Browse AI

This was the toughest financial decision I've made in my entire life!

I started doing a trial project with a potential cofounder I met through YC cofounder matching program early September. He told me he tried to go to browse.ai by mistake and found that it's on the expired domains auction.

When I started Browse AI, I wanted this domain, but the owner said he won't go below $50k. So I got BrowseAI.com instead.

The owner said: “Amazon has browse.com, they might want to buy .ai too”

Turns out he forgot to renew!

I talked to my mentor (Daniel Ha, cofounder at Disqus) and he suggested I bid up to 5k for it. I waited until the last hour and right before I start bidding, 2 other people started bidding for up to $250. Then we competed with each other for two hours (the auction was extended) and eventually, I was able to get the domain for $5,009 (plus a 3.627% credit card payment fee). $9 above what the other person bid and I wasn't willing to go any higher...

I'm so glad this happened right before our ProductHunt launch! browse.ai seems much cleaner and easier to read than browseai.com

We made our user dashboard and Chrome extension public this week. Anyone can now sign up and use the product. I'm now sending invitation emails to batches of 5-10 people from the waitlist every day, hoping to get feedback.

Even though it took us ~7.5 months to get here, there are still important features we haven't finished developing yet (Capture Text, for example). Moving forward, we'll work on those features while gathering feedback and readjusting priorities accordingly.

Our private launch was scheduled for today.

We knew we were probably going to be a few days late because we're behind on a few bug fixes and features, but I didn't think we'd be blocked by something completely out of our control...

That was until last weekend when I submitted our Chrome extension to Chrome Web Store to be used by Testers and I found out even if you're only launching privately to a few specific accounts, your extension has to go through a manual review process by Chrome Web Store team. 😮 And guess what...they're currently going through the backlog of extensions submitted 3 weeks ago! 😱

I was so pissed at myself for not submitting the extension sooner. 🤦‍♂️ Because the extension is pretty much done and the changes we're making are mostly on the dashboard and the backend services. I was thinking we may have to postpone the private launch until a month from now...which is super disappointing when you've been working 70 hours/week for many weeks to get your product launched in time.

An hour ago I refreshed my pinned Chrome Web Store developer dashboard tab and saw this 😍

SUCH A HUGE RELIEF!

I guess we're going live now! 😍 Just need to wrap up a few things and start sending the invites to the 60 signed up early users plus friends and ex-coworkers! Exciting times!

We just launched the first version of our site: BrowseAI.com

Previously, there was a simple landing page there that I built back in January to attract some early users. 57 people signed up ever since which is double what I was hoping for (30) mostly thanks to the IH community.

Now, we are hoping to attract more people while we launch privately to our early users in a couple of weeks. We're super excited to hear people's feedback on the product! We also posted on IH to get some feedback on the site:
Why would you 🔥NOT🔥 sign up for Browse AI?

We had 25 early users on the waiting list yesterday. Our goal was to reach 30 before our private beta mid-May.
Indie Hackers tweeted about Browse AI yesterday and that brought 7 more early users in a few hours!
I posted our experience here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/our-saas-now-has-32-early-users-thanks-to-a-tweet-by-ih-bff331d5b7

We had 25 early users on the waiting list yesterday. Our goal was to reach 30 before our private beta mid-May.
Indie Hackers tweeted about Browse AI yesterday and that brought 7 more early users in a few hours!
I posted our experience here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/our-saas-now-has-32-early-users-thanks-to-a-tweet-by-ih-bff331d5b7

A developer friend of mine told me a few weeks ago he quit his job and is now looking for opportunities, in case I know someone who's hiring. I wasn't planning on hiring a developer before my product has some traction, mainly because I'm bootstrapping the business with my personal savings, but I have a lot of trust in this person, so I decided to take a chance and hire him. However, we decided that he should spend a few weeks on learning about some of the technologies I'm using (Typescript, GraphQL, AWS Lambda, Chrome extension APIs, ...) before he starts.

He started on Feb 25th, and within a few days he was making valuable contributions. Now I feel MUCH more comfortable stepping away from product development sometimes to focus on strategy, sales & marketing, and talking to customers. And I'm much more confident we'll be able to send invitations to our early users before the end of this month.

A few things that helped:

• Using Typescript! He said the typescript types are like documentation to him (even though this is his first TS project). This, and the few weeks he spent on learning, made the onboarding extremely easy and quick even though the project is quite complex from a technical perspective.
• Having enough savings! I worked as a full-time employee for 6 years and saved aggressively. I could have quit earlier, but I wanted to have enough savings to be able to hire people and spend some on marketing if I need to. It wasn't only about covering my living expenses.
• Knowing the person. This took a lot of hiring challenges away. I fully trust him, and I know he is incredibly smart and passionate about what he does.
• Working remotely. I plan to keep the startup remote and not get an office. My friend is in another country and I couldn't hire him if I wasn't open to (and used to) collaborating remotely.

I just published the first landing page for the product on BrowseAI.com . I also posted on IH forums to hopefully get some feedback from others in the community:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/trying-to-make-web-automation-easy-just-published-the-landing-page-8432dd8655

How is picking a name still one of the most difficult tasks for a startup??

Every good domain is already registered. So it's nearly impossible to find a name that's good AND has a good domain available.

I spent probably 20 hours over 20 days on just the name, which is waaay more than what I was expecting. But eventually I came up with Browse AI which I really like, and registered the .com domain.

A few tips for people stuck on the name like me:

• Coming up with a name requires a lot of creativity, and if you're like me your ideas could change with your mood! So I recommend allocating small chunks of time during several days to this instead of spending one or two full days on it. You'd be surprised how your ideas improve over a few days and how they vary from day to day.

• I heard on a podcast (I think it was IH) that YC recommends instantdomainsearch.com for looking up domains. It's the fastest one I've found, but BE CAREFUL! sometimes it shows false positives or negatives. I found Namecheap.com to be quite reliable, but not as fast. With other services like GoDaddy, I've heard a lot of people saying they search a domain there and it gets bought by the provider shortly after. So I wouldn't use them.

• Instead of pushing yourself to come up with a domain or name first, try to come up with some keywords that you want most associated with your product. Then enter them on namelix.com and go through a hundred results.

• Enter your keywords on Google like "define [the keyword]" and see what synonyms show up.

• Document all your keywords and names that have a good domain available. I used Notion for this. Don't rely on your memory. Our memories as human species living in the age of Google really suck.

• Once you pick a name, don't forget to Google it and make sure there's no other company (at least in the same space or region) using the same name.