[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Text Blaze (YC W21) Programmable snippets...
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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).
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/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?
Author : scottfr
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-02-05 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
| latexr wrote:
| The animated example lags in Safari. The longer it goes on, the
| worse it gets. When it restarts, it again starts fast and becomes
| progressively slow.
| danbarak wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. We'll look into it asap
| doron2402 wrote:
| Wow, I've been waiting for this! As someone that english is his
| second language this tool is a time saver!
| bruno222 wrote:
| I have been trying to find an nice Window Macro app for doing the
| same thing.
|
| A Windows app because I dont use only Chrome. I use Slack,
| Outlook, VSCode, WSL2, Citrix VM, etc. Would be nice to have this
| for any and every window.
| gurgeous wrote:
| Looks great! Can you fill out web forms? We would use this for
| creating fake accounts in our test environment, for example.
| AptSeagull wrote:
| Really nice work
| bprasanna wrote:
| Why not firefox add-on? What's so difficult in developing the
| add-on in Firefox?
| scottfr wrote:
| We definitely want to add Firefox support!
|
| We haven't yet done so because we really want to nail the
| experience on a single platform first (Chrome).
|
| Text insertion on the web is actually surprisingly complex [0]
| and we leverage some DOM API's that aren't fully standardized
| yet. Focusing just on Chrome for the moment allows us to really
| figure out the experience before we expand to other browsers
| like Firefox, along with Desktop and Mobile applications.
|
| [0] There are so many different ways to support text input on
| the web. Take Google Docs for instance; when you type into it,
| you are actually typing into a hidden iframe element that
| captures your keystrokes and then updates the document model.
| Figuring out how to support all these edge cases is tricky.
| Glench wrote:
| Let us know when firefox support is out!
| spoonjim wrote:
| Your marketing is terrible. On your home page have a GIF of a
| support agent typing a few characters and invoking every single
| smart feature you support.
| scottfr wrote:
| Marketing is not our strong suit admittedly. Customer success
| is our biggest vertical but we have lots of users outside it
| which makes messaging tricky.
|
| The most interesting three users I heard from using Blaze were
| a priest, a tarot card reader and sushi chef.
|
| Would love any feedback on how to reach users in general.
| ppetty wrote:
| I wish there was a way to try it without logging in to Google ...
| but unless I'm mistakn that's a prerequisite for using the
| extension. I like the idea, I think I'd like even more if it
| worked in an "offline" mode. I get that I'd probably lose syncing
| & backing up my preferences, but to me that would be a great way
| to really test drive.
| scottfr wrote:
| We support email and password login so you shouldn't need to
| sign in with Google (not sure if Chrome requires you to be
| logged in to install Chrome extensions in general).
| gnicholas wrote:
| Chrome doesn't require login except for extensions paid
| through their payment infrastructure. But they recently
| killed this infrastructure, so as of this week it isn't an
| requirement for any Chrome extension.
|
| This also shows one of the dangers of building on Chrome (my
| company has two extensions, one of which we had to rush off
| of the Google payments platform), which is that you're
| subject to their whims.
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| How do you plan to monetize a Chrome extension?
| ninetax wrote:
| Cool, I'll try it out. What's the business model? Sell premium
| snippets?
|
| "Looks like you're trying to do an intro... and yours kinda
| sucks. We have a proven intro, click here to upgrade!"
| scottfr wrote:
| Text Blaze is a freemium product. The free version works great
| for basic use cases and also lets you try out the more advanced
| features. Then we have paid versions that offer more advanced
| features (like embedded forms and formulas) and improved team
| collaboration.
|
| We actually are interested in the possibility of selling
| premium snippet packs. Not something we have had time to
| explore at the moment, but the "give the razor away" model is
| an interesting one.
| ninetax wrote:
| Nice, thanks for explaining
| breck wrote:
| Interesting. I pay for Alfred. How does this compare?
| scottfr wrote:
| I am not an expert in Alfred so I can't talk too specifically
| to it. However, there is a lot of competition out there in this
| space like Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Text Expander, Typinator,
| etc...
|
| One thing special Text Blaze offers is the ability to make
| dynamic forms with formulas. For instance say you had an
| invoice snippet. With Text Blaze you could do something like
| this
|
| ```
|
| Cost: ${formtext: name=price}
|
| With tax (15%): ${=price * 1.15}
|
| ```
|
| This will create a snippet with a text box for the cost and
| then a dynamically calculated field that applies the 15% tax.
|
| This is just a simple example but you can well beyond it to
| embed logic and dynamic behavior directly in your snippets.
|
| Beyond dynamic behavior, we're very focused on ease of use and
| collaboration across teams of users (which is important for
| business use cases).
| breck wrote:
| Cool! I love DSLs. Thanks very much for the response.
| Personally I don't currently use Chrome extensions, but I
| like this sort of thing that help's people more productive so
| will keep an eye out!
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Curious about the backstory here. Looks like the extension has
| been out since at least 2017. What made you join YC? What are you
| telling investors (assuming you've been talking to them following
| YC) when they ask "how do you make this a big business"?
| danbarak wrote:
| It started as a side-project that grew organically thorough
| word of mouth. When we realized the huge potential, we decided
| to turn this into a venture-backed project and applied to YC.
| The rest is history :)
| the__alchemist wrote:
| What will the venture money be used for? Marketing?
| scottfr wrote:
| First, Text Blaze should run on every screen you use. Right
| now we're Chrome only. We want to expand to other browsers
| (another user commented about Firefox) and we also want
| native desktop and mobile applications (keyboards in the
| case of mobile) so that Text Blaze will work wherever you
| are working.
|
| Second, we want to develop tighter integrations with
| various applications. In another thread we discussed how a
| Text Blaze snippet could automatically include the name of
| the person you are replying to in Gmail. This works, but it
| very technical currently. We want to build higher-level
| advanced integrations for all the common sites our users
| use to make this much easier (Gmail, Google Spreadsheets,
| Airtable, Monday.com, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Intercom,
| etc...).
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Is the plan to make money to charge for integrations? Or
| is the plan to collect data on people's most used
| snippets and sell that data?
| desmap wrote:
| Do you guys know AHK? It's Windows-only, has a weird language
| design but which is terse like no other and it's quite powerful.
|
| I would be happy to learn how you will position your product
| compared to AHK.
| scottfr wrote:
| Sorry, I've never used AHK, but my understanding is it's very
| much focused on scripting UI's.
|
| We support a little bit of that (you can tab between different
| fields in a webpage with Blaze), but we're much more focused on
| communications (text).
|
| Most of our features are really about making static or dynamic
| messages or documents. So for example, lots of forms support,
| formulas, data validation, etc... And making this all as
| accessible as possible.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I don't know about other people, but I only ever used AHK as
| a text expander. I used it religiously when I worked as a law
| firm associate and had to use a PC.
| [deleted]
| ricopags wrote:
| Specifically the most excellent Lintalist[0] which is built on
| AHK and which I use daily. I wonder if they'd consider extant
| offerings and offer a path to inclusion [though Chrome-limited
| seems a downgrade to me given I use my snippets everywhere]
|
| [0]https://lintalist.github.io
| annamatalon wrote:
| This is awesome! I know a lot of sales people who would love
| this.
| adarhay1 wrote:
| Interesting. I see myself using this one, lately get to write the
| the same message over and over again. will give it a spin.
| Templates would help
| danbarak wrote:
| Let us know what you think! Our blog has quite a few templates:
| https://blaze.today/blog/ We also have extensive documentation
| to help you get started (https://blaze.today/docs/) and a
| lively community (https://community.blaze.today/)
| ricopags wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! I wish you success.
|
| I use Lintalist[0] and wonder if your team is familiar with it
| and whether you might look to integrate.
|
| It seems the planned feature of adding high level abstractions
| for working with Chrome page content would be the only point of
| differentiation I could see placing your app above Lintalist, for
| my needs. Perhaps integrating with the snippets and libraries I
| already have? Just a thought.
|
| Good luck to your team!
|
| [0]https://lintalist.github.io
| jnsie wrote:
| What is the benefit of this over something that works system-
| wide, such as Textexpander?
| llarsson wrote:
| It seemed pretty clear to me from the description that this
| thing will let scripts read from Chrome to, e.g., pull in names
| from what you are looking at on LinkedIn and also make web
| requests.
|
| But OP and Text Blaze should take your question as great
| feedback: by simplifying to "programmable snippets", it sounds
| like just a dumb automation tool to reduce typing. We saw that
| stuff yesterday on HN with people using AutoHotKey and similar.
|
| Make it more clear what you offer!
| jnsie wrote:
| Agreed. I went to their homepage and it highlights dumb
| automation (which is valuable, but everyone is doing already)
| over transforming web content. For instance, the image
| halfway down the page is a standard text replacement scenario
| (replace /ty with "Thank you...."). They need to focus on
| their differentiator and not try to reinvent the text
| expansion wheel (especially on a single browser)
| scottfr wrote:
| I discussed our dynamic features a bit in an earlier comment,
| but I want to highlight what a Chrome focused extension offers
| over a system wide app.
|
| As a Chrome extension, Text Blaze can use the contents of the
| webpage you are on in your snippet.
|
| For example, if you replied to an email in Gmail, the following
| Text Blaze snippet would pull in the name of the person you
| were replying to automatically (the bit after the `selector=`
| is a CSS selector):
|
| ```
|
| Hello {site: text; selector=.h7:last-child .gD},
|
| ...
|
| ```
|
| CSS selectors are much too technical for most users and this
| one in particular is quite ugly, but we are planning on
| developing higher-level functionality to make this much more
| accessible in the future.
| jnsie wrote:
| Appreciate the response! I think you should hammer this home
| on your homepage. There are a bunch of text expansion apps
| out there but I'm unaware of any that can do _this_.
|
| On a side note, a few images weren't loading when I opened
| your homepage in Safari just now.
| FabianBeiner wrote:
| I agree. I just wanted to post "Why would I not use
| https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso instead?", but
| that Selector thingy is a really nice idea.
| scottfr wrote:
| Agreed! Once we have the higher-level functionality for
| this in place it's something we'll really focus on as it's
| a killer feature.
|
| For now though it's too technical for most users (outside
| HN of course) so it's not something we focus on.
|
| Thanks for flagging the Safari issue, we'll look into it.
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(page generated 2021-02-05 23:01 UTC)