Day 571: FIRST CUSTOMER 🎉

yay browserflow is officially a business!!!! 🎉

only took 14 months to get here lmao

while i’m excited about this, it’s a bit concerning that the way i got this customer was by doing things that won’t scale

i basically have been doing a bunch of custom work and built all their flows — it’s felt more like freelancing than anything

i was happy to do this because

(1) romain (the customer) has been super supportive throughout and i enjoy helping him out

(2) this is a nice way to test out real-world scenarios and see how the platform holds up

but unless i want to hire support people or other developers who can build out these custom solutions, this is not going to be a good way to get customers going forward. i absolutely think building a team of developers who can build custom solutions for customers would work as a business, but at that point this becomes an agency/consultancy where browserflow is a hidden implementation detail and i’m much less interested in that compared to building a product-focused saas business

this further pushes me in the direction of positioning browserflow as a tool for developers / people who can fully self-serve so that i’m not on-call whenever a site changes their design and a flow breaks. that’s the completely opposite of the calm business i’d like to build where i don’t have to be beholden to my phone / customers paging me at any time of the day/night. obviously, i can hire and train employees to do that so i’m not on the hook personally, but it’s just not that appealing to me

in other words, i want to build browserflow to empower developers/freelancers/teams to be able to quickly build out these automations for themselves or for clients rather than building automation solutions directly for the clients themselves

might look back on this in a few months and see this as the moment where i ignored a clear sign of how the market wants a fully managed service rather than a developer tool, but i gotta at least give this a shot