Float

Today I am Super excited to announce that we are launching Float in a public beta.

Why is Float unique to us?
So every time you use the internet, a cloud server computes your action, which requires a lot of energy.

Although I am not an expert on climate change, we can do a lot as a company, so we decided to plant a tress for our first few customers and may expand it if required.

We are planting three fruit trees at my home for our first three customers. So we will give these trees a name, keep you updated on growth and finally ship the fruits after a few years at your business address.

Reach out to me at navdeep@addfloat.com if you want to be one of that three customers.

What is Float? Could you give us an elevator pitch?
Float can help you create an interactive product demo in seconds. Just add Float to chrome and show complex process integration with a few clicks.

Why are we building Float?‍
‍While working in a tech company, I was frustrated by the effort required to explain a simple integration guide in the product documentation, from uploading multiple screenshots to writing about the different integration steps.

The page length was becoming more than the length of the great wall of china, and the user experience was like reading a Wikipedia article (Text-heavy).

Here is the most popular use case for Float

1. Show Product Tours on your website
   ‍Create an engaging “try before you buy” experience for your customers who don’t wanna create an account.

2. Support customers with product tutorials‍
   Create a library of interactive product walkthroughs to help your customers get started quickly.

3. Explain features or integration in your blog post with Float

You can start by creating a workflow in 3 Easy Steps.
Step 1 Add Float to your chrome browser

Step 2 Go to a website and record your workflow.

Step 3 Share or Embed the workflow.

When building tech products, people are the ‘lever’, and the fulcrum is the ‘experience’ you need.

So Let me summarise the week one progress and challenges we faced while building Float in public.

✅ We are now able to capture the screenshot of a single chrome tab but taking multiple screenshots across different tabs is still a week away (Stage 1/5)

✅Started working on Feature prioritisation, Website design, Dashboard prototyping, etc. (Stage 2/5)

So, let me simply the above two checkpoints for you.

Every technology product you use has a ‘front end' and a ‘backend’.
A frontend is what you see on your browser or app screen, and the backend is all request that goes behind on the server.

My co-founder Akshay knows how to build the backend but has no idea about the front end, incredibly messy chrome APIs.

So we started solving the most significant piece of the puzzle, i.e. Handling chrome APIs.

With messy JavaScript & React code, finally, we can get a screenshot of one single screen in a chrome browser, but to explain an integration guide, you have to take screenshots across all chrome browser tabs.

So, now the more significant challenge is to handle multiple screenshots across all the opened chrome tabs.

Meanwhile, I started working on the front end and the design work with Figma and Webflow, along with some product tasks like competitor analysis and feature prioritisation.

While discussing with my cofounder how fast we can release the first version of the functional product.

He said that If others could do it in 2 months, I could put in 8 extra hours every day and wrap it up in a month.

And that reminds me of the famous quote from Archimedes.

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Quotes By Archimedes
Read this if you want to know more about what we are building.

1. From Selling Newspaper to Building a Tech Startup — A life story of mine

2. 50 Investors said NO to us. So, now we are building our Startup in public.

3. Why do startups chase growth to build business moats?

4. CAC & LTV are confusing! So I have simplified them to get you up to speed (fast)

I reached out to more than 50 investors for my startup, and everyone said NO to us.

From Startup incubators to accelerators to angel investors, I reached out to everyone you can imagine.

But no one was ready to invest USD 25k for 10% so we could leave our daily hustle and focus on building the product.
But why do they say NO to us?

All I can sense from their response was that we don’t have some proven track record or a proxy to qualify as an entrepreneur. (Institute or college).

My co-founder (also my brother), who is now 30, has failed twice in college and doesn’t even have a proper college degree with Zero corporate experience.

He used to drive a truck before covid 19 and picked up on programming during the pandemic due to lockdown (Read this to know more about his journey)

Being a brother, I know he is extremely hard working and super intelligent in writing code.

I started my career by selling newspaper subscriptions in a small town, and we know we will figure out some way to build things.

In the end, some wisdom prevailed, and we realised that “if we could solve the problem for a small set of people, we could make customers our investors” and we started building Float.

Next significant phase in our startup journey ??

Launching a Startup is like flying a plane; unlike here, the customers pay you after the flight, not before the flight.

So we need a long runway before a take-off (money) and some fuel while we fly (more money).

So, I built a financial safety net for my brother and myself. I joined a SaaS startup and started taking courses in the morning (3 am-10 am).