Launch HN: Text Blaze (YC W21) Programmable snippets to automate tedious typing

Hi HN! We’re Scott and Dan of Text Blaze (https://blaze.today https://blaze.today). Text Blaze lets you create programmable text snippets that you can insert anywhere in Chrome by typing a brief shortcut. Before Text Blaze, we designed and built internal tools for thousands of sales and support reps at Google. As much as we tried though, our tools could never automate all repeated work for all users. We saw that there were always tech savvy reps who would build additional scripts to fill gaps and help save even more time. With Text Blaze, we wanted to create something for those kinds of reps to speed up and automate their boring repetitive work (and make it super easy for them to share with teammates). Text Blaze snippets help users to do this. You can start by taking all the repetitive messaging that they have and making it insertable with a few keystrokes. Many of our users easily save hours a month of typing just doing that. Technical users can go much further though. Our snippets can include form fields like text boxes or drop down menus in them and have dynamic fields with formulas. Users can use this to: - calculate a 15% service charge automatically when entering a price in a snippet text field. - or automatically pulling in the name of contact when sending a message in LinkedIn, - or saving data to a Google Spreadsheet every time they use a snippet, - or create patient diagnostic templates where the snippet may include a drop down to capture whether the patient is a smoker. If (and only if) the answer is yes, a follow up question and text box (number of cigarettes a day) will appear. Think of Text Blaze a little like Zapier meets Emmet. Some of the ways people use Text Blaze have amazed us. For example, the Customer Success department at a European delivery company, uses Text Blaze to standardize their comms with customers and drivers and automate much of the related processes. For example, their snippets read conversations with drivers in Intercom and automatically send a summary of the required information to a rep in the relevant Slack channel. Our most common users of Text Blaze are in customer support and recruiting, but we’re also seeing a lot of adoption in other areas like education (especially with the increased levels of remote learning with Covid). Text Blaze is free to use for many use cases and we have paid versions with additional features and improved collaboration for teams. Want to try Text Blaze out? You can get started by installing our extension from the Chrome Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadaccgipmpannjkmfddolnnhmeklj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadac...). We’re a Chrome Extension as we see more and more users are spending all their time in Chrome and we want to be able to closely integrate with the different web applications they use. We would love your feedback on the Text Blaze here and your experiences with tools for end-user automation in general. What’s worked for you and where are there opportunities to improve existing approaches?