Some BIG stuff is coming in browserless.io!

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