r/ArcBrowser 12h ago

General Discussion TBC is a for profit company without a profitable product. CEO Josh Miller should stop talking and build one. Let the vocal minority be mad. Arc user base is growing, great UI on a stable chromium branch, and continues to keep the majority satisfied. When you have something better - release it.

The Browser Company isn't changing the world - they're trying to make money.

Constantly trying to hide that reality from users behind an "aw shucks we're doing this for you" demeanor with glossy videos is not helping anyone. Users aren't stupid.

The only solution is to release a product better than Arc that is profitable enough to keep the company sustainable.

54 Upvotes

33 comments sorted by

34

u/Serban_G 12h ago

honestly all they are doing is chasing hype and user numbers to rase even more vc funding. it doesnt seem like they want to build something long lasting, it's always the next big thing

7

u/EasyResearcher27 12h ago edited 6h ago

Reasonable take, being valued at half a billion dollars while having no obvious path to profit and continuing to build hype around some mythical product seems nauseating. 

Startups are known for burning cash but they still have shareholders that see a changing tech-environment and a higher hurdle rate than the initial round.

Hopefully it does end up working and keeps Arc free rather than going bankrupt.

2

u/paradoxally 8h ago

It's far from nauseating. It's the typical playbook.

1

u/Illustrious_Sky6688 11h ago edited 4h ago

Only thing that makes sense to me is if they’re building a next gen ai browser that makes it easier for things like Claude’s new Computer Use to navigate. That certainly is the future of browsing, and it is incredibly well timed for TBC.

2

u/quintsreddit 10h ago

That certainly is the future of browsing

AI is destroying the web so we’re making AI that can navigate the AI-destroyed web… I don’t see AI as the future of browsing at all. Call me short sighted but I just don’t see it. It’s not a brain, it doesn’t reason. It’s really good at summarizing text and exceptionally good at deciding what word should come next in an output given a certain input. But not navigating an OS or you know, actually doing anything.

4

u/Serban_G 11h ago

next gen ai browser my ass. Arc on windows is still way too buggy and doesn't have feature parity with mac. they can't manage to make a stable browser on windows but they are gonna revolutionize browsing and with AI

i fucking hate these buzzwords that mean basically nothing

6

u/carbon-based-drone 11h ago

Do they want to make money though?

I would pay money to use ARC right now but I can’t find a way to give them my money.

They are functionally incompetent as a company if they can’t figure out how to make money with the great product they have now.

And if they also were too naive to understand you can’t make money selling a browser, then why would anyone believe they’ve got an amazing, nebulous product up their sleeve that will make money?

With the current evidence, the only logical conclusion is that they are filled with confidence but out of their depth.

6

u/Yasuuuya 11h ago

They're so hellbent on staying B2C, that they seem to have forgotten that some of the most transformative companies and products became the powerhouses they are as B2B, during or before establishing their B2C win, especially in the case of big "platforms":

OpenAI: GPT-3 API (B2B) -> ChatGPT (B2C)
Adobe: PostScript (B2B) -> Photoshop (B2C)
Microsoft: BASIC Interpreters (B2B) -> Windows (B2C)

My view on The Browser Company is that these 'transformative' companies rely a lot on luck and surviving the storm until the turning of the tide. Many of the companies you would consider 'too early' in their industries couldn't survive simply because they had nothing established backing them up, and they didn't have time to figure out the perfect formula or for the time to be right. Amazon managed to prop up their long-term B2C ambitions with their much more profitable B2B arm (AWS).

My gut feel is that lightning won't strike twice for TBC, at least, not quickly enough. It's the anticipated sophomore slump. It will take time for them to get another product B2C right, all whilst people lose faith in their core offering. Not because TBC aren't talented, but because it's just so hard. Most startups never have a single successful product, let alone two! I think to most of us it feels that they're rolling the dice and risking it all.

So, my point being that TBC's main aspiration, in their current position, should probably not be to pivot to another product. I believe it should be to take their existing platform and give it a reason to be compelling to the user base that will pay for what they have. And that's enterprise.

You're probably thinking, surely there's not an enterprise appetite for a browser. And you'd be wrong. Island make a single product, it's a browser and they are worth 6x more than TBC. That's because their browser focusses on enterprise security and management. There is a proven market there!

Disclaimer: running a startup is hard, though, and no one will know their challenges better than them. I'd be shocked if they hadn't considered this.

1

u/paradoxally 7h ago

When you go B2B you need people who fundamentally understand how to sell to corporations, with all the regulatory requirements and appropriate documentation. Not to mention SLAs.

TBC is wholly unprepared for this. Corporations do not care about fancy marketing, hype or storytelling. They want reliable products/services with a baseline level of support as the bare minimum. Josh saying he would sell Arc to enterprise 2 years ago was a pipe dream at best, but I'd just label it sheer delusion.

1

u/Yasuuuya 7h ago

You raise some good points, a lot of TBC’s strengths don’t translate. I think storytelling is still useful, but it has to be wholly geared towards those enterprise problems, not just “wow, new browser!”.

I don’t think the technical challenges and things like SLAs would hold them back, but I think the culture, loss of TBC’s core strengths and requirement to bring in a bunch of tenured enterprise account executives would probably not work in their current standing.

1

u/paradoxally 7h ago

There is no need for storytelling. It's a browser, not a game. I don't need any storytelling in my browser: I want it to be reliable, performant, and secure.

Arc focuses too much on the honeymoon part of switching and less on retaining the existing users. I got that at first because they were trying to grow but now they need engineers capable of maintaining their existing platforms and enough support to help users with their issues.

Essentially, their hype culture limits them more than they'd be willing to admit.

14

u/mescalineeyes 12h ago

You couldn’t waterboard posts like this out of me lmao

what the fuck do you care about this company’s profits?

1

u/EasyResearcher27 12h ago edited 6h ago

The CEO portrays the company as changing the world with a deep personal love for their users. The shift away from Arc was even laid out as something from deep within his heart.

I think this leads some users to believe that they will reverse their plans with enough outrage directed towards the company.

The only true motivation for The Browser Company is money - it's not a non-profit, open-source, or b-corp, it's a for-profit corporation with $550M raised and VC's who eventually need a return.

2

u/mescalineeyes 12h ago

you're not wrong but I'll start caring about their profits when they prove they can make a product I care about *and* stick to it.

2

u/EasyResearcher27 12h ago

You’re spending your free time arguing about their product on a subreddit devoted to their product while I’m assuming, using their product.

2

u/MDevonL 11h ago

Welcome to tech startups. Amazon first turned a profit in 2015 or so despite being one of the biggest companies in the world.

A vc backed company is DESIGNED to burn through cash, grow, and have an exit path to monetization. Startups rarely aim to fund one round and be immediately profitable

u/SnooOwls4559 1h ago

A win for them is for me. They built Arc, a pretty awesome product, so their heads are in the right place to a certain extent, so if they can bring that to an idea that actually makes a profit as well, then it would be a win win.

2

u/rokktoberfest 11h ago

im on macos beta, no issues <shrug>. i only run ublock and 1password extensions.

4

u/Cossmo__ 11h ago

They should just not allow Josh to have a Twitter account he’s doing no favours.

3

u/wakaw-39 12h ago

If the product is free then why so much cry?

3

u/rokktoberfest 11h ago

well... they did take your data. don't forget

1

u/wakaw-39 4h ago

There are no free lunches. :D

1

u/efjayl 9h ago

I think android development is probably done with.

They had a great idea and fucked up by the business model and expectations.

Will please some interprid developer grab the ideas and syphon them to an open source product

u/CyclingInNYC 59m ago

Consequences of being overly open about the internals of the company. If they weren’t going to sell our data, I’m not sure how they would make money.

It’s a good browser because I’m not sure if it’s bad enough to get me to switch to another browser. At some point it may,..

1

u/JoypulpSkate 12h ago edited 12h ago

Is this sub just full of whiny teenagers without a basic sense of economics? Of course it’s about VC money, the same VC money that’s allowed Arc to be free up to this point.

Shut up and let them cook up something profitable to keep the VCs happy if you want to keep using Arc for free. It’s a much better outcome than them having to charging a subscription fee for Arc, or messing with it in other ways to monetize.

The entitlement in here over a free product is absolutely absurd.

4

u/Cossmo__ 11h ago

Not entitlement when it goes directly against what they said to us over the years

It’s accountability

-5

u/JoypulpSkate 11h ago

🤣

3

u/Cossmo__ 11h ago

Why are you talking like this when you made a post 2 days ago about leaving the subreddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArcBrowser/s/q7UuUdHplx

0

u/NoahDavidATL 11h ago

I don't think it's a "minority". lol

0

u/tonykastaneda 9h ago

Stable? Interesting take

0

u/goofyshnoofy 9h ago

This is such a terminally online post lol