Day 759: browserflow priorities

product

i still haven’t fully solved the problem of feeling pulled in all directions when working on browserflow, but i’m getting better at saying no. i’m still spending way too much time on activities that feel urgent but aren’t the most important uses of my time.

right now, my focus needs to be on (1) building the long-term foundation for marketing / acquiring new users and (2) making it easier to get started with browserflow because it’s still too hard for most people.

the people who end up messaging me the most are the power users, which on one hand is great because they’re so passionate about using browserflow, but for the time being, i need to focus on the experience of new and beginner users because there’s still so much room for improvement there. it doesn’t make sense to build some super advanced feature that 3 people will use when 100 people get stuck every week and stop using browserflow because they don’t know how to get it to work.

(i’m considering killing some of the power features (e.g. running a flow from a flow) because it significantly increases product complexity, there are existing bugs that are difficult to work through due to that complexity, and almost no one uses it. i do want to make it easier to organize and structure flows though, but it’s definitely not a priority right now)

things i need to stop doing:

  • building one-off solutions for people (basically consulting/freelancing)

    • this was super duper useful in the beginning because it helped me understand what features browserflow needed + common usage patterns, but having done this enough times now, i’ve hit diminishing returns on learning

  • building features for power users

    • to be clear, this is important and will definitely come later, but just not now. the impact of doing this compared to making it easier to do the most common tasks just isn’t comparable

  • fixing bugs that only affect a tiny number of users due to some super special edge case

    • same rationale as above

things i need to do more:

  • more documentation
  • more tutorials
  • better UX for the most common tasks
  • write blog posts about automation + scraping to plant the seeds for long-term SEO
  • integrations that will enable more use cases (zapier integration, webhooks, API)

before, when i had no customers, i found it useful to do things that don’t scale in order to learn more about different problems and develop solutions for them

now, i need to stop doing those time-intensive, low-impact activities and focus exclusively on things that scale. answering the same question a million times on discord is such a waste of time when i should be creating better documentation and tutorials to prevent the need for those questions to be asked in the first place