14 tabs. Before the long weekend for the 4th of July, I had 14 tabs open on my Mac. Surprisingly, this was actually on the lower end. When researching an important subject for work, or browsing due to late-night curiosity, some end up having dozens of tabs open at the same time across multiple windows and browsers. It can get overwhelming, and even more so if the computer crashes in the middle of browsing. Tthe onset anxiety that comes from trying to find that one tab through different means of recovery becomes daunting. Saad Syed and his team at Flow have come with a solution that makes saving tabs and configurations easy.
What is Flow? Flow helps you be intentional with your time by saving browser tabs to context-separated workspaces. With Flow, your browser’s new tab page turns into a launchpad for your various projects, hobbies, and interests. Save and switch between different workspaces with just a click.
Flow has gone through multiple pivots and tackled multiple customer segments since going through YCombinator(‘19). They started off with a chatting “discord” type product and then moved to tab management after realizing the communication tool market became saturated. Their most recent pivot led them from being a tab management tool for work/life balance (by helping customers separate their work tabs from personal tabs), to a tab management and workspace management tool. With the onset of COVID, most of the population worldwide started elevating their computer and technology use and were online more often than before. With Work-From-Home Policies(WFH) and the rise in online gig-work. The internet usage went up (50-70%) and with it, the number of tabs. For example with online school, teachers and students often had multiple screens and tabs open at once and it was difficult to manage projects. The Flow team took heed to their customers through numerous interviews and catered their product to their needs by making it easy for them to launch into their projects and side hobbies through launching them through their app. Furthermore, the Flow app aims to ease a user’s anxiety by collapsing the tabs they may not need at the moment, but saving them if they have a fear of losing them.
What gives Flow the edge? Most blue-collared jobs provide or recommend a dual-screen monitor set up for ergonomics and work efficiency. Flow allows customers to save their work configurations (including split-screen set-ups). This makes it easier for users to pick up right where they left off and allows them to customize their browser layouts. Additionally, tabs and configurations are backed up constantly and features are automated.
What was the shining lean strategy throughout their product and business evolution? Saad appreciates the encouragement of “doing things that don’t scale” early on in the business from Y Combinator. This is against the norm in traditional business frameworks in tech, but this lean strategy helped Flow since they started operating at a smaller level. They directly talked to customers using their product to understand their pain points and did a lot of usability UI/UX testing in the early stages. Constant interviews and conversations fed into their product prioritization and timeline. Though YC was a little over 2 years ago, the team constantly uses these strategies to find the best product-market fit.
If you would like to try out the flow product and declutter your space, make your way over to https://www.enterflow.app/.