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Launch HN: Axiom (YC W21) – No-code browser automation a.k.a. RPA for everyone

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Axiom (YC W21) – No-code browser automation a.k.a. RPA for everyone

#21

Post by reubano »

yaseer wrote: post #20
reubano wrote: post #18

Who are your top competitors and how do you differentiate yourselves? Esp re recent HN submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26239975

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 go for everyone else. Zapier - Axiom competes with zapier in some ways. We're different because we automate the Ui, not just APIs, and we integrate with Zapier. Automatio.co - They seem to e…

Thanks for the synopsis. There definitely seems to new wave of automation tools coming out these days.

Re: Launch HN: Axiom (YC W21) – No-code browser automation a.k.a. RPA for everyone

#22

Post by ordinaryradical »

yaseer wrote: post #19
ordinaryradical wrote: post #17

I used this product a while back to do some scraping of a very annoying (and slow!) to navigate website and it was a life-saver. Still using the google sheets it helped me generate. I saw the value of this tool straight away and the UI was pretty reasonable, just a few quirks. I would definitely use Axiom again if I ran into a similar need. Best of luck to your team. My one suggestion: Let people touch the UI and get…

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 can get started. Right now, it's a paid feature. I'm very glad the feature we have planned is something customers would appreciate though, at least we won't have built something nobody wants. We ma…

Sounds like you’re on the right track. I personally think codeless tools like these are all about confidence-building. I’m just technical enough to know what Puppeteer is and know how long it would take me to learn it. If I see that I can learn your tool right on your site/play around with it without having to sign up, my conviction goes way up.

Re: Launch HN: Axiom (YC W21) – No-code browser automation a.k.a. RPA for everyone

#25

Post by yaseer »

xrendan wrote: post #24

Is there any capability to run bots headless on our own infrastructure as opposed to locally?

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.

Re: Launch HN: Axiom (YC W21) – No-code browser automation a.k.a. RPA for everyone

#26

Post by yaseer »

TruthWillHurt wrote: post #23

https://www.selenium.dev/selenium-ide/

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 and airtable - a 'no-code builder' whose ultimate goal is to create re-usable templates.

Re: Launch HN: Axiom (YC W21) – No-code browser automation a.k.a. RPA for everyone

#27

Post by Sil_E_Goose »

>using Axiom is 10X faster than writing it in selenium/puppeteer + we handle all the annoying logic you need. We're investigating a node library for this - let us know if it would be useful.

As someone who has recently started working with puppeteer, I definitely think a library to alleviate that pain would be immensely valuable.

Re: Launch HN: Axiom (YC W21) – No-code browser automation a.k.a. RPA for everyone

#29

Post by yaseer »

Sil_E_Goose wrote: post #27

>using Axiom is 10X faster than writing it in selenium/puppeteer + we handle all the annoying logic you need. We're investigating a node library for this - let us know if it would be useful. As someone who has recently started working with puppeteer, I definitely think a library to alleviate that pain would be immensely valuable.

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.

Re: Launch HN: Axiom (YC W21) – No-code browser automation a.k.a. RPA for everyone

#30

Post by yaseer »

tartakovsky wrote: post #28

Regarding testing, that sounds like a great use case but I had trouble locating information on your website about it.

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://web.axiom.ai/recipe/test-user-interactions

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