yaseer

21 ms·

181.
by yaseer 6y ago
Ah yes, Kapow! This is like 'OG RPA' (...the technical definition) Many people forget that RPA is over 20 years old. UiPath basically took very old technology, modernised it, and re-applied it to new markets to become a $35 billio
182.
by yaseer 6y ago
Ha, you're pretty well versed in the pain-points! Yes, that's the playbook we want to follow - long-tail SEO. That worked amazingly well for Zapier, and if we had a cheesy tagline, it's 'plug gaps in your zaps' like
183.
by yaseer 6y ago
Yes, we've been monitoring Power Automate too! It's a different approach, coupled to automating the desktop office ecosystem, whereas we're coupled to web-apps, and web APIs alone. Secondly, it is more complicated, a bit more
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by yaseer 6y ago
awesome, we'll drop you an email too to understand more!
185.
by yaseer 6y ago
Indeed, there's demand/a market! Every player has a slightly different angle and market focus: -Simplescraper as the name suggests is very scraping focused, not process automation focused. -Browserless is more like 'heroku fo
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by yaseer 6y ago
Secondly, I obfuscated the example a little for the startup's privacy. They weren't booking something, they were cancelling something, and yes there wasn't an API.
187.
by yaseer 6y ago
Funnily enough, the first axiom prototype we sold customers was on cypress.io - I liked it! We switched it out for puppeteer as it was more suited as a library for our-case. Cypress is a great batteries-included E2E solution though.
188.
by yaseer 6y ago
Thanks Matt! I'd love to reconnect after YC, the last few months have been fairly hectic, so apologies for dropping off the radar. I've been following your newsletter on https://taskablehq.com/ , looking awesome!
189.
by yaseer 6y ago
I think you're right, we just have a responsibility to kick those people off our platform.
190.
by yaseer 6y ago
Not currently in the no-code interface! I've seen this requested before. Puppeteer (the library which runs our bots) does support this easily, so we may be able to whip something up if you have a sizeable use-case.
191.
by yaseer 6y ago
This is a good point - we haven't put it in our marketing yet, the use-case is new. Here's a non-public landing page though! https://axiom.ai/automate-testing We also have this public recipe: https://we
192.
by yaseer 6y ago
Interesting! If any puppeteer developers would also find it useful, let us know - it's always good to know something is wanted before you make it.
193.
by yaseer 6y ago
Yes, selenium, and selenium IDE was definitely our original inspiration. (Aside, we built axiom on puppeteer though). I think Selenium IDE is primarily a developer tool. We see axiom as a no-code tool, following the same playbook as zapier
194.
by yaseer 6y ago
Yes there is! We do have an on-prem solution. What usually happens is someone builds a bot locally, and once it does the task they need, they talk to us about cloud and on-prem.
195.
by yaseer 6y ago
Here's a list of competitors and how I think we compare with each - UiPath - Designed for heavyweight Enterprise. We're really not competing for the same market, but their tech is a similar approach. They go for fortunate 500, we
196.
by yaseer 6y ago
Wow, that's awesome! What you've described is literally our cloud product - we give people a sandbox with a virtual browser to use and get started (like browserstack). We're working out a way to scale it cheaply, so anyone ca
197.
by yaseer 6y ago
We actually do look at network requests, but we only do this to assess page-load. Assessing this is a surprisingly hard-problem. I don't think our UI Testing tools monitor network traffic though. I can see how that might recur - if you
198.
by yaseer 6y ago
Great question! We built axiom after running a software consultancy trying to integrate UiPath for customers. We realised, those solutions are great for $1 million consulting projects with a big development team. But most bots people need a
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by yaseer 6y ago
Certainly - we don't enable something to be done that couldn't be done before. We just make bot-building accessible to more people. Ideally, that means more helpful bots, but it could result in a more bad bots too, if we're n
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by yaseer 6y ago
We aren't looking at robots.txt - but that's a great suggestion. It leads to a bigger point about bad actors. Unfortunately, people can build bots to do all kinds of bad things - this is something we have seen, considered and take
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by yaseer 6y ago
You've hit the nail on the head for our biggest problem - many people don't realise axiom can solve their problem! We realised, the best way to do this is start producing templates with solutions to common problems. Here's on
202.
by yaseer 6y ago
Yep, you're right! It doesn't need electron specifically, just several node modules that don't run in a browser-only environment. We use electron to package up the node modules, and use it for auto-updates + other 'nice&
203.
by yaseer 6y ago
Right now our desktop app is chrome only, but we'll expand to other browsers post YC. Our cloud supports any browser, we let you build a bot using a virtual one, like browserstack.com. As this costs us hosting bills to run, we do ask p
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Launch HN: Axiom (YC W21) – No-code browser automation a.k.a. RPA for everyone
160 points by yaseer 6y ago|77 comments
205.
by yaseer 6y ago
This is pretty neat. Programming languages are about working with the correct abstractions for your problem domain. It's about time we had a high level DSL for working with web abstractions.
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by yaseer 6y ago
It should be noted they have 60,000 users and still have a perfect track record averaging 5* reviews. That's only possible if you've built a really solid product.
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by yaseer 6y ago
I don't think it's misleading, given the SNES history. For me the SNES was famous for its expansion chips - I immediately assumed one like the super fx chip that gave it 3d graphics. The title may be skewed towards an audience tha
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by yaseer 6y ago
In any project, you need some basic milestones/OKRS + something measurable, like a KPI. If the management layer around you did not structure their communication with you around these, that was their shortcoming perhaps. You could certa
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by yaseer 6y ago
This is pretty awesome. Browser-based coding environments are becoming huge (an observation, not a suggestion of what should be). This is a natural fit for those environments.
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by yaseer 6y ago
It's probably the most natural way of providing a browser-based git implementation, for systems like github/gitlab and browser-based IDEs. Browser-based coding is pretty popular these days, it seems.

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