Ship something you're ashamed of

Hi, I'm Paul, founder of Browserbase. These are my essentials for getting code to market. Okay, so my first essential for getting code to market has to be X, or as I call it, Twitter. It's so important to me to be able to talk to our developers or really give someone a channel to interact with us. I have quite a few Twitter alerts set up where if someone mentions Browserbase or web agents or stagehand or director of some of our products, I'm always trying to respond to them, get their feedback or engage with people who might not be tagging us directly. Not only is it a tool for me to go shitpost and put stuff out there, but it's also a great tool for me to engage with our customers and know what's going on in the world. Another thing that's really important for me for getting code to market is creating the code. Recently, I've been obsessed with Claude Code. I am a developer. I've always been an engineer, but I'm not the VIM expert. When I heard it was a terminal-based UI, I was a little hesitant, but after using it, I just can't stop. I use it daily. Something I've been using Claude Code a lot for recently is actually using Claude Code to call our tools. I'm going to have Claude Code generate a query for me to make some data requests to our database and then try and analyze that data as well. Maybe it's going to draft an email to a customer after answering the support question. Claude Code is not just for generating code, but also really helping me with a lot of the easy tasks that we do every day at Browserbase. Another tool that's essential for me getting code to market has to be FigJam. When I'm thinking about content or strategy or product diagrams, FigJam is my go-to. In terms of why I like it more than any other tool, it's something about the ability to dive into the Figma editor mode if I need to, if I need to go a little bit more in depth with some of the designs. Also, all of my assets are already in Figma, so I can pull stuff together. Maybe I'm just a power user because I also use Figma Slides. That really helps me create great presentations from the team and import my FigJam diagrams into Figma Slides. I think for us, centralizing on one single place where all of our brand and design content in has been really helpful for me to create really good ideas and iterate quite quickly to maybe come up with an idea for a blog post and a graphic and then turn that into something that's real. My toxic trait at work, I think because we're still a 30-person team, I love to get into details. I still have push notifications turned on for every single Slack message at Browserbase. If you send a message, I'm reading it. Sometimes I come out of the blue and I'm getting the context on what's going on here. For me, I want to make sure that I'm not reading every message. I'm starting to mute some channels and give myself a little bit of air from keeping up with every single channel. I don't need to be that in the details. A tab that I always have open in the browser. It's interesting. I mean, Google Calendar is the easy answer here because I'm always bouncing around in meetings. I also love to keep an eye on our post. I love to see the signups. I love to see where everything's going. I try and keep a good track on the metrics. Something that I've learned from our team, I used to be a monthly metrics person. I'd have checked how everything's going every single month. Now I'm addicted to weekly metrics. That's quite nice because you really can get into details about what's happening and when posts change something. Moving from that monthly to weekly means I'm checking it much more often. Now I'm looking at post log every day to see how we're going to get closer to beating last week's goals. This is probably obvious, but to me, music is really important to how I work. It's how I get in the flow. I'm using Spotify all the time while working. I think it's an obvious one to pay for, but to me, curating the office vibes with our office playlist is extremely important. Probably one of the highest leverage things I can do to improve team productivity. You got to believe that Spotify is getting its $9 .99 usage every single month. Top tracks, well, the Bieber album just came out yesterday, Swag, and that has been playing nonstop at the office for us. Watch out. Before that, we had a lot of bad bunny and it's just a mix. It depends on who's playing. Sometimes we have a lot of country music going on. Sometimes it's reggaeton. The Browserbase team has a very diverse music taste and we all like a little bit of everything. A physical item I have to live by is my tungsten cube. I love having it on my desk. There's a tweet from maybe a year and a half ago where I'd just gotten it. I was playing with it and I dropped it and I smashed the laptop of my wife. I just bought her. There's a beautiful hole in it. That's how powerful the cube is. It's something I'm often playing with while I'm thinking about things and it sits there right on my desk every day. I think eventually Guillermo got a tungsten pyramid after seeing my cube. I need to go get one etched with the B logo next. An essential tactic that I have for fundraising is actually to never really be fundraising. Every round we've done at Browserbase has been preemptive. Of course I've had to fundraise all through that time but the way you do it is actually by building relationships. For every investor that is an investor in Browserbase, I've known them for a year plus before starting this company

and that makes it real easy for them when the moment is right to jump in and participate in a fundraising round. So never be fundraising but always be

meeting people and in hindsight one of the best things I did for our company was spending about a year before Browserbase getting to know a lot of great investors in our space and letting them kind of get to know me more such that when they had a chance to invest in Browserbase they really leaned in. The second thing that's really important with fundraising is having a clear vision and idea. When I started Browserbase I had a 3 ,000 long word essay about what the headless browser infrastructure for AI should be and you know to be honest when I wrote that I was trying to talk myself out of starting the company. To build a company you have to be absolutely certain it's going to be successful. You have to have all the reasons laid out. Why won't OpenAI build this? Why won't Amazon build this? You have to know those things ahead of time and have really good answers so you can sleep at night. So for me being prepared so I had a straight shot once I raised money to go build this company was very very important for early success and that first essay was really a playbook that we got to follow as we built this company and I could always look back to that strategy that I wrote in November 2023 and it's still very valid even in you know July 2025. So coming off of the fundraising part to have early traction there's a few strategic tips I think about. First of all your first few customers are going to come through introductions and it's pretty helpful if you have a network of investors or startup friends in a city who will help introduce you to the right people who have your problem. I did 50 customer interviews before I've been building a single piece of product at Browserbase and that was really helpful because when I did launch our first product Browserbase the browser infrastructure cloud it was accurate it worked it solved the problem people needed. So by networking very hard in the beginning and making sure I talked to a lot of people when we launched the product we immediately had customers and if you build a great product those customers will tell other people about your product and word-of-mouth growth is extremely

important. So secondly targeted geography for me I wanted to be the headless browser guy of San Francisco. I wanted to make sure that everyone in San Francisco knew about headless browser infrastructure and really knew that we were the people who are the experts in it. So I really focused everything on going to meetups in San Francisco talking to people in San Francisco. To me San Francisco was kind of the you know starting point for something much

bigger than AI and if we could focus on one geography we are much more likely to build word-of-mouth traction as opposed to spreading out across all of the United States. So by getting great intros targeted geography and then actually shipping great product you can get early traction you just have to start really really focused. I think people spend a lot of time on polish way too early. Now the bar for software quality has gone up quite a bit with AI there's no reason why you shouldn't have a mobile version of your landing page right but when you're shipping something you should ship something that you feel a little ashamed of and I think people tell you that it is cliche but there's something about you have to physically feel like the product is holding back the company because if distribution and customer growth is holding back the company that's a much harder problem to fix. For us I've always felt like our brand has led the product maybe like by 10 to 15 percent and

that's great because we can continue to keep building our product to live up to the expectations. So we have a long way to go you know we're only six quarters old as a company but every single week I see a ship something that makes Browserbase even better and it lives up to our

customers expectations of what we should be doing. So a marketing tool that I have to use that I hate is LinkedIn. I have not mastered LinkedIn at all I really want to get better at posting on LinkedIn I'm kind of just like copy and pasting my tweets over there and hoping they work I haven't figured it out and I think it's just not my channel as I sell to developers I'm a developer and I don't think developers use LinkedIn that much however you better believe this clip is going to show up on LinkedIn after this podcast and I'm going to get better at posting every single day and practice makes perfect so give me six months if I'm not better at LinkedIn then I haven't been You know for building our marketing motion at Browserbase it has to be founder-led without a doubt and part of the build up to Browserbase was me learning how to get distribution. First time founders think about product second time founders think about distribution it's a common saying and that's really helpful because when you're building that initial distribution you're building that initial brand and you're getting people to know you you're also building the voice of the company and I think the Browserbase voice and the Browserbase brand and the style that we posted really came from me thinking deeply about what type of company I wanted this to be perceived by for other people by the developers and then when you hire your first marketing person our first go-to-market person was actually an intern Alex he was amazing and he got to grow up with me and really handle the ground game of some of these hey let's build something that's you know attached to the zeitgeist here let's build an MCP server and the first person that can be very helpful to expand the go-to-market motion is someone who can help play the ground game but still wants to take strategy and advice from the founder and then over time you layer on more specialists you know eventually get somebody who's been there and built marketing you know from some revenue to a larger net revenue in a larger company so for us it's always been kind of strategy first filling in with great people who want to learn and then over time you could add more specialists who are really good at certain things like dev rel or channel marketing