Good friends support you in your endeavors.
Great friends support you in your endeavors, but they also dish out tough love when you're clearly doing something whack.
Luckily for me, Shiva has been helping me keep it real for a long time now and today was no exception. We got to talking about Browserflow, and he pointed out some of the blind spots in my approach.
First off, I've been working on this project nonstop for over five months now. That's a crazy amount of time to devote to something without launching. This wouldn't be a problem if I were doing this as a hobby or simply building for myself. To be fair, I kind of am — just like Hide Likes, Hide Feed, and Intention, Browserflow is something that I started working on because I wanted to use it myself. I'm my own target user. That's fine and dandy, but I also have the goal of making a living off the software that I build. And that means building things that resonate with other people who are not me.
Shiva pointed out that I've been building and building and building, and while that's fun, I won't magically have customers without putting effort into selling. Unfortunately, "build it and they will come" isn't a real strategy.
Some realizations and reminders from our conversation:
Browserflow is ready
Every week, I say that I'm going to focus more on marketing and selling (and even publicly declare it), but inevitably, I get sucked back into product and developing features and fixing bugs. I'm apparently a code junkie that's unable to kick the habit.
While there's still a ton of room for improvement in Browserflow and plenty of bugs to fix (let's be real, there always will be — software of this complexity is never fully bug-free), the product is stable and useful enough that several friends and I use it every day.
Instead of making recording flows easier (which I'm dying to do) or making tiny tweaks here and there, it's time that I shift much more drastically into marketing and sales.
Pick a niche
What would people be willing to pay for?
Browserflow's power come from being able to do anything on any website, and while that's great from an engineering perspective, it's not a great sell. No one's going to pay for a swiss army knife that they don't know how to put to use.
So far, most of the flows I've put in the gallery have centered around taking control of your data on social media sites: exporting your followers, unliking things on Facebook, that kind of stuff. While some people would definitely find this useful, it suffers from the problem that this is something you do once. Once you've unfollowed everyone on Twitter, you're good. You're not going to be doing that every single week.
The use cases that people have been most enthusiastic about are the ones that save them time on a regular basis. For example, my friend Michael runs a newsletter and uses Browserflow to automatically compose and format his posts when moving them from Google Docs to Substack. Browserflow has become part of his workflow.
Those are the kinds of flows that I need to build and market. Not the cute little experiments that seem sort of interesting, but workhorses that people can't imagine going without once they've started using it.
Shiva mentioned that a good demographic to target would be the new crop of entrepreneurs who are building businesses through the interwebs and that makes a ton of sense. Michael has been using Browserflow to automate repetitive workflows in Shopify, and he had also previously suggested that other Shopify users might pay for Browserflow. Many people are now stitching together a bunch of services and no-code tools to create businesses, and Browserflow can be the glue that helps them run things more efficiently.
Validate the idea
So here's the plan. I'm going to stop building and start talking to people running their own businesses or have a job with workflows they want to streamline. That means that my weekly goals will be centered around scheduling calls with people and building flows to help them automate their work. While my initial reaction to that is largely "yuck" because I much, much prefer improving the product over scheduling calls and zooming all day, this is something important that I've put off for far too long.
I want to set up a concrete metric for me to target in order to confirm that I'm actually spending enough time on non-coding stuff, so here's the commitment: I can't ship a new version of Browserflow until I've collected payments from four people paying $50 to join the Browserflow beta.
The only exception will be if I find a major bug in existing functionality that leads to flows breaking. The above commitment does mean that I can't implement new features in order to have someone's flow work — otherwise, I'd get sucked right back into coding. If Browserflow is missing functionality that's needed to complete someone's workflow, I'll take note of it but I won't start working on it until I find four people who are thrilled enough with Browserflow's existing functionality that they're willing to pay to join the beta.
No more building for now. It's time to talk to people!
(Thanks Shiva for kicking my butt when I need it. 🙏🏽)
<aside> 👋 You're reading Road to Ramen, where I think aloud and share everything I learn in exploring the question: Can I make a living building things I love?
by DK the Human (@dk_the_human)
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