Day 583: customer advice

product

had a call with F, a customer who’s using browserflow for scraping linkedin. he gave some great advice for browserflow so wanted to log it here:

  • have a presence on linkedin

    • so i tend to view linkedin as a complete joke but somehow over the years it’s become a Real Social Network and while i’d rather not engage with that platform, the reality is that linkedin is a huge source of interest in browserflow because it has so much data on businesses. i explicitly do NOT want to become just a linkedin automation tool but i know that’s what a lot of people want to use it with. F told me that i need to get on linkedin and he’s right — that’ll definitely be part of my marketing efforts after the retreat

  • build more templates

    • F is a non-technical user and told me that because everyone’s so busy, many people won’t have the patience to sit down for 30 minutes and figure out how browserflow works. this goes back to the question of who i want my target audience to be. if it’s developers, i can expect people to take the time to learn the tool, but if it’s non-technical users, they’ll want something working ASAP and not care so much about how it works. david and other friends have suggested that i can do both by having browserflow, the tool, be flexible while providing an extensive gallery that will help people get started with minimal effort

    • F had actually seen the initial benefit of browserflow by running one of the gallery flows (scraping employees from linkedin) so building out more of these where someone can just pick and choose what they need would be helpful

    • other ideas in this vein

      • long-term, i want to create a marketplace where developers can build flows and sell them to interested users. that way, there’s incentives for developers to maintain their flows while non-technical users can benefit from a variety of options

      • the first step to doing that would be allowing anyone to share their flows to a community-sourced gallery. from there, i can work on improving discovery by having the extension show top extensions for the particular site the user is on (e.g. if they’re on linkedin, showing the top linkedin flows and making it easy to start using them)

      • the reason why i didn’t have the gallery be community-sourced from the beginning was for two reasons: quality and security

        • quality: i want to avoid the situation where someone tries to run their first flow and it simply doesn’t work. i’ve had that experience while testing out other automation products and it suuuuucks and really undermines trust in the quality of the product. a way around this would be to have “featured” flows that are vetted
        • security: because browserflow can automate any site, it also means that a malicious actor could create a flow that tries to steal user data. it might be sufficient to do what shortcuts on iOS does in showing a warning to users that they’re installing a third-party flow, but long-term i want to introduce a permissions system so it’s clearer what kinds of things the flow is able to do and access

    • F wanted to add more teammates to browserflow

      • i currently don’t have team plans, but i think i’ll definitely have to add support for access control, combined billing, better collaboration, etc. assuming i’ll continue to sign on more businesses
      • is it time to hire someone to help me because there’s a lot of work to be done there

    so much to do

    so much potential

    wheeeeeeeeeeeee

    when i finish the retreat, i should come up with a way to prioritize all these things because it’s too much to take on all at once