Day 540: Ocean of Uncertainty
Talked to the co-founder of a now-defunct startup that built a popular web scraping service.
The conversation was sobering.
He said that one of their major challenges, which they never figured out, is deciding who their target audience was. Developers or non-technical users? Enterprise or individuals? As a result, every day was filled with the existential crisis of not knowing what to prioritize because they didn’t know who they were serving.
His advice: Pick something very specific that has a clear customer and build a complete solution for them. Don’t try to be everything for everyone.
Road to Ramen is littered with posts of me agonizing over trying to decide what problem I’m solving and who I’m solving it for. For the past year, I built a general-purpose platform that’s supposed to be able to do anything. As a result, not only do I have a hard time marketing (who do I market to? what problem do I claim to solve?), but the product suffers as well because I’m building things in a generic way that requires users to configure things and set things up themselves in order to target a particular use case.
I’m still hopeful that this horizontal approach can work, but I need to prepare for the possibility that I might be barking up the wrong tree. It may end up being way more effective to build for a very specific use case for a very specific user. For example, consider an API service that returns screenshots of websites. This is a tiny subset of what Browserflow currently does, but there are businesses that do just this quite successfully:
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- Used by “more than 9600 businesses”. If we assume that they’re all paying and make the very conservative assumption that they’re all on their cheapest $7/month plan, that’s still an MRR of $67,000.
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- Been around for a few years so I’m guessing it’s working!
I think I need to give myself a deadline to test the hypothesis that I can make a horizontal approach work. Browserflow does so many things (anything a browser can do! on your desktop or in the cloud!), and while it’d be great to be able to build out that kind of general platform (great from a satisfaction sense — it’d actually be way easier from a maintenance perspective to support a narrow use case rather than support a platform anyone can build on top of), it’s not clear that it’d work.
Right now, as I try to turn this from a passion project to a business, I feel like I’m grappling with the core existential questions for Browserflow:
- Who am I building for?
- What problem am I solving?
- Do I want to continue building alone or bring on partners/form a team?
I don’t have clarify on any of these, but that’s okay.
The plan right now:
- Target web scraping as my first hero use case
- Try to find customers
- If I succeed, great; continue building out that use case and also look into adding another hero use case — eventually, have enough hero use cases that it works as a horizontal platform
- If not, cry myself to sleep and then explore what narrow, end-to-end solutions may be possible given what I’ve built so far (and validate before building further!)