The Skyvern journal

If we're being completely honest, most of us spend an unhealthy amount of time clicking around websites, doing the same thing over and over and over and over again.  We're probably just filling out forms, logging into accounts, or trying to scrape data from a tricky webpage. Either way, it can definitely feel like a full-time job on its own.  But How would you feel if I told you there are a bunch of surprising browser workflows that can be completely automated?  Yup, that means no more manual

Drumroll please… Exciting news: our integration with Zapier is now live! Zapier is an automation platform tailored to freelancers, small businesses, and non-technical users. We're excited to be one of the 5,000+ supported integrators available, extending your Zaps into the browser. Why Integrate into Zapier? A workflow builder inside a workflow builder? You might think we’re crazy (and maybe we are), but when you really think about it, we serve different purposes. Skyvern allows you to reach

I've been rewatching Ben Horowitz's lecture on How to Manage (YC + Stanford how to start a startup -- link in comments) There are so many insights in here that are counterintuitive for me. It all starts from viewing each complex decision from the perspective of the whole company. #1 - If someone asks for a raise and you give it to them out of cycle, you're killing the culture. You're punishing everyone who didn't ask for the raise. #2 - If someone isn't performing well, demoting them isn't a

Ever have a bad day and wonder how you're gonna get over it? Happens every day in startup land. Just last week: 😵 Our entire browser infrastructure started crumbling under the weight of new users trying it out. There was a memory leak that went undiagnosed, and 20% of all new user requests timed out. Talk about a good experience! 🤯 Trying to build 5 demos at the same time to prep for some calls later in the week.. after spending 8 hours doing discovery calls all day 😵‍💫 Diagnosing really

We have had a few interesting issues recently 1. We were helping one of our customers fill out some tax forms, and Skyvern failed to interact with the "yes" and "no" radio buttons because clicking the labels didn't work -- very unusual for websites 2. We were helping another customer fill out some permit applications, and Skyvern failed to find the correct address and ran into an issue This got us to an interesting series of conversations with our customers -- what kind of success / failure ra

Faster workflow startup times Faster workflow startup times Usually performance fixes are a big meme. You get an app update and the release notes just say "performance improvements"... but WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? We make our performance improvements as obvious as they can get Any time I did a live demo.. we'd wait 1 minute for a workflow to start Any user that wanted to test their workflow.. would wait 1 minute for a workflow to start Any customer calling our API.. experienced an unnecessary mi

Why does YC keep talking about "launch early, launch often"? By default.. people don't know that you exist. It's your job to be the squeaky wheel, and let people know "HEY I EXIST", "HEY I CAN SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM" You may have seen my many posts talking about Skyvern hitting star count numbers Those didn't happen out of the blue. We kept launching, and launching, and launching. Trying to spread the word about us. Trying to learn about which use-cases we're best suited for. Trying to solve anyo

Back in February.. I did my first podcast appearance ever with Mike Bifulco We had just decided we were going to open source.. but hadn't pulled the trigger yet It's crazy to watch it back and realize how big of a bet we were making. We had no idea whether the bet would pan out, but we had high conviction on 3 things: 1. Skyvern was a "cool" product. Each successful run made me go "holy shit" (I won't talk about the failed runs 😂). This magic deserved to be made open and shared with the worl

Landing page re-design We just released our new landing page at https://www.skyvern.com Our old one desperately needed a makeover. It was something I cooked up two nights before a launch. Even though it looked scrappy, it served its purpose well. Our potential customers were able to go to it and see what Skyvern could do. They would see use-cases, they'd be able to book a demo, they'd be able to try our product out, they'd be able to navigate to our open source repo There are a few places w

Hear Ye, Hear Ye! We are thrilled to announce our integration in Pabbly Connect! Pabbly is a leading SaaS application suite that specializes in automations. With around 18.5k active users and 44k subscribers on YouTube, we are excited to embed Skyvern inside this cutting-edge automation tool. Why Integrate into Pabbly? Integrations are common ways to feed your SaaS tools into your automations. Pulling meeting notes with one integrator, parsing them with another, completing data entry with a

For anyone who's been following along our journey for the past 2 years.. you'll know it's been a long one We wouldn't be here today without the help of all of our friends (ie YOU) who rallied behind us in our super long and crazy startup journey Ever wonder what it took to get here? 0. Our first startup idea -- helping people onboard into companies (it was a bad one) 1. We tried to pivot into a slack + discord chatbot to answer questions (before ChatGPT came out) 2. We explored an idea to bui

HIPAA Compliance Skyvern is now HIPAA Compliant!! This has been a long time coming We've known that we would have to become HIPAA compliant for a long time. We kept talking to healthcare company after healthcare company.. all with the same painpoint "I need help integrating with the highly fractured EHR ecosystem" So.. we open sourced ...And it helped for a bit. Some companies started to self-host us But it was too high friction.

We just hit a milestone I never dreamed of – 6,000 Github stars ⭐️ I remember back in february we had heated discussions about whether we should Open Source Skyvern or not There were a ton of reasons not to do it: 1. What if someone stole our code? Rebranded it to their own? 2. What if enterprises decided not to pay us? Just use our open source version? 3. What if people read our scrappy (crappy) code? Roasted us? 4. What if they tried it out and it didn't work? 5. What if they didn't leave f

Most startups send Investor updates to their investors. It's a great way to stay connected with the people who believed in you.. especially the ones that believed in you when nothing was working! It also holds you as a founder accountable. You're forced to write down how things went / are going at a regular cadence, and reflect why or why not you were (or weren't) able to do what you said you would. The hardest part of these updates is sending them both when the times are good and when the tim

I remember I read a post from my friend Abhay a few months ago about juggling balls in your career. He mentioned that early on in your career, you admire the people that seem to always have their sh*t together. They have a ton of projects going on in parallel, and seem to easily handle everything. The most admirable part is that they never seem to drop a ball -- everything always moves across the finishing line You work hard and learn from that. You do your best to take on as many projects as

This is one of the hardest things I've had to learn as a founder. You set out to build products to help people and solve their problems. You cobble together a MVP, emphasis on the minimum, and launch it to a bunch of users If you're lucky, you get a ton of demand. How do you decide what to build next? How do you decide to focus on customer onboarding vs fixing bugs vs launching new features to unlock more revenue? If your goal is to make people happy (or "make something people want" per YC's

New Prompting Guide We just released a new prompting guide: https://docs.skyvern.com/getting-started/prompting-guide It goes into detail talking about a few gotchas. For example, did you know: 1. Skyvern works the most reliably pairing prompts with (goal, completion criteria) pairs? 1. It turns out that LLMs are very similar to humans in this regard – the more vague you are about when something is "done", the less likely they are to do it the way you expect 2. You can use keywords like

Context Skyvern is an AI agent that helps companies automate workflows in the browser. We run leverage proxy networks and run headful browser instances in the cloud to facilitate most of our automations. 😱 200GB of proxy bandwidth was approximately $500 burned over the course of 6 hours One fatal morning I woke up one morning to an alarm on my phone – Skyvern's failure rate was through the roof. Classic startup moment. Looking through our alerts, I noticed that our proxy bandwidth alert ha

How to find ICPs to go after? This is a question I ask myself all the time. The answer is obvious, right? Who would find the most value out of Skyvern? When we first launched our product, we had no clue what kinds of things companies would want to automate with a product like Skyvern. We had only collected a handful of examples after talking to tens of companies. The examples included: 1. Automating purchasing for companies that helped others order things from a unified portal 2. Automatic

New Pricing page Skyvern's landing page just got a minor update – we now have a dedicated pricing page 💰! We have 2 main problems we think we can solve with a pricing page: #1: Our pricing wasn't clear at all! The only way to learn about our pricing was to log in and see the billing page #2: Many people coming into Skyvern didn't realize we have an open source version! Our pricing page now makes it clear We still have one big question on our minds: should we continue to do usage-based pric

TL;DR We started using HTML instead of JSON to represent possible actions that Skyvern could take and reduced our cost by 11.8% and increased our success rate by 3.9% What’s Skyvern? Skyvern is an open source AI agent that helps companies automate browser-based workflows with AI. You can use Skyvern to automate actions on any website with natural language: simple objective-based problems. Examples include going to www.geico.com and prompting it with “generate an auto insurance quote”. Githu

GPT-4O-Mini We just launched GPT-4O-Mini support in Open Source Skyvern 🎉 OpenAI's hottest new model at a low low price-point of $0.15 / 1M input tokens.. compared to $5 / 1M input tokens for GPT-4O. https://github.com/Skyvern-AI/skyvern/commit/ec5a0a03c094bfefb5fb810cefff94935532c9e2 Retry Tasks 📃Hot off the press – you can now retry tasks within Skyvern! 🔁 Ran a task, loved how it went, and just want to see the magic again? Ran a task, saw it failed, and want to tweak some paramet

#1 - Detailed billing (ie how much did I spend on that task?!) You asked, we delivered🎉 You can now see how much your tasks cost you in Skyvern's task billing page 😹 I bet you're wondering.. why did we launch Skyvern without this feature? Well... we wouldn't need to build this if no one signed up to use Skyvern! #2 - Cancel Tasks (abort mission abort mission!!) One of the most frequent messages we got were questions about how they can cancel / rollback their running tasks. Worry not! Sky

TL;DR: We had a spike of traffic Monday (May 6th) morning, and we looked at our metrics to find out we got featured in a french newsletter and a viral tweet Monday Morning: Random burst of traffic Last Monday morning (May 6th), we woke up to a large burst of traffic to skyvern.com, an influx of Github stars (+1200) in our open source repo, and a burst of new users in our discord (+70) — which led us to scratch our heads.. where did this traffic come from? We hadn’t done any launches, no publi

As some of you may know, Skyvern is actually our third attempt at building a startup, and we’ve made every mistake under the sun in our path to get to where we are. I’m happy to say that applying to YC was not one of them, as YC has given us 3 competitive edges we didn’t expect when we first got in. Want to know what they are? Scroll to the bottom to find out 🙂 So.. why did we even apply to YC in the first place? Applying to YC was the easiest choice we ever made. We knew the odds of us gett