Day 718: Bots!

When I meet people and they ask me about my work and what Browserflow does, I’ve been saying something like “it’s a browser automation platform that lets you automate your work”.

I know it’s absolutely terrible and it’s not like I’m trying to use nonsense buzzwords but I haven’t thought of a better way to describe the tool. I could go with “it’s a Chrome extension that lets you automate your work” which is slightly better because people generally know what Chrome extensions are whereas a browser automation platform means absolutely nothing, but it’s still not great.

So there I was, running on the treadmill in my apartment building’s gym because I kept waiting and waiting for the rain to stop so I could ride my motorcycle to the gym but it never did but I still wanted to get some exercise in, when it occurred to me: Bots. People understand bots.

“Browserflow is a tool that lets you build bots for any website without code”

That feels a lot more concrete and understandable than “automating your work” even though honestly, they’re both pretty vague. But it’s feels easier to describe a bot doing your work for you rather than a browser automation platform or Chrome extension “running flows”.

I’m leaning towards replacing all mention of “flows” with “bots” across the entire product. Not only does it feel easier to understand, but it also sounds way cooler. Having bots doing your work in the cloud sounds more badass than having Browserflow “run flows in the cloud”.

Desktop flows → Desktop bots

Cloud flows → Cloud bots

Flow gallery → Bot gallery

Running a flow → Running a bot

I also think this might attract more people who are interested in doing things in the cloud because a bot comes with the connotation of doing things automatically (e.g. on a schedule) rather than running things manually. This would be a good thing because customers with ongoing needs for automation (e.g. scraping a site every week) are stickier than people who have a one-time need for automation (e.g. scraping a site once).

I’m not looking forward to refactoring all the code (a quick project-wide search shows over 2000 uses of “flow” in the codebase) and performing the database migration, but I think the added clarity from the terminology change would be worth it.

Bots!