I started making Browse AI (https://browse.ai) about 3 years ago. Quit my job soon after and focused on it full-time when I had savings enough for 2 years of my living expenses.
The next 1.5 years were intense. I learned to have better and more conversations with users (we'd crash and burn if I hadn't come across a book called The Mom Test) and we went through several positioning pivots.
As I was running out of money, I launched on ProductHunt and got decent initial traction and a group of angels who found us there and invested ~$300k.
Then we started making revenue...
Then, after almost 3 years of work, we reached $100k ARR...
Then we went from $100k to $200k ARR in less than 3 months!
We've signed up ~20,000 new users in January so far and I'm projecting $300k ARR in a month! We're growing ARR 30-50% month over month.
I have a team now who are doing a ton of the hard work. I still have to spend time on every part of the business, but I've been trying to focus my energy on certain parts that I'm better at.
The hardest challenge for me throughout these years has been figuring out if I should persist and work harder on the same path, or switch to something else or pivot. I went through a pre-accelerator program and an accelerator and I had some mentors through them. Some were super helpful and gave me the confidence I needed to keep going.
In general, specially if you're a solo (technical) founder like me, I recommend having mentors that have been through what you're going through and talking to them at least once a month. It's too easy to focus on the wrong things and waste the precious early capital and time. I know I would be 2 years ahead if I had sought mentorship early on.
It lets you train a bot in 2 minutes. The bot will then open the site with rotating geolocated ip addresses, solve captchas, click on buttons and scroll and fill out forms, to get you the data you need.
It’s integrated with Google Sheets, Airtable, Zapier, and more.
We have a Google Sheets addon too which lets you run robots and get their results all in a spreadsheet.
We have close to 10,000 users with 1,000+ signing up every week these days. That made us raise a bit of funding from Zapier and others to be able to scale quicker and build the next version.
self promotion: I launched my no-code scraping cloud software on ProductHunt last month after a year of testing with beta users: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/browse-ai
We launched on ProductHunt yesterday and when I was going to bed, I thought when I wake up I want to know what went on during the night! So I used my product to check every product's upvotes every 2 minutes and add it to a Google Sheet with a chart. You can see the result here.
Do you think I should turn this into a 1-click automation or maybe even a standalone product for ProductHunt makers? Do you know of any alternatives?
The next 1.5 years were intense. I learned to have better and more conversations with users (we'd crash and burn if I hadn't come across a book called The Mom Test) and we went through several positioning pivots.
As I was running out of money, I launched on ProductHunt and got decent initial traction and a group of angels who found us there and invested ~$300k.
Then we started making revenue... Then, after almost 3 years of work, we reached $100k ARR... Then we went from $100k to $200k ARR in less than 3 months!
We've signed up ~20,000 new users in January so far and I'm projecting $300k ARR in a month! We're growing ARR 30-50% month over month.
I have a team now who are doing a ton of the hard work. I still have to spend time on every part of the business, but I've been trying to focus my energy on certain parts that I'm better at.
The hardest challenge for me throughout these years has been figuring out if I should persist and work harder on the same path, or switch to something else or pivot. I went through a pre-accelerator program and an accelerator and I had some mentors through them. Some were super helpful and gave me the confidence I needed to keep going.
In general, specially if you're a solo (technical) founder like me, I recommend having mentors that have been through what you're going through and talking to them at least once a month. It's too easy to focus on the wrong things and waste the precious early capital and time. I know I would be 2 years ahead if I had sought mentorship early on.
I'd be happy to chat if you're working on a self-service SaaS. Message me on LinkedIn or Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ardalann/ https://twitter.com/ardalanme