Hi HN! We’re Scott and Dan of Text Blaze (<a href="https://blaze.today" rel="nofollow">https://blaze.today</a>). Text Blaze lets you create programmable text snippets that you can insert anywhere in Chrome by typing a brief shortcut.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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:<p>- calculate a 15% service charge automatically when entering a price in a snippet text field.<p>- or automatically pulling in the name of contact when sending a message in LinkedIn,<p>- or saving data to a Google Spreadsheet every time they use a snippet,<p>- 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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Text Blaze is free to use for many use cases and we have paid versions with additional features and improved collaboration for teams.<p>Want to try Text Blaze out? You can get started by installing our extension from the Chrome Web Store (<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadaccgipmpannjkmfddolnnhmeklj" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadac...</a>).<p>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.<p>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?
Text expanders are useful tools. But no matter how many extra features this one has, as a Chrome extension it's practically useless to me. This doubling-down on "users spending all their time in Chrome" is unfortunate and a self-fulfilling prophecy. :(
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"?
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.<p>I would be happy to learn how you will position your product compared to AHK.
Congrats on the launch! I wish you success.<p>I use Lintalist[0] and wonder if your team is familiar with it and whether you might look to integrate.<p>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.<p>Good luck to your team!<p>[0]<a href="https://lintalist.github.io" rel="nofollow">https://lintalist.github.io</a>
It should be noted they have 60,000 users and still have a perfect track record averaging 5* reviews. That's only possible if you've built a really solid product.
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.
Cool, I'll try it out. What's the business model? Sell premium snippets?<p>"Looks like you're trying to do an intro... and yours kinda sucks. We have a proven intro, click here to upgrade!"
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.