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Discussion on: I'm the creator of browserless.io -- let's talk about starting your own company

 
joelgriffith profile image
Joel Griffith

Hey no worries!

Fun story, actually! I was actually building a wish-list aggregator of sorts. It was pretty simple -- you pasted a link to a product you wanted to share with others so that they can buy stuff for you and mark it as bought without having to confer with other purchasers. I was literally scraping the links sent in for pricing and pictures to make the site more usable, and then I stumbled on Target's website which was a single-page app. This meant they had no usable HTML in their initial response, which meant I had to run a browser to parse/execute the JavaScript on the page and give me the results.

After going down the steps to do this I learned it was quite painful. I did a lot of research to see if there was a product that just did this already, and there wasn't! That's when I threw the whole "wishlist" app out the door and started working on browserless.

The TL;DR here really is that this was:

  • Something I would pay for.
  • Something I needed to ship a product.
  • Didn't already exist (not necessarily a requirement, but I really liked it!).

That was the "aha" moment!

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_baruchadi profile image
Baruch Hen

Seeing how things unraveled from your point of view is really inspiring!

Thank you for sharing this! Looking forward to my "Aha" moment! 😛

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joelgriffith profile image
Joel Griffith

Glad to hear it -- don't ever stop trying! I'm still failing, which I don't think gets talked about enough. Failures really are the pressure-cookers for success and we should talk about them more.