece I have to decide is whether to focus my efforts on the desktop offering (local execution) or the cloud offering (remote execution). Doing both doesn’t seem like a great idea because while they have some overlapping concerns, there’s a lot that’s specific to one or the other (e.g. local flows can take inputs interactively from the user while cloud flows can’t; cloud flows can use proxies, set cookies, solve captchas, etc. while the local flows can’t).

Given that the cloud flows have a much more compelling business case (cloud flows are much more likely to be used on a recurring basis than local flows, many of which are just one-off things), I’ll go with cloud. Like the other decision, I’m open to being wrong about this and changing to focus entirely on helping people improve their local productivity workflows, but my product hunch is that the cloud offering is the more promising direction.

Decisions:

  • Reframe (in my mind) this week’s launch as a starting point, not some big reveal

    • Honestly, I’m going to keep this one super low-key and focus on drumming up a ton of attention once I’ve iterated on the product’s positioning, gotten use cases, etc. and launch for realzies. this is a baby launch

  • Target audience: Developers

  • Target usage: Browser automations that run automatically in the cloud

Goals

In the spirit of “done is better than perfect”, I’m launching on 6/16 no matter what. I’m going to try to get as much prep done as possible, but if it doesn’t happen, it’s not a blocker.

  • Routine

    • Sleep before 11pm at least 3 times
    • Jog at least 3 times
    • Stretch at least 3 times
    • Work out at least 3 times

  • Browserflow

    • Rewrite landing page copy to target developers
    • Audit gallery (remove missing flows, make sure flows work, etc.)
    • Rework tutorials (some commands have changed since I initially recorded them)
    • Move community from Slack to Discord