NEW Startup: Automated Product Screenshots

We're putting the band back together to put an end to the manual product screenshotting circus! We call it LaunchBrightly.com :-)

TL;DR You sit in Customer Support and you've probably updated a support article with a new screenshot from your product this week. We can automate that and would love to talk to you (no selling, just eager to chat with friends in pain). Ping us at hello@launchbrightly.com

Taking screenshots of your SaaS product features is a manual chore and way more cumbersome than it should be. And yet, it's something every Support team needs to do, no matter their business model or industry. We’ve all been there! The endless loop of:

• Signing into a demo account
• Navigating to the page and feature in question
• Clean up or remove unwanted elements (if your anal like us)
• Enhance it ever so slightly by adding eg. some text in an input box for illustration purposes. Perhaps an arrow pointing to the feature update itself
• Command + Shift + 4 to get a manual screenshot on your Macbook
• Perhaps you style it a little bit, so it looks as solid as possible
• and then you drag that final PNG image on your desktop into your Help Center.

Only to see those product screenshots go stale and slowly rot as the product evolves and moves further away from the initial launch. That's the sad state of affairs most of us live with today.

Even sadder is seeing all the energy we invested into generating max engineering velocity penalized on the Support end, as product images slowly grow outdated. We hated it! And it is why we started LaunchBrightly.

We run an automated process that continually takes on-brand and beautifully styled screenshots of all your SaaS product features — on desktop, mobile, dark mode, localized, etc. You push a new feature to production and we automatically update all feature images across platforms.

In grander terms; we are on a mission to build the first continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline and process for the Support team.

It was not that long ago, and I am old enough to remember, when a developer, after having spent a few cycles building a new feature, would have to take on the monumental task of actually getting their code into production - a pretty painful and error-prone manual deployment process. Today, of course, we conceptually have fully automated builds for every code change and accompanying production deployments fully automated. Teams are now able to deploy higher-quality code, faster. Yes, it’s possible to manually execute each of the steps in the engineering CI/CD pipeline. But the true value of this pipeline is realized through automation. And we now want to build this for Support teams, starting with Product Screenshots!

Having taken, quite literally, thousands of product feature screenshots over the years, we are the customer, we know this pain intimately and the empathy comes from within and we are super passionate about solving this manual chore!

We are just getting started on this adventure. But we do have an MVP so if you’d like to see what we have in mind and try it out, we’d love to chat. Or, just as valuable in these early days, we’d love to chat with some nice people in Customer Support who are taking manual screenshots today. No sales, just super curious to meet with the very people who are living and breathing this pain. You can reach us at hello@launchbrightly.com or personally at:

Dennis: dennis@launchbrightly.com
Josh: josh@launchbrightly.com

To infinity and beyond (*or really just the next commit)

Cheers
Dennis + Josh

n.b. We are also looking for a backend Node.js engineer to help move the Puppeteer based screenshot engine (API) forward and a frontend Vue/JS engineer for our App. If you’d like to join us on the ground floor of this adventure, head over to our: Jobs Section 😊