Before formally starting include.ai we created a Chrome Extension for Stanford students that would automatically enroll you in a class at midnight by repeatedly clicking the “enroll” button. This extension was downloaded by over 500 students and took down Stanford’s enrollment portal. A few weeks after enrollment night we were charged with breaking Stanford’s Honor Code/Fundamental Standards and had a nice long talk with Stanford IT. We ended up getting off with a slap on the wrist, a Stanford IT frisbee, and an idea for a startup.
It took us days to handle all the edge cases with our enrollment bot. But, what if anyone could build an automation like ours in minutes? Better yet, what if they could build it without code?
There are a lot of repetitive and mundane tasks on the web (like clicking the enroll button as fast as humanly possible at midnight) that should be automated. And even more personal, Kevin’s dad is blind. So growing up, Kevin found himself constantly helping his dad do tasks on the web, like getting a new credit card (because Chase’s web portal is so incredibly bad). It would be amazing if there was a way to click through the process of getting a new credit card, save it as an automation, and then send it to his dad.
So, that’s how it started. include.ai was going to make web automation easy and accessible for everyone.
The first lesson we learned was that consumers were not the right market to start with. Consumers don’t actually take that many actions on the web. They spend the vast majority of their time (1) consuming entertainment, (2) talking to friends/family, or (3) shopping. This makes it tough to build a product people would pay for.
Instead, we should focus on B2B.
If you look upmarket, enterprises were already spending millions implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
Chrome extensions that automate the web have millions of installs.
Web scraping is a whole industry that has spawned API platforms and services.