We use the web more or less the same way we were 20 years ago: using internet browsers. Except, websites have become so heavy we need super computers to have 10 tabs open. On top of this, big corporations spend millions on teams of engineers to scrape as much data as they can from the web and make it impossible to collect data from their sites.
People and small businesses are hurt the most. They need more data to be able to grow, but even though there is plenty of valuable live data on the web, collecting them is incredibly expensive and time-consuming, and impossible at scale.
We wanted a change. So we rolled up our sleeves in 2020 and got started with building the first missing piece: an easy, affordable, and reliable way to extract and monitor data from the web at scale.
We launched the first version for the public in September 2021.
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1. Optimize for Happiness: We use software to make people happier. This is only possible if we genuinely care about our users and partners.
2. The Simplest Alternative: The world is too complicated. We create value by making it simpler.
3. Minimal Headcount: We set up processes and automations that allow us to invest more in our existing team members and pay them well.
4. Data-driven Decision-making: Every high-impact decision we make must be backed by data.
Burnt the midnight oil prototyping for six months.
(no, not all of it was spent on making the 3D robot, that only took 5 months)
Went through a pre-accelerator program at Startup Edmonton and a number of positioning and product pivots.
Spent the summer in SF going through an accelerator and working day and night to prepare for the public launch after pivots.
XX made the first investment in Browse AI.
The launch on ProductHunt went great. We got 1,600+ upvotes and a surge of users that lasted a long time.
These users gave us valuable feedback that shaped the roadmap for the next year.
The user feedback kept coming and our product roadmap kept growing. Meanwhile, a user who worked at Angels of Many was using the product and loved the approach, so they contacted us and became our second investor.
We used this funding to scale to 12 team members full-time.
Our steady growth was starting to take more momentum.
Two senior staff at Zapier were using Browse AI and told their executives. They were impressed with our product, engagement, and growth achievements and saw a lot of similarities between our journey and theirs early on.
Zapier became our 3rd investor.
We reached 100,000 users mostly organically with 82% finding us through word of mouth and search. We were growing so fast that we were having a hard time keeping up. We had to turn off onboarding emails and urgently hire for support and sales to be able to handle the demand.
We need to keep up with the exploding user growth AND build many more features and products that 10s of thousands of users are asking for. We had a lot of investor interest, so we raised some working capital from the best investors we met, including (co)founders of Dropbox, DoorDash, Blinkist, Pitch, Nasty Gal, and others many of whom were our users.
