browserless
Headless browser automation for developers
IndieHackers! It's been so long, we've been so busy, but I wanted to write something about some great stuff we've been doing. And, most importantly, both are totally FREE.
After bootstrapping to $1.3M ARR, 15,000 active users and 9,000 github stars we are now looking to increase the number of enterprise customers at Browserless. While we love our self-serve customers and the number of accounts is growing quickly, we see an opportunity to move a little bit more up-market and serve larger teams. To do this, we are investing in the following activities. We’d love your feedback on whether this makes sense or how you think we can accomplish this.
Investment #1: Establishing an industry conference: The Browser Conference
Justification: Our product enables engineers to automate different tasks with a browser programmatically. Up until 7 years ago, engineers only had Selenium which was purpose built for front-end testing and validation. Today, we have an explosion of tools and frameworks that are tailored to what developers want to get out of modern browsers.
With that being said, we think there is plenty of end-user browser awareness for a wide audience, but there is relatively little for developers automating tasks.
The space is exploding with new libraries and technologies so it’s hard to keep up with. Many libraries commonly appear in the trending repositories:
Puppeteer: 84.5k
Playwright: 54.8k
Selenium: 27.7k 😥
chromedp: 9.5k
Browserless: 6.4K
… so many more and north of 1k stars.
These tools have fundamentally transformed the web automation space. New libraries and technologies are faster, lighter on network bandwidth, and more robust. Things like using 3rd party proxies, GPUs, dynamic and hybrid automation are starting to become easier and common. With further advancements in this space automating a web browser might even become easier soon than manually doing it yourself given that developers effectively have back-end control on what’s going on.
Check out the amazing speakers we have lined-up!
What are our goals?
Highlight best practices, common issues, and lessons learned.
Network with other organizations and people to figure out solutions to common problems.
Find where there’s gaps in the ecosystem and what we can do to fill them.
If you’d like to join us, the first year is going to be virtual and free. You can register here: https://www.accelevents.com/e/the-browser-conference-23
Investment #2: New product offering: Browserless Proxy
After talking with hundreds of customers, we have found that the #1 request people have for Browserless is a proxy to help them with various automation and scraping tasks. We have been busy researching the best approach to implement a proxy natively into our product and have a great solution. If your team is looking for an extremely flexible solution for browser automation (scraping, testing, AI use cases, or automation), you can sign up for our BETA here:
Investment #3: Hiring a full-time marketer to help us tell our story
If you have been following our journey here on IndieHackers, then you know that this has been a truly bootstrapped effort and almost all of the content is written by myself…also the reason why it is a bit sporadic! ;)
To help us share the cool things we are building, create more steady content and improve our general online presence, we are now hiring for our first ever full-time marketing hire at Browserless! This person will need to have a content background (we debated a ton on what skill-set is more important) as we want to provide interesting and valuable content for our technical audience. We see content as the “kernel” and we can then learn to distribute that via different channels and mediums over time. At any rate, if you know of someone that wants to be part of a growing company that is focused on the bleeding edge of what is possible with browsers, please share this with them:
As always, I’ve approached building Browserless openly. The benefit is checking my assumptions and getting feedback from people external to our team. I’d greatly appreciate any and all feedback on the three investments we are making.
Thanks and keep building!
-Joel
It's been 3 years since we started browserless, but as always small wins are some of the best wins! Today, we are trending at #5 on Github's Daily Typescript repositories, as seen here: https://github.com/trending/typescript?since=daily.
Thanks to all who've followed us so far on this journey, and here's to many more years to come!
In case you missed it, we recently were on Starter Story talking about growing a developer-focused business. Some of their questions were tough, and we hope the answers can shed some light on your journey! Plus, you'll get see sneak peak at the futon that "bootstrapped" browserless into what it is now.
See it here: https://www.starterstory.com/headless-browser-service
Our new post on SourceSort is now live! Being an open-source project has many benefits, but also some drawbacks, and we dive deep into how to get the best of both worlds.
Feel free to check out our interview here: https://sourcesort.com/interview/joel-griffith-browserless.
We recently did an interview with our friends over at brandfetch.io. Some great talking points including
- Growing your audience
- How to get started
- What we should have done sooner(!)
Check it out here: https://blog.brandfetch.io/automating-browsers-with-browserless/
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Agree with blogging. Such a long-tail benefit, but hard to commit time to do it.
After two years of running the business we have now hit 500 paying users! This an incredible accomplishment, and we couldn't have done it without the support and help from this community.
If you're on IndieHackers, and wondering how to get started, we were in your same shoes not so long ago. Please reach out and we'd be more than happy to share our insights!
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When you say "we" how many people are you now? Last I can remember, Joel was grinding it alone 👍
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Congratulations, Joel!
Posts like your reaffirm to myself that I am connected with the right community of founders :)
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Congrats, just saw your huge bump in revenue in September, what happened? 😱
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Yeah, that was a nice spike. We landed a rather large yearly contract, which was that payment. October probably won't be nearly as high!
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Just hearing this is inspirational in itself. Congrats.
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that's so awesome. Congrats.
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Congratulations @jgriffith. Cool product!
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Awesome accomplishment Joel!
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Congrats. A huge milestone!
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Congratulations! I've got a lot of help from your blog and the chat on your website, look forward to using your service soon!
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Thanks so much, appreciate that. Paying it forward now!
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What I great thing to heart!!!!
I'll contact you! What's the best way to do it?
Bests,
Just a short 8 months ago, after nearly a year of being in production, we announced that we had 100 users.
Now, fast-forward about 8 months later, and we've tripled that number! Here's to fighting and growing for your users!
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I used to be a customer, great product!
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I am one of those happy customers, keep it up!
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Thanks, Michael! Very cool to see your product on here -- I never knew you were an IHer, glad to see you on here!
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Wonderful!
What did you do to get them?
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I think early on, writing a lot of content and some general SEO helps. Nothing in the "magical" territory, but just good 'ol-fashioned content goes a long ways. Listening also helps a lot to (see my comment to @armouti). Laying in a hammock and thinking about the future also brings new ideas to the table as well -- can't think of everything sitting in front of a computer. You've got to get out a bit and remember the bigger picture.
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wow you're on a rip. What's been your main acquisition strategy ?
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As lame as it sounds, I generally just listened. Everyone has different feedback and use-cases, and I tried to get all of them working in a way that makes sense. I also use the product myself (we generate our licenses using the service + scrape external docs for our documentation as well), so feeling and seeing shortcomings as a user certainly helps. Finally, I tried to cater to the various purchasing styles out there. Some users only use the service a few times a month, and there's a way to buy time for that case. Others want to run it themselves, and we allow that as well. It's challenging to make it all work so that it's portable for other's to use, but it also forces you to make good design decisions early on.
Hope all that helps -- you've likely heard it all already, but reenforcement does help!
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Thank you so much for taking the time to write this!
It's very inspiring the amount of creativity and hard work you had to put in to cater to all these various customer needs in an optimal way, hats off for that!
it definitely opens my eyes to get to hear these lessons from the lens of someone who succeeded at making them work.
However the advice of making good design decisions early on is novel to me! I always hear the mantra of shipping an internally-crappy product fast is much better than investing time into shipping a well-architected product that might not end up catching traction... I guess it's a delicate balance that depends on the product? which in the case of browserless it is infrastructure heavy and needs quality-performance as part of its value proposition, right?
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We've hit 3M sessions ran in one day! This is a huge milestone for us, and places us as one of the largest providers for browser-based automation. Even with the likes of SauceLabs and Browserstack!
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3m sessions sounds amazing, is it sustainable with the business model?
PS - have you come across Ministry of Testing? Curious (it's my thing and an ideal market for your thing?)
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Hey thanks for the congrats! The nice thing about the biz model is that it scales (mostly linearly) with the on-boarding of users -- so yes!
I have heard of Ministry of Testing! It's come up a few times, however I haven't looked much into it (will definitely now). Seems like a great community, do you do events near the Pacific NorthWest?
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How do you answer the question of "it works locally, but not in prod?" for headless workloads?
This is a question we've often asked ourselves, and the only answer is a better toolset. With that in mind, our latest docker release now includes a "live" debugger! You can now drop-in on active Puppeteer/REST API sessions and see what the browser is doing + have access to the entirety of Chrome's developer tools!
Our README has more information on how this all works, and it's now a part of our Dedicated plans, so go forth and conquer headless Chrome!
We're happy to announce that our usage-based accounts are now live! Pay only $0.00008/second for running your headless browser work, and no ongoing costs or fees.
We're extremely excited about this release as we encountered many challenges, great and small, in getting this out to production. Expect more write-ups from us on how we went about them!
Full blog post here: https://docs.browserless.io/blog/2019/04/01/usage-accounts.html
1 Comment
Hey Joel, I've been following Browserless.io for a while, and I must say you're doing an excellent job in the market!
Here are my thoughts:
#1 and #3 seem to be long-term plays, which could yield significant benefits when the ritght time comes.
Focusing on horizontal expansion like #2 would be your best move. It would not only benefit your existing user base but also give you a competitive advantage measured against your competitors.
Good luck!