The leap of faith: going full-time on browserless

The day that everyone dreams of, few people achieve, and even fewer do so comfortably. Today is the day that I go full-time on browserless.io.

Before I get too much into this, I wish to first thank my incredible employer, Elastic. For the past two years they've been "home" for me, especially in a time of incredible uncertainty and panic. Through thick-and-thin, I've never felt more at home and with my kin than I have at Elastic. Keep doing what you're doing -- I'll forever remain a fan.

For me this is a very emotional day. Three years ago, I was working on a wishlist registry, struggling to parse data from across the web. I thought I was solving my own problems, but in reality I was about to find the problem to solve. It was a pivot I was uncertain of at the time, and now in retrospect, one I'm forever thankful that I did.

If you've followed browserless, you've no doubt noticed that things have been growing at a steady and even pace. To say that this has been a long time coming is an understatement! To put it in simple terms, browserless makes more than twice what I was making at prior companies. To say that I'm lucky is a gross mischaracterization.

It's with all of this in mind that I'd like to take some time and put thoughts to paper. I've gotten a few questions about how this all happened, how I kept my sanity, and (more importantly) how you can make a similar transition. Read on.

How did this happen?

Three years ago I was building out an app to share wishlists with your family. This was going rather swimmingly except for the fact that I couldn't parse certain website's data. These sites were running single-page applications, which couldn't be parsed without the use of browser to render everything, and fixing this problem led me to find out that others were having issues as well. It took quite a while to work out a solution as no service existed, and after some consideration I decided to switch over to building browserless: a "browser-as-a-service" SaaS.

At that time I didn't have an audience, or a following to try and make ends meet, which meant that I'd be working full-time to support myself. Consulting and other opportunities are great ways to backfill any potential loss in income, but neither were a great fit for myself. I enjoy building product, and working with a team, which consulting doesn't always have. Marketing a product is already hard and I didn't want to spend my nights and weekends marking both browserless and myself, so working full-time is how I made it happen.

OK, why not "slim" down your lifestyle and quit earlier?

While this is great advice ("ramen profitability" as some call it), it didn't mesh well with where I was in my life. I have a family, a house, and young kids. Aside form some meager savings, there was really no other safety nets in place. I've also lived the "ramen" profitability life-style many times over (see https://secondcareerdevs.com/episodes/joel-griffith), and didn't want to dig more holes to get out of. I wasn't wanting to compromise, which might strike you as odd, but if that's how I feel about browserless it's going to be the way I run everything, full-stop.

Now obviously you can't have everything, so the only option for me was to double-down on working and running browserless. It was quite an undertaking, and there were many many stressful times. You've heard folks say that it's not for everyone, and this is why: to make the leap you have to bend the rules of time, money, or lifestyle. For me, I bent the "time" rule, and it just happened to work for who I am.

How did you manage to balance working on both?

I automated.. a lot. Most of the frequent request's users had I quickly implemented, fixed, automated, or gave a deadline on when it'd come. This works for some things but not everything -- for example inbound support. For those types of issues I tried to respond as quickly as possible, and if it required my attention then I looked to make those responses "self-serviceable." The real blessing here is that almost all browserless' paid users are Dedicated, meaning that they own their accounts, effectively. If they need to, they can re-provision, restart, or even upgrade/downgrade without needing me to get involved. We do our best to make sure this happens without a user-invoked action, but the levers are there if they need to be pulled.

I also closed most of my communication mechanisms down to just 1 -2 channels. We have a fairly quiet Slack channel, and email support. At one point I believe we had 3-4 ways to communicate and it was just way to much to try and detangle. I love email (as crazy and broken as it is) because it retains your context, is "native" to just about every device ever made, and everyone already has it. There's no need to create yet-another-account, to download the accompanying app, or whip out the credit card. Scaling down communication channels saved my sanity, even if it costed a few users in the long run.

So what if you lose all of your users and revenue?

Then I have two years to make something happen. Part of this journey was making sure I had enough in reserve to keep things going, even if it meant new business wasn't coming in, and if I've learned anything in the last year it's to be overly sure that you're going to be ok. Plan B needs a Plan C and D. Crazy? Sure. But it's for that reason that browserless can run on its own for two years with no paid users and me and my family will survive just fine. Probably even longer if we had to scope back our lifestyle.

In any case we're overly set up for longer-term success just because we don't have huge overhead, loans to worry about, or commitments elsewhere. I don't like to compromise on my browserless vision, and I'm glad I stuck to my guns on that.

What are you going to do now?

Take a break. As you can imagine, it's been a heckuva ride so far, and I need to get some mental headroom back. Not to say that I'm done with browserless: quite the opposite! After some time off, I plan to hit this thing harder than before. There's a whole lot of really cool stuff I have planned, most of it are things that'll make headless-scripts stupid-easy to write and run. Practically all of it is something that I wished existed out there but doesn't yet. Self-healing, no-code, and "machine-learn"'ed stuff -- you'll have to stay tuned!

I also want to take this time and help my family get through the rest of this pandemic. It's not exactly a great time to quit a full-time job, but more than ever my wife and kids need someone to help with all of the day-to-day stuff. I feel like we're nearing the end of this, and I want to be there in case that's not true.

How can I do this as well?

Try, over and over again, and keep trying. It's said a lot because it's true: the folks that "did" this are the ones that were crazy enough to keep trying new ideas. Even in failed projects, there's a lot to learn and will open your eyes. Everyone is different, has different experiences and learnings, and some of that you will have to unlearn. I never believed this kind of thing was possible when I got started, or that I could even handle it. Most of that was because of the nature of how I grew up (poor). There's a great quote from a movie called Green Street Hooligans that goes: "Once you've taken a few punches and realize you're not made of glass, you don't feel alive unless you're pushing yourself as far as you can go." This is true for going the indie-dev route as well. You're not made of glass, you can stomach critical feedback, and you will enjoy pushing yourself once you've done it.

Closing thoughts

When I started browserless.io, it was on IndieHackers. Their podcasts were incredibly informative and I spent many many hours taking in as much information here as I could. Dig back into the early episode's if you can. Mike Perham's interview on SideKiq was especially transformative for me, and it might be for you.

All else fails, keep failing. Success really is showing up and trying again and again.