Day 529: Finding a Niche

product

Even with all of 5 users or so in the Discord telling me about the things they’re trying to do with Browserflow, I’m realizing that the breadth is simply too wide. Here are the different use cases that have come up so far:

  • Taking a screenshot of their financial portfolio and emailing it to their friend
  • Periodically checking to see if a website changed and getting notified if so
  • Performing long-running tasks

For each use case, I can see where Browserflow can provide better support:

  • Browserflow saves screenshots into Google Drive but doesn’t provide a mechanism for sending it via email

    • I planned to have Zapier take care of that part but it can’t because it can’t search within subfolders (Browserflow creates a new folder for every run) so I have to find a different solution

  • Browserflow makes it easy to get notified if a piece of text changes, but not if something visual changes

    • That’d require a way to compare screenshots from the current run to screenshots of a previous run
    • I’d also need to provide tools for seeing the difference between two images easily

  • Browserflow Cloud only supports running tasks that complete within 1 minute (free plan) or up to 5m (business plan)

    • I’d need to move to a different infrastructure with always-on servers rather than using a serverless architecture if I want to support long-running tasks

And that’s just from three different users. Once there are even more people, I’m sure the number of use cases will grow and grow and grow.

There are two paths forward:

  • Continue to provide a general platform
  • Specialize into one or a few use cases

I like the idea of providing a general platform (can you tell that this is a consistent theme in Browserflow? It’s an RPA that can work on any website vs. using APIs which would limit its applicability; it’s a platform that can support any workflow vs. an end-to-end solution for a particular use case), but I’ll have to at least keep an open mind about narrowing my focus so that Browserflow doesn’t just end up being a mediocre solution to a lot of problems. It’s better to be a great solution for a few.