To start, tell us briefly about you. What is your current role at your company, and what are the measurable achievements you are most proud of?
I am the Founder and CEO and nothing makes me more proud than getting feedback from customers who have used our software to help them get away from their desks faster so they could spend more time with family, friends and in activities that nurture their souls.What pain point(s) do you solve for your customers? What was the “aha Moment” that led to the idea? Can you share that story with us?
Ghost Browser helps make working in the web less frustrating and more productive with features like Multi-Accounting for both Web 2.0 and Web3 web sites and better tab and project organization. The aha moment for me was when I was doing QA for websites with multiple different user types (i.e. Admins, visitors, customers, former customers) and felt the pain of submitting bug reports thinking I was logged into one type instead of the other. There was also the paint point of going through constant logging in and logging out to get testing done. This was a product that I had my team build for me to use until I realized there was a greater need for Multi-session browsing out there. That’s when we turned it into a product!What do you think makes your company stand out? What are you most proud of?
Our company practices healthy work-life balance and with Ghost Browser, we’re able to facilitate that for our customers as well. We save people a lot of time on mundane tasks that can slow down their task completion time, and even worse, trigger distraction mode in their brains, causing immeasurable disruptions to their flow states. The result is less time and frustration to get your job done, better productivity and a better mood. We love that we’ve improved the lives of the people who use our product. Testimonial excerpts below:“We’ve always been frustrated because of the inability to work with more than one customer at a time…at a time when we were changing a lot of internal systems and total productivity was down 3% company-wide, Ghost Browser users saw a 4% increase in the number of support tickets closed through our chat channel alone. For us a lot of the value was the ability to feel more confident taking on more tickets at once and not get burnt out.”
Frontline Education Support Team “One of my biggest stress points was the thought that ‘Ok, now I have to log into Twitter under 15 accounts’. The waits add up. The log in time for me is huge. Elisa estimated that Ghost Browser saves her 35-40 minutes per day on log in and log out time alone, plus another couple of hours each month when she does reporting. And she’s getting out of the office faster too: With Ghost Browser, I went from 10-11 hour days to 8-9 hour days.”
Elisa Vazquez, Elevate Your Brand “Hitting a blocker issue while QA testing creates hesitation over whether to wait or close your tabs down and switch to a new task. What if the developer gets right back to you? “With Ghost, I don’t have that hesitation. If a developer for a higher priority project unblocks me, I can switch back and I’ve not lost any of the work in either project. I’m already logged in and I have my tabs set up for when I’m ready to switch back and forth.”
Jennifer Schaeffer, TeamSnap “The ability to login to multiple Google accounts simultaneously and not hit the standard hiccups with switching accounts is probably the #1 feature but it would be followed very closely by the ability to login to different sessions from different proxies. Both of these features combined make for an incredibly powerful browser.”
Dave Davies, CEO at Beanstalk Internet Marketing
From your experience, what are the most important things to build a highly successful website and online business? Please explain each in detail.
You need a market and you need product-market fit. I knew I needed Ghost Browser for my own workflow but it wasn’t until other people saw me using it and said, ‘hey, we could really use this for managing AdTech tasks and Social Media accounts’ that we turned it into a product. I already knew it was valuable in QA tasks, but when I realized people outside of my daily grind saw value too, we saw the fit and turned it into a product.🧠 If you have product-market fit, you can have competition and still be successful.
However, also make sure that you are doing something that’s hard to do. This eliminates low end copycats usurping value from all of our hard work figuring things out.
For Ghost Browser, for example, we could have easily built a browser extension to do most of what Ghost Browser does in a fraction of the time it took us to build the product on Chromium. But extensions can easily be mimicked or flat out stolen, so by choosing the hard route, we were able to eliminate potential competitors by making it too hard for them to compete. This allowed us to offer features that not just anyone could come along and copy. Getting IP protection can be difficult and expensive in tech.
We protect our business by doing something hard enough that it scares the competition away.
In your opinion, which aspect of running a website tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?
I think most people I’ve run into who have given up on businesses have done so because they underestimate or mismatch the passion that is requires to get you through the hard times. It’s rare for a business to just go straight up from the start and you need that passion and purpose to get you through the hard times when you question your own sanity for taking the venture on to begin with. For example, you might be passionate about sports, so you start selling sporting goods on-line. When you do that, you really become a sourcing and fulfillment company, which has nothing to do with sports at all. How does your love of sports get you through challenges with product not being delivered or yet another long night of packing and labeling shipments in your garage? A better passion fit for someone who loves sports would be creating a coaching program on-line or in person because it’s the actual sport you are working with. The most common underestimation of passion that I see is in creating content. It’s one thing to make a marketing plan where you say you are going to write x number of blog posts per week, they get y views and you generate z revenue. But until you actually try to maintain that schedule while getting through tax season, a holiday week, a spell of writer’s block or burnout, or whatever else life throws at you and your company, it’s easy to underestimate the amount of time and energy that goes into content creation.
💡 If you are relying on SEO or social media marketing for your site to be successful, write your plan, then follow it for a month or two before you actually publish anything. This will give you a store of content you can publish during the hard weeks and a more realistic expectations for exactly how much content you can pump out.
Hint: Usually it’s a lot less than you originally mapped out.
