Launch HN: Text Blaze (YC W21) Programmable snippets to automate tedious typing

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"?

It started as a side-project that grew organically thorough word of mouth. When we realized the huge potential, we decided to turn this into a venture-backed project and applied to YC. The rest is history :)

What will the venture money be used for? Marketing?

First, Text Blaze should run on every screen you use. Right now we're Chrome only. We want to expand to other browsers (another user commented about Firefox) and we also want native desktop and mobile applications (keyboards in the case of mobile) so that Text Blaze will work wherever you are working.

Second, we want to develop tighter integrations with various applications. In another thread we discussed how a Text Blaze snippet could automatically include the name of the person you are replying to in Gmail. This works, but it very technical currently. We want to build higher-level advanced integrations for all the common sites our users use to make this much easier (Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, Airtable, Monday.com, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Intercom, etc...).

I'm sensing a data/tracking play with a similar risk as Grammarly (they don't do this currently, but that doesn't mean they can't change their privacy policy tomorrow).

What is the benefit of this over something that works system-wide, such as Textexpander?

It seemed pretty clear to me from the description that this thing will let scripts read from Chrome to, e.g., pull in names from what you are looking at on LinkedIn and also make web requests.

But OP and Text Blaze should take your question as great feedback: by simplifying to "programmable snippets", it sounds like just a dumb automation tool to reduce typing. We saw that stuff yesterday on HN with people using AutoHotKey and similar.

Make it more clear what you offer!

Agreed. I went to their homepage and it highlights dumb automation (which is valuable, but everyone is doing already) over transforming web content. For instance, the image halfway down the page is a standard text replacement scenario (replace /ty with "Thank you...."). They need to focus on their differentiator and not try to reinvent the text expansion wheel (especially on a single browser)

We definitely have a lot of work to do when it comes to marketing. One key challenge is tailoring the massage to the audience. While the HN audience would understand transforming web content and understand the value in it, most support reps won't. One thing we're working on is different landing pages for different functions. That should allow us to highlight benefits that are relevant for the audience.

I discussed our dynamic features a bit in an earlier comment, but I want to highlight what a Chrome focused extension offers over a system wide app.

As a Chrome extension, Text Blaze can use the contents of the webpage you are on in your snippet.

For example, if you replied to an email in Gmail, the following Text Blaze snippet would pull in the name of the person you were replying to automatically (the bit after the `selector=` is a CSS selector):

```

Hello {site: text; selector=.h7:last-child .gD},

...

```

CSS selectors are much too technical for most users and this one in particular is quite ugly, but we are planning on developing higher-level functionality to make this much more accessible in the future.

Appreciate the response! I think you should hammer this home on your homepage. There are a bunch of text expansion apps out there but I'm unaware of any that can do _this_.

On a side note, a few images weren't loading when I opened your homepage in Safari just now.

Agreed! Once we have the higher-level functionality for this in place it's something we'll really focus on as it's a killer feature.

For now though it's too technical for most users (outside HN of course) so it's not something we focus on.

Thanks for flagging the Safari issue, we'll look into it.

I agree. I just wanted to post "Why would I not use https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso instead?", but that Selector thingy is a really nice idea.

Agreed, I use the snippet function of Alfred after I tried textblaze but now that I know of dynamic snippets I’m really curious to give it a second look.

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.

I would be happy to learn how you will position your product compared to AHK.

Specifically the most excellent Lintalist[0] which is built on AHK and which I use daily. I wonder if they'd consider extant offerings and offer a path to inclusion [though Chrome-limited seems a downgrade to me given I use my snippets everywhere]

[0]https://lintalist.github.io

Sorry, I've never used AHK, but my understanding is it's very much focused on scripting UI's.

We support a little bit of that (you can tab between different fields in a webpage with Blaze), but we're much more focused on communications (text).

Most of our features are really about making static or dynamic messages or documents. So for example, lots of forms support, formulas, data validation, etc... And making this all as accessible as possible.

I don’t know about other people, but I only ever used AHK as a text expander. I used it religiously when I worked as a law firm associate and had to use a PC.

AHK is a programming language that does text expansion and a lot more. Check it out.

To give a bit more context to what the others wrote. AHK is the only reason I use Windows and not macOS nor Linux on a desktop because they don't offer anything remotely powerful as AHK and AHK makes my life 1,000x easier/faster. I always wonder how others can use a computer without something like AHK. I dislike its language design and all its quirks a lot but all the alternatives I checked come not close in terms of features and have an even worse UX.

So, there's definitely a market opportunity but I'd go more low-level in order to have OS-wide coverage and preferably beyond one OS but this would be impossible when doing three implementations. Maybe a macOS version is a good start. There you have few options which bring you far but yeah, not as far as AHK.

How big do you consider the market to be today and in the future? To me this sounds extremely niche for a YC startup.

when most common users are customer support and recruiting that seems like a big market no, taking in consideration these two departments are pretty much in every B2C companies

Congrats on the launch! I wish you success.

I use Lintalist[0] and wonder if your team is familiar with it and whether you might look to integrate.

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.

Good luck to your team!

[0]https://lintalist.github.io

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.

Why not firefox add-on? What's so difficult in developing the add-on in Firefox?

We definitely want to add Firefox support!

We haven't yet done so because we really want to nail the experience on a single platform first (Chrome).

Text insertion on the web is actually surprisingly complex [0] and we leverage some DOM API's that aren't fully standardized yet. Focusing just on Chrome for the moment allows us to really figure out the experience before we expand to other browsers like Firefox, along with Desktop and Mobile applications.

[0] There are so many different ways to support text input on the web. Take Google Docs for instance; when you type into it, you are actually typing into a hidden iframe element that captures your keystrokes and then updates the document model. Figuring out how to support all these edge cases is tricky.

Let us know when firefox support is out!

This is awesome! I know a lot of sales people who would love this.

Interesting. I see myself using this one, lately get to write the the same message over and over again. will give it a spin. Templates would help

Let us know what you think! Our blog has quite a few templates: https://blaze.today/blog/ We also have extensive documentation to help you get started (https://blaze.today/docs/) and a lively community (https://community.blaze.today/)

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.

We support email and password login so you shouldn't need to sign in with Google (not sure if Chrome requires you to be logged in to install Chrome extensions in general).

Chrome doesn’t require login except for extensions paid through their payment infrastructure. But they recently killed this infrastructure, so as of this week it isn’t an requirement for any Chrome extension.

This also shows one of the dangers of building on Chrome (my company has two extensions, one of which we had to rush off of the Google payments platform), which is that you’re subject to their whims.

Looks great! Can you fill out web forms? We would use this for creating fake accounts in our test environment, for example.

Yes, you can simulate keys like 'tab' and 'click' to move between fields. Give it a shot.

Cool, I'll try it out. What's the business model? Sell premium snippets?

"Looks like you're trying to do an intro... and yours kinda sucks. We have a proven intro, click here to upgrade!"

Text Blaze is a freemium product. The free version works great for basic use cases and also lets you try out the more advanced features. Then we have paid versions that offer more advanced features (like embedded forms and formulas) and improved team collaboration.

We actually are interested in the possibility of selling premium snippet packs. Not something we have had time to explore at the moment, but the "give the razor away" model is an interesting one.

Nice, thanks for explaining

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.

Marketing is not our strong suit admittedly. Customer success is our biggest vertical but we have lots of users outside it which makes messaging tricky.

The most interesting three users I heard from using Blaze were a priest, a tarot card reader and sushi chef.

Would love any feedback on how to reach users in general.

The animated example lags in Safari. The longer it goes on, the worse it gets. When it restarts, it again starts fast and becomes progressively slow.

Thanks for the feedback. We'll look into it asap

Interesting. I pay for Alfred. How does this compare?

I am not an expert in Alfred so I can't talk too specifically to it. However, there is a lot of competition out there in this space like Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Text Expander, Typinator, etc...

One thing special Text Blaze offers is the ability to make dynamic forms with formulas. For instance say you had an invoice snippet. With Text Blaze you could do something like this

```

Cost: ${formtext: name=price}

With tax (15%): ${=price * 1.15}

```

This will create a snippet with a text box for the cost and then a dynamically calculated field that applies the 15% tax.

This is just a simple example but you can well beyond it to embed logic and dynamic behavior directly in your snippets.

Beyond dynamic behavior, we're very focused on ease of use and collaboration across teams of users (which is important for business use cases).

Cool! I love DSLs. Thanks very much for the response. Personally I don't currently use Chrome extensions, but I like this sort of thing that help's people more productive so will keep an eye out!

How do you plan to monetize a Chrome extension?

We charge a subscription fee for advanced features and increased usage (more snippets).

Thanks!

Wow, I've been waiting for this! As someone that english is his second language this tool is a time saver!

Really nice work