How Arc Grows: Building The New Window Into The Internet
Lessons on avoiding the competition, building what people don't know they need, ignoring the numbers, and so much more
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Sometimes in the world of tech, what we consider innovative concepts aren’t necessarily all that new. Sometimes, “new” is just a unique and different perspective on something so expected and mundane. Something boring.
And The Browser Company of New York, with their flagship product Arc, is a great example of a company solving a boring problem in a delightful, unexpected, and contrarian way.
As the name may have given away…
A browser, yes. Now you might be thinking, “But why, nothing is wrong with the browser?” You’d be right, and you’d be wrong. Arc believe there is a more fundamental opportunity that goes beyond the browser though: that there is a better way to use the internet. The browser is just the means—the window if you will—to pretty much everything in our lives.
Since the era of Internet Explorer (🪦), countless companies have attempted to build a new browser experience. We’ve seen Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, DuckDuckGo, Brave, and Edge. But, while we’ve seen new logos for browsers, we haven’t really seen a new concept of the browser. Open any of the ones listed above, and you’ll find a pretty standard and expected experience with the same UI and UX you’ve become deeply familiar with.
You know—horizontal tabs along the top, bookmarks, the address bar.
That’s the design pattern engrained in us. The design pattern nobody has dared challenge, because pushing against the grain of deeply learnt user behavior can be dangerous.
Well, that has all changed with the arrival of Arc—the browser that takes on an entirely new notion for what searching, discovering, and interacting with content on the web should be.
When/If you go and open up Arc, you’ll be greeted with new design patterns and concepts. Which, despite truly amazing onboarding, still take some time to get comfortable with.
I’ve been using Arc now for about a week, and personally, despite the imperfections, I absolutely love everything about the product. And the more that I’ve been discovering all their differentiators and the browsing superpowers, the more I’ve “got” what Arc is really trying to do. David Pierce from the Verge puts it into words perfectly:
The Browser Company’s CEO, Josh Miller, talks a lot about operating systems and browsers. The difference is subtle but important. Browsers, traditionally, have mostly just tried to show you the web without getting in your way; they provide tabs and a URL bar and maybe a way to add extensions, but not much more. Operating systems, on the other hand, are deeply involved in how things work. Think of the way Siri and Apple Pay operate across apps on your iPhone or how Google’s Material You changes the look and feel of everything on your phone. Even the share menus or simple drag-and-drop between apps — that’s all operating system stuff.
Arc wants to be the web’s operating system. So it built a bunch of tools that make it easier to control apps and content, turned tabs and bookmarks into something more like an app launcher, and built a few platform-wide apps of its own. The app is much more opinionated and much more complicated than your average browser with its row of same-y tabs at the top of the screen.
Another way to think about it is that Arc treats the web the way TikTok treats video: not as a fixed thing for you to consume but as a set of endlessly remixable components for you to pull apart, play with, and use to create something of your own. Want something to look better or have an idea for what to do with it? Go for it.
This is the big bet they’re making.
Now, Arc is earlier stage than most companies we look at here (valued at about $100M), but the more I learnt about the company and the execution behind Arc, the more I realized there was a lot worth sharing here about startup building. From strategy, to product ethos, to storytelling and brand building.
Which leads me to ask you this quick question before we get cracking…
Here’s what to expect in today’s analysis:
A story of David avoiding Goliath
A brief history of the internet’s original layers
Transforming the internet, and merging the layers together to build a new category
Keeping tabs on growth
Arc’s Go-To-Market strategy
Horses and Cars: Not what users know they want
Their product ethos: Exploring with a machete
Branding, product-marketing, and storytelling
Actionable insights 🧠 🛠️
Here are just some of the many takeaways in today’s deep dive:
Category creation often boils down to counter positioning yourself, and making yourself, un-copyable to the incumbents. Pick an idea in a boring and untouched space, and then say fuck that to the norms, challenge them, and do it radically differently for an unbundled niche audience.
Find your nuclear go-to-market audience by picking a very specific community and tailoring your product for them. Like, even as specific as focusing on a single /subreddit. Communities beat personas because the individuals in them are connected. Once you break in, you can snowball your way through fast.
In a very unconventional product manager way, consider putting your audience last. This is borrowed from contrarian writing wisdom, but as you read this post, you’ll see how it translates to Arc’s approach to building. If you are building for an ICP like yourself, Arc shows us that sometimes you need to build what’s true to you first and foremost. As with art, that creates soul and craftsmanship that people see and come to love.
The numbers and metrics—while important for holding yourself accountable—often lead to optimizing for the wrong things. To build human software, you need to look beyond the screen and the data, and optimize for feelings. This is the balance between data and product sense.
Put more surprises and magic moments into your product. Often this means doing delightful things that have no function, but elevate your form.
Assume you don’t know anything, and approach building like whacking through a juggle with a machete. Despite heaps of experience on Arc’s team, they assume they know nothing and use rapid/messy prototypes and assumption testing as their machete to find their way.
Ask “What if…"?” more. Push your team’s quality standards, and push your innovation, by asking the simple question that can squeeze out more.
Communicate like influencers, not corporations. Nobody cares about more bland B2B/enterprise content. Don’t forget people who make decisions at those companies are still people, and we all resonate more with real talk vs bland company content. Simply, tell better stories.
…many more inside.
Provide 🤌 membership level support like Arc does…
One thing that stood out to me about Arc, which we’ll get more into shortly, is not just how good and responsive their level of support is, but how they think about “support” so much more holistically. For Arc, it’s all about building long-term customer relationships.
They do provide excellent support of course, but they also use the team to build relationships, engage with the community, gather feedback, and as Josh says, eventually sell.
I literally only saw this yesterday when chatting with the Arc team about an idea, but Arc use Zendesk to power their entire membership team—and Zendesk just so happen to be our select sponsor this week.
For our startup founders specifically, I’ve partnered with Zendesk for 4 reasons:
I used Zendesk everyday when I ran my own startup. We got setup before we had a single user.
My team use Zendesk and I’m often in there combing for insights.
Zendesk are the best-in-class CRM to support customers and build relationships
They are offering HTG readers, who are at early stage startups, their full stack for free for 6 months. ( Click here to get going )
I’m super proud to work with such a great product, and truly, there really is no better time to start building a great membership experience. That can start with Zendesk right now.
To get your free 6 months, just hit the button below.
Bought to you by our select sponsor, Zendesk. Want to partner? Learn more here.
1. A story of David avoiding Goliath
While Arc is building a browser, they are not trying to win the browser market.
They have realistic ambitions, and know very well that Google Chrome is going nowhere. That is a Goliath who will take many rocks without budging.
Arc is rather taking the road less travelled. Instead of needing to be precise with a slingshot to knock the category leaders down, Arc is walking around the market and creating a new category for themselves—a category using a counter positioning strategy that Google, with their ~3.3 billion daily active users, will never copy.
Google cannot risk doing what Arc is doing. Nor should they. That would be an awful decision, both because it messes with the money (more on this soon), and because the vast majority of Google users would hate it. Don’t go move Aunty Marge’s cheese—she likes her tabs, favorites, and buttons just the way they are, thank you very much!
Chrome works very well. It’s a passive browser that gets out of your way. Almost all of those 3.3B people like that and don’t even think for a second about Chrome as a product they use. That makes Chrome an excellent product.
In a sense, Arc is unbundling a very small subset of Chrome users. A group of people who spend all day on their computers and see the pain points within the current paradigm of browsing (although may not be able to pin point what the pain necessarily is). A group of folks who want a premium browser when they see it, and that’s what Arc is. It’s a product that is more active in your web experience, and you definitely know you’re using Arc when you’re using Arc.
What Arc is doing for browsing the internet, Superhuman is doing for email.
But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here…how did David come across Goliath in the first place?
A brief history of the internet’s original layers
Our story starts in 1993, with Mosaic.
Quite simply, Mosaic set in motion the popularization of the internet. It was the very first visual portal people had into the web.
I say portal, because that’s what Mosaic defined the browser to be—the means to interacting with graphic websites. Mosaic unlocked the content layer of the internet. In other words, everything. And with the portal open, more and more websites were made for us to reach through and use.
To squish history, Netscape and Microsoft then came along, and off the back of Mosaics’ shoulders, stole the market.
As the Web gained steam, Netscape Navigator (by Marc Andreessen) became the most popular browser (80% of the market in 1996). But seeing the importance owning the control/base layer of the rapidly rising interent, Microsoft were fervently working on Internet Explorer 1.0. Before IE, Windows' stock browser was literally an icon labeled "The Internet."
By 1998, thanks to clever distribution tactics with Windows machines and leveraging the mighty power of defaults, Internet Explorer stole the crown with over 65% of the market.
The 90s were where Microsoft won the first battle of the browser. And only in 2003, where Internet Explorer was at its unchallenged zenith (95% of the market), did Firefox and Safari enter the ring.
The lack of competition allowed Firefox to quickly rise into second place with only around 5%, with Safari having the smallest at just 1%. Despite IE’s dominance, the browser battle was starting to become a war.
The early 2000s saw Safari and Firefox chipping away at IE. But at the same time, Google was building a powerful search business. And their Search product was the navigation layer of the internet.
Of course, to use Google Search, you’d still be operating on the control layer—the browser. A layer Google had no stake it…yet.
Make the cow fatter!
On October 23rd 2000, Google made their first advertising dollar.
Very quickly, Google started printing money. Search x Ad Words became their cash cow.
And what do you do when you have a cash cow? Well, you think of ways to make it even fatter, of course!
A good place to start brainstorming how is to ask, what is the cow eating to get so big? In the case of Ad Words, the answer is data. User data. Your data. Your search patterns.
So, when you start working the whiteboard to figure out how to feed more data inputs into the cow, you fairly quickly land on the obvious answer—just get more of it by capturing data beyond search.
How? By owning the layer that can track you wherever you go. Whatever you linger on. Whatever you hover over, and whatever you click.
So, in September 2004, rumors of Google building a web browser first appeared.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Today, there is no browser war. Google controls the battlefield, and the only way the other browsers make money is by charging the king to have Google Search as the default search engine in the url.
In other words…
Google got into the browser business because of search (their business model revolves around spying on us)
The other browsers keep the lights on because of search (e.g Google pay Apple ~$18 billion a year to have Google Search the default in Safari…eyes everywhere)
It all revolves around the classic notion of search, and the ad dollars behind it.
Bringing the OG layers together
All together, it looks like this…
Control/Base layer = the browser to contain the web
Navigation layer = to search the web
Content layer = websites / web apps that make the web, well, the web!
And this worked/works well. Very. Very. Well.
Everything we do moved to the internet and nothing was really questioned.
Transforming the internet, and merging the layers together to build a new category
LLMs (large language models) are underpinned by the invention of the breakthrough transformer.
And LLMs are what make AI as we know it today. Simply, they have changed the game. They are changing websites, and they are changing search. But, until now, they haven’t touched the control layer.
It’s now what Josh Miller (founder/CEO) and the Arc team sees as a huge opportunity for the browser—their browser.
They afford us the opportunity start over. To take a web browser, web pages, and a search engine and blur them together into a brand new category of software. A new type of browser that browsers for you.
We’ll get more into this, but I just want to be clear now, Arc is not some generative AI tool. They do use AI for quality of life features, but not right now as the core. And I don’t want you to think that that statement above means you can’t search for things the way you always have on Arc. You absolutely can.
But, I’ve definitely seen what they mean by merging all of those layers together. If you use Arc in it’s entirety, the browser feels like a companion across/through/within each of the traditional parts of the internet.
It’s very cool. And I think this is a fun moment in browser history. After more than a decade of total Chrome dominance, folks are looking elsewhere for more features, more privacy, and better UI. Vivaldi has some really clever features; SigmaOS is also betting on browsers as operating systems and is most similar to Arc; Brave has smart ideas about privacy; even Edge and Firefox are getting better fast.
But, Arc is the biggest swing of them all: an attempt to not just improve the browser but reinvent it entirely.
This is category creation 101—which we won’t get into the mechanics of today. But to go deeper on this topic, check out some of the posts by
. They are all excellent.2. Keeping tabs on growth
In a piece about a browser company, I’d be remise to not use the word “tab” somehow today. I feel like it makes sense for this section, so let’s look at some important growth tabs in Arc’s journey.
First…
Their go-to-market
Not for everyone
If Arc tried to appeal to the masses, they’d appeal to nobody. And I don’t just mean that from the classic go-to-market approach of niching down and then expanding later. No, Arc’s market will always in my view my mostly niche.
Arc is for the tech enthusiasts. For the people who enjoy customization and modularity. It’s for the folks who love tools like Notion and Miro for their Lego-like nature and aesthetic. It’s for people who geek out on organizing things, and those that get excited to play around with new, beautifully crafted, software.
For those people, and just those people, Arc wants to replace Chrome. And by being very intentional about who Arc is and is not for, they’ve built a cult-like fan base who plaster stickers on their computers, tout Arc hats, and enthusiastically tell people they don’t use Chrome anymore. That’s the power of making something for a very specific type of person.
As Josh Miller told my friend Jacob Jolibois in an interview:
Our goal is not to make Arc the best browser for every person.
And actually one of the things that motivates us is that the internet is so central in our lives across all parts of our life. And all of the people that use the internet are so different from each other.
There's so much diversity in people, the needs and moments of the day.
The thing that is most flawed about the web browser market in our opinion is that there's a lack of choice.
They're essentially a handful of web browsers.
They all effectively look exactly the same.
They all effectively do exactly the same things.
And they all effectively have the exact same philosophy about how we should use the internet.
If you were to apply that to anything else we spent hours and hours a day in as a human, you'd be like, are you, are you kidding me? Imagine if we all lived in homes that effectively were an identical layout, identical appearance, maybe change the little things on the wall, you know, it's dystopian.
The motivation for The Browser Company and Arc is not that everyone in the world will use Arc, it's that there's gotta be another way.
We are gonna try to build a way that feels right to us and we think a lot of people relate to that, but it's not for everyone. So I just wanna say that at the top, our goal is not to convince every single person that Arc is great for them.
I love that point about bringing optionality to a bland space. And that really is Arc’s big hook to appeal to this group of folks. It’s just so different from everything else.
And when you have something so different, the first task is figuring out which little community you can win over. In Arc’s case, the group most likely to try out a new browser that nobody had heard of was the tech nerds.
So, they adapted their product accordingly for them by adding powerful integrations to the tools they already used, like Notion, GitHub, Linear, and Figma. That’s something no other browser does. But, it did something important for the first users—it made them feel like the product was for them. And in doing so, they gave them a good reason to take a flyer on an unknown and unproven product.
A quick aside…
Not demographic. Not persona. Not just who. But a specific community.
Being big in the tech scene, I believe Arc reached this initial audience by tapping into Josh and Hursh Agrawal’s own personal networks.
But as I was writing the above about targeting a community, one thing I wanted to pull out here as a tactical lesson is this: when you’re figuring out the audience for your product and how to reach them, one approach is to identify in great detail a specific community.
Why? Because unlike personas, for example, who have similarities but likely no connections, people within communities are by definition very connected.
They know and follow the same opinion leaders. They value similar things. They have norms and talk in certain ways, and they enjoy talking about specific interests in great depth that others think are crazy. Communities have a shared and local meme culture, and they, again by definition, aggregate and hang out in the same places.
While you can get people from a persona signing up for your product, you can’t “break into” a persona.
But, when you break into a community and win some trust, you can very easily snowball your way through that community. AKA—communities have a ton of leverage.
For example, say you’re building an investing and savings product. Instead of saying “we want to reach young people who care about saving money in America” say, “we want to break into the r/SavingMoney forum with 27K members".
Now you can go study that community in detail. Identify who posts a lot, summarize key themes they talk about, and importantly, make a note of their language and norms.
Then, use all of that in your product marketing, and start by winning over that community by making the product seem hyper-specific for them.
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Back to the Arc specifics.
Waitlists, onboarding, and an aspirational release
Arc was in a private beta for quite a while. To download it, you had to join a waitlist, where only a portion of folks who put their emails down were granted access to the app.
And for each person who joined in roughly the first year—each person was given a 1:1 onboarding walkthrough over Zoom with someone on their membership team.
This was important for three reasons:
It allowed the Arc team to build direct relationships with their new members
It allowed the Arc team to give a hands-on demo, ensuring the new members got familiarized with the product enough to start playing around
It allowed Arc to pressure test their product, which for a browser, is essential. People have zero tolerance for slowness, poor security, or unreliability of the browser since it powers their entire web experience. Certain elements had to be perfect for release, otherwise they risked a buggy and cumbersome experience.
Superhuman did the same thing initially, and for software that works so differently to status quo stuff like Gmail and Chrome, showing people around is key to driving early “getting it” and retention.
While Arc had to roll out slowly, onboarding also played crucially into Arc’s early growth strategy, which was leaning into the scarcity/FOMO effect by (1) using waitlists, and (2) giving members invitation codes to share with others.
Because people had gone through private onboarding, they both had met someone from the Arc team (thus humanizing the product), and had a higher likelihood of experiencing the aha moment thanks to actually being shown around and having their questions answered. This meant those folks who were allowed in where far more likely to share those invite codes out and bring in friends from their communities.
By the time Arc launched publicly in May 2022, they had a nuclear audience eagerly waiting to give the product a try. And they made the announcement of Arc 1.0 with this emotive video designed to appeal perfectly to the audience of tech nerds, who have an appreciation for experimentation and risks.
Who—from this community—wouldn’t want to try a product that positions itself either as the beginning of everything, or the end of nothing? Clever.
Monetization: Free single player, to SaaS billed multiplayer?
Arc is currently free. And as the saying goes—if you don’t pay for the product, you’re the product.
That is particularly true in the browser space given all the spying for advertising purposes. But, Arc doesn’t track you. The experience, by default, is completely private. A big part of what they’re trying to do is get rid of ads as much as possible while you work on the on internet.
But Arc isn’t here for charity—they’re in the business if making money. Or as Josh says, “a lot of money”.
So that begs the question—which many people have taken to social media and Reddit—how will Arc start generating revenue?
A few possibilities:
They do what Superhuman does, and charge a flat fee to use a premium browser.
They do what all other browsers do, and charge Google to be the default search engine.
They go freemium, where core parts of Arc remain free, but power users upgrade for extended features.
They focus on teams and standard PLG, in that way, following in the steps of Notion and Figma where they try to monetize the B2B side eventually.
I don’t see #2 being possible given (1) Arc’s approach to privacy and anti-tracking stance, and (2) how Arc is trying to build an experience that bypasses the Google Search page entirely.
The most likely scenario, given the below statement by Josh, is a PLG hybrid of 3 and 4 above.
We think the future of the internet is multi-player and full of people at the browser layer.
The question is—will companies care about a team-based browser? Browsing the web is a very personal thing, and I’m not sure I see the case for companies seeing Arc solve a company-wide problem. But they’re investing in team-based browsing, and if anyone can create the Slack of browsing—Arc will.
Personally, I think they should lean into #1—just have a simple pay-to-play model, with the option of having a company buy a discounted set of licenses. Start with a 30 day free trail to allow folks to test it and discover the power of Arc, as well as invest in customizing their experience (IKEA effect).
It shouldn’t be cheap—around $30 a month. This, for the niche they’re in, could be meaningful revenue.
For now, it seems the strategy around pricing is to just figure it out later. Get the users in, let them built habits, tell their friends, and set Arc as the default, then layer in pricing.
Personally I advice having a monetization strategy from the beginning, and being clear about it with users. Otherwise people start to wonder and get suspicious that it’s too good to be true.
Horses and Cars: Not what users know they want
Arc is a great example of the “faster horse vs. a car” conundrum, where if you went and asked the market what they wanted out of a browser, hardly anyone would have said anything that resembles what Arc is today.
In an interview with VentureBeat, Josh explained...
You’ve got to build what feels right to you and your team, and have your creation be an authentic expression of you. Not what the market wants, not what a blog post says is good, and not what some fancy person told you to do, but what feels right to you
It’s true, people don’t always know what they want, and intuition is important. But generally, even when doing that, you have to build something people will use and, eventually, something people will pay for.
The first part of Arc therefore is the table stakes stuff of a browser. Speed. Reliability. Privacy. Security.
That must be there first and foremost—and it is. But it’s all the other stuff that makes Arc, well, more an integrated operating system for the internet that a typical browser.
Now I don’t want to talk too much about features here…I’m not trying to pitch the product. But I will skim very quickly through some of the things they are doing different just for context. As you’ll see, an underlying ethos of Arc’s here is to look at the status quo of a browser and simply say, fuck that, we can do it very different.
As I’ve used Arc more and more, I’ve come to see so much of their product is just quality of life, design-led, features that make browsing the Web so much easier and more fun. They are very clearly not afraid to experiment with fuck that features.
Tabs and bookmarks
😴 Conventional: Tabs are arranged linearly. Tabs and bookmarks are separate things.
😯 Arc: They merge tabs and bookmarks together, and organize it horizontally, with the option to hide the entire sidebar.
Split screens
😴 Conventional: To work off two tabs, you need to create multiple windows and put them next to each other.
😯 Arc: Within the same window, you can split up to 4 websites side by side.
Keyboard shortcuts
😴 Conventional: Traditionally you click and point around a browser to get what you want.
😯 Arc: They have keyboard shortcuts for almost everything.
Spaces
😴 Conventional: You have multiple profiles (i.e work and personal) and open new widows to interact with each.
😯 Arc: Within the same window, you can swipe between multiple spaces without having to click around and find the right window.
Interoperable Notes
This is a new feature to the browser, and the idea is an integrated notepad that follows you around the web.
Easels
Also novel to the browser, Easels is an internet-native canvas that allows you to collect and organize the web in a neat way. Say you’re planning a trip with friends. Instead of sending people a bunch of links, you can just take screenshots of parts of a site and add them into a Miro-like canvas. Each screenshot is then linked to the live version of the site automatically, making it like an interactive presentation of a real-time view of many websites at once. Every Easel is shareable and collaborative, too. Watch how it works here.
And with Easels, Arc are leaning into the product acquisition loop known as billboarding. Because you can share an Easel with anyone, and the Easel is cross-browser compatible, whenever someone opens an Easel link in Chrome there is a clear CTA to get that person to try Arc. When you have UGC on your platform, make sure you’re branding it for free marketing.
Boosts
Also unique to Arc, are Boosts which allow you to customize how you see a site. For any website, you can change the color, style, and even completely strip away elements. Like this Boost a user made of GitHub, turning it into a Windows ‘98 theme.
I don’t care for this feature, but being able to customize the Arc browser is great for growth for two main reasons. First, it brings in play—and fun through gamification that gets people making the browser their own increases the odds that a person will stick around (again, IKEA effect). Second, it encourages more User Generated Content. If I design my own version of Substack (say, making it pink and taking away everything besides just the main feed), I’d probably share it with you guys. This creates free brand awareness and word of mouth growth.
I can definitely see a play here where Arc launch a Boost marketplace, where power users can give away—or sell—their customizations to the community. A classic template play.
Those features show us that Arc is full of surprises and unexpected delighters. While Chrome remains Chrome with nothing new, Arc’s users get new features that improve the browsing experience every Friday. Some of them land, some of them don’t.
And this is a great transition into how Arc thinks about building product.
The product ethos: Exploring with a machete
There are 4 things I’d like to pull the thread on when it comes to how Arc builds product:
Their prototyping philosophy
Their release note style
Maximizing for magic moments, and balancing data and intuition to optimize “user feelings”
Their membership and storytelling teams
Let’s unpack each.
Prototype it in 48 hours or less
I really really recommend watching this short (5m) video. It’s not only done incredibly well style wise (we’ll talk more about their brand and story telling soon), but there’s a lot to aspire to there in terms of how to build things—particularly, their approach to prototyping.
“We don’t know until we try it” — this is great.
Arc’s entire approach to building product is rooted in everybody being empowered to share ideas, and everyone being empowered to make them and give demos.
As that video highlights, and as Josh touched on in Lenny’s Podcast, Arc don’t have any formal PRD process, not do they have any formal PMs on their team. It’s all much scrappier by design. Rather, Josh’s approach to product is to hire people that just love to make thing things, and by doing so, that they will do whatever is necessary to get that thing made. Which includes wearing the PM hat sometimes.
So instead of writing PRD docs and plans and often doing traditional discovery work, the Arc team operate a lot conversationally in Slack.
They just Slack ideas in a channel, make pitches/cases for what they are thinking and why, and then have a day or two to put together something very rough that shows what the idea is.
Most ideas that get prototyped internally don’t see the light, but of the ones that do, Arc don’t approach them as AB tests in that sense. They just release and monitor. This is assumption testing which I love—it’s less “scientific” but much faster and less effort.
As Josh says:
We're a very prototype and experiment-driven culture. So what we like to do is if we feel someone has an inkling, we don't spend a lot of time talking about it. We just say, cool, go build it and we'll play with it.
Do the first version in 48 hours,
make it ugly,
try to get something out there,
and we'll let the thing in our hands, do the talking.
And that extends beyond just that first stage of the product development process, which drives home an important point: product development is subtractive as much as it is additive. You must be comfortable unshipping things.
I think a good 50% of things in the product today won't be there in five years because we think removing from the product and sculpting down and refining is just as important as adding to it.
Of course this is not for everyone. But it’s a cool and scrappy way to generate ideas, empower people to contribute, and push a culture of assumption testing vs AB testing
The outcome of it is Arc are focusing on creating numerous prototypes instead of overthinking charts, user journeys, and behavioral diagrams, and the impact is that it enables longer and more precise testing of the user experience in a real-world environment.
To be clear, this doesn't mean that pre-prototype stages are wrong or that they should be avoided, rather, it's a reminder of the importance of allocating resources equally and not lingering too much in project phases that can't provide the best possible feedback on the product itself.
Over-communicate in release notes
With this rapid approach to building and rolling things out, Arc ship meaningful features every Friday. That’s a great cadence.
And when you’re building with such velocity, letting users know about it becomes a secret weapon.
Now, nothing makes a product feel dead like reading bland “bug fixes and performance improvements”. If you want users to care about your product, you need to let them know how it’s evolving and getting better for them. We saw this with beehiiv, and how their build in public approach generates a lot of buzz and anticipation.
Arc does that every week in their Release Notes. It’s not some text-only changelog, but a highly visual doc (using their own Easel feature) that boasts a great design. It tells a story in each release, it’s actually exciting to scroll through (remember who their audience is) and it goes beyond just product updates, but includes other new stuff from the Arc-verse, like newsletter components, videos from the team, and other highlights of the week that aren’t related to the update. It’s like a press release each week that I look forward to.
Of course, these updates are easier to write if you frequently ship interesting new features. But even if you don’t, it’s worth considering your customer communication strategy for new features. If a desktop browser can pull this off, any product can.
Take a look at an example announcement.
Maximize magic moments, optimize for feelings
What’s clear across the Arc product is their emphasis on seemingly small details that have hard to measure implications.
These are magic moments, and they are peppered everywhere across Arc.
Magic moments are not the same as aha moments—which as we know, mean a user finds the core product value and then activates.
Rather, they're experiences that so wildly exceed your expectations of what a product should provide that you feel surprised and delighted by them.
In Arc, these little details are variable too. Sometimes you just experience it once. But they have a compounding effect, where you just feel like Arc is special.
This may sound romantic, so here are four tangible examples of the things I’ve seen.
They have multi-sensory onboarding. I’ve never seen onboarding done the way they do it. From the moment the app was installed, Arc made me feel something. The screen outside of the Arc window faded into black, they used an illuminating sphere visual, and a sound effect that made be feel like I was one of the first people using the iPhone. It grabbed my attention for sure.
Animations. Across the browser you’ll find little animations. I can’t even recall when and where, but that’s the point. They are subtle but just add a nice polish to everything. Ooh, I just saw one…little notes very subtly come out of the Spotify logo when playing music! Nice touch.
Membership cards. Literally nobody needs this, but someone was like “Let’s give each user a membership card to Arc!” It does nothing, but you get it at the end of onboarding and it makes you feel like you’re part of something. Mine says “Methodical Guest” because I haven’t yet set Arc as my default browser—I’m still “pragmatically exploring” as I think they’d say.
Lastly, how Arc use AI to create magic moments—all without needing to use the word AI and the sparkle emoji. Unlike many products who over-hype their AI, Arc use AI in small little ways, ways that Josh says, “make your day on the internet a bit easier, and a bit faster.” These are quality of life things that just happen, and when you find them, are little delights. For example:
Tidy Tab Title - if you've ever pinned a tab, you might have experienced an instance where the title of the tab is too lengthy to be of any help. With Tidy Tab Title, Arc browser uses AI to rename the tab to make it easier to locate.
Tidy Downloads - this is similar to Tidy Tab Title, only AI will be used to rename downloaded files to an actual descriptive title.
Five-Second Previews - If you hover over any link in Arc browser and press the Shift key, Arc browser will fetch a brief summary and preview of the link in question.
Ask On Page - When you use the Find feature (Command+F) to locate a word or phrase on a website, if your keyword (or phrase) isn't found, Arc will lean into AI to find an answer for you. This makes querying page content super easy and useful.
Browse For Me - This is a feature I see expanding quite a bit. It’s sort of like Arc’s version of Google’s “I’m feeling lucky”. Simply, instead of taking you to a page, Arc will create a custom website for you based on a bunch of content. Great for information searches.
And all these magic moments boil down to a big philosophy of Arc’s…
Optimizing for feelings.
What are you talking about, Jimmy!
Valid reaction. Like most things, Arc goes against the grain and puts craftsmanship and product sense at the front and center, with data giving me the vibe of a secondary input. That’s why they prototype and ship so fast—to see if the intution is right.
This is a big value of theirs, so let me not put words in their mouth. Here is how they describe what they mean. A concept at the least worth entertaining.
Why are we here?
It’s a question we often ask. And while it’s not our style to dwell on the past, there’s simply no way around the fact that we’re pretty fed up with a certain philosophical framework in Silicon Valley.
It has many names: the growth mindset. OKRs. KPIs. Even Minimalism — the predominant aesthetic of our era. But at its core, it all comes down to one thing: the relentless optimization of everything in our world.
We believe this mindset has led us to a very specific place: one of efficiency, productivity, and profit… but not a place of humanity. Soul. Or feeling.
And when we take a step back, we think feeling is kind of what matters most in this world.
Humor us for a moment and picture your favorite neighborhood restaurant. Ours is a corner spot in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It has overflowing natural light, handmade textile seat cushions, a caramel wood grain throughout, and colorful ornaments dangling from the ceilings. Can you picture yours? Do you feel the warmth and spirit of the place?
A Silicon Valley optimizer might say, “Well, they don’t brew their coffee at exactly 200 degrees. And the seats look a little ratty. And the ceiling ornaments don’t serve any function.”
But we think that’s exactly the point. That these little, hand-crafted touches give our environment its humanity and spirit. In their absence, we’re left with something universal but utterly sterile — a space that may “perfectly” serve our functional needs, but leave our emotional needs in the lurch.
So, by focusing on what they want a user to feel after using a specific feature, Arc are on a mission to try bring humanity back into the software we use every day.
Because, when our software optimizes for numbers alone— no matter the number— it appears doomed to lack a certain spirit, and a certain humanity.
I really really like this concept. And while it may seem idealistic at best or naive at worst (as they rightfully acknowledge), the truth is that we already know how to do this to some degree. Here is what Arc do to help measure feelings:
They index heavily on their own sense. “We optimize for feelings. Our own, and of those we serve. Because our most treasured, human creations are far from neutral… In fact, they are full of opinions, taste, and subjectivity! That is what gives them their spirit and vitality, so own what moves you and let it run wild in your software!”
They look beyond the screen. “David Adjaye drew from Yoruban sculpture, and Steve Jobs from Zen Buddhism and calligraphy. We could continue this list forever, but that’s not the point. The point is to look outside the confines of our industry toward what makes us feel in the world around us, and ask ourselves why. Borrow. Remix. Let it shape your work!”
They cede control to the individual, and allow people to customize their own space. “In so much modern software today, you’re placed in a drab gray cubicle — anonymized and aggregated until you’re just a daily active user. For minimalism. For simplicity. For scale! But if our hope is to create software with feeling, it means inviting people in to craft it for themselves — to mold it to the contours of their unique lives and taste.”
The takeaway here, please, is not to throw away the value of data. We should look at the data and use it to make decisions and as a measuring stick to keep us honest. Arc also does. But rather, that data alone misses nuance. It’s why we say that data will tell you what is happening, but seldom why. To understand why, you need speak to people.
This rifts on a similar idea. Use data, but also think about the end feeling your trying to invoke. Do you want people to feel accomplished and smart? Do you want them feeling relaxed? Do you want them to feel excited?
When you’re building a feature, just consider (which hardly anyone ever does) what you want people to feel when they use it. Just that alone may lead you to add some magic moments to stir that feeling.
Put user experience, design, and “What if"?” above all else
Related to magic moments and optimizing for feelings by “giving software soul”, Arc is a product all about craftsmanship.
The user experience is everything. The finishing touches are polished, and the things being tested are still beautifully left rough around the edges.
Last week we spoke about raising the bar, and asking whether your standards are high enough (and how to raise your teams). Arc is a great example of a team who prioritize design and keep asking “What if…” in their product.
This is what keeps pushing them to build new features nobody knew they needed.
Their membership team—holistically owning the entire user relationship
Instinctively, you know to some degree what this is because the term “membership” is clear. But, this isn’t a typical org within a startup.
Often companies have various teams related to the customer—from user research, customer success, to product advocates.
Each of those teams typically focus on different points within the user journey.
At Arc, they see the user relationship as holistic. The same people on their own team should get to know the users from the beginning—the first touchpoint—through to the end of their story with Arc. How this single team engage with members evolves overtime from onboarding, to support, and feedback/user sessions.
This, as Josh Miller says on Lenny’s Podcast, is how Arc build deep and ongoing relationships with their members (they don’t use the term user ever).
And ongoing relationships with your users is how you build loyalty, lean into community-led product development, and generally have a very customer-centric culture.
How does Arc do it?
They use Zendesk. Simply, Zendesk is best-in-class software that powers Arc’s membership team, as well as thousands of other startups and bigger companies. I used Zendesk at my startup everyday since I did support by myself (they made it easy and manageable), and my current team also do for customer service, engagement, and sales. We just started using their AI tools, and it’s incredibly helpful.
I know a ton of you are founders at early stage companies, which is why I’ve partnered with Zendesk to bring you 6 months free of Zendesk. All you have to do is go here, submit your info, and join their startup program.
It’s never too early to start building a membership team like Arc.
Branding, product-marketing, and storytelling
When I think about Arc, I surprisingly don’t just think about the product. I think about their brand which is just as meticulously thought about and crafted as their product.
Here are the 4 big things that stand out to me.
They are personal, and communicate to people like people, not a company
They weave the community into their brand
They humanize their software—features come from someone, not Arc
They emphasize storytelling, and have a standalone story team
Let’s zoom into each.
Communicate like influencers, not corporations
Social media has proven repeatedly that people care about people, not brands. That’s why influencer marketing exists.
If you want to build a strong connection with your audience, you need to show your face, personality, and avoid corporate talk.
That’s why Arc’s videos are often vlogs, in a typical YouTube creator style. They showcase things like board meetings and offsites, as well as just run of the mill behind the scenes of startup life. People like that, it makes them feel part of a journey.
Josh also often records Q&A sessions, where he’s surprisingly candid and vulnerable about what’s going on, even about sensitive topics like their struggle to settle on a vision for Arc on mobile.
This approach to content gives you something exclusive, letting you get a peak behind the curtain around how they come up with new features and just generally do things. Again, remember who Arc is building for—this resonates with that community.
But very importantly, it also personalizes the people behind Arc. In their content you get to meet people (like Patrick from the earlier video) and learn about their backgrounds and how they do their job. You can’t help but start rooting for these people—a powerful storytelling technique.
The style they use gives an amateurish vibe, and it plays a significant role through which Arc communicates on a friendly, personalized, and human level. Again, just watch this video incase you didn’t.
Look how it’s playful and honest. Our new friend Patrick speaks from home via webcam, giving the impression that he's personally addressing each one of us. This creates a much stronger connection with us vs something overly polished.
And while it gives the vibe of amateurish on purpose, this content is clearly very thoughtfully planned and edited. To me at least, it evokes an emotional response thanks to clever audio design, the webcam vibe, and the showing of Slack channel messages (making me feel a bit like an insider).
Of course this doesn’t work for every company and I’m not saying go blow up your content strategy, but I do think it’s something to noodle on at the very least: how can you humanize your messaging and be more like an influencer vs a corporation. Because at the end of the day, even the people who make the buying decisions at enterprises are just that, people. And people like stories with characters they can root for.
Keeping tabs on the community
Arc is following the relationship trope in their communication.
The we're in this together narrative keeps coming back in the messaging in a very conversational and empathetic tone:
Here are a few recent fixes that we found and solved, thanks to you!
Please keep sending us feedback as we make Arc the best possible browser, for you!
We're hoping to build something new and different — and we can only do that with you.
And for Arc, co-designing is much more than just a buzzword. Their members are actively involved in shaping new features. For example, Josh often goes to Twitter to ask folks how they’d design a feature.
Co-designing—or community-led product development—goes beyond surveys and interviews. It’s about tapping into your users across channels, engaging with them, and communicating their contributions back to them. If someone suggests something that you—call them out in your release note or social announcement. It’s about appreciating your customers, saying thank you, and making them feel seen. And your content is a great way to do that.
Just look at how active Josh is at engaging with people on social media (regardless of following size). These little moments of community engagement add up.
Give a feature a face and a name
Most companies tell you what’s new, but what Arc does that I love, is they tell you who made it. Just check out this release note:
Since November, Adam, Karla, Kasper, Sika, and Nate have been hard at work building the fastest way to search, and the cleanest way to browse.
Seb's been reducing CPU and memory usage by freezing background tabs that start using a significant amount of CPU — with over 200,000 now frozen every day! [...] Relentless as ever, Andrzej got rid of a slight flickering that happened when switching tabs. [...] Justin made drag-resizing your browser windows smoother than butter.
Instead of just“Here are Split Views”, Arc will tell you that Kristina made Split Views for you.
Features are given names and faces, and anyone reading can easily start following the designers and engineers behind Arc. You start learning how fixed that annoying bug, or who’s been spending the past week making Arc faster for you.
This is so cool and one of my favorite parts of Arc’s product marketing. Again, it’s all about relationship building and humanizing the product.
In a B2B setting, customers might know the faces of the CEO, or perhaps sales and customer service folks. But PMs, designers, developers, are usually in the shadows.
Arc let’s the people who did the making stand up and reveal what they made.
It makes me appreciate their work more. My connection with the product becomes more personal.
And it's really that simple. Praise publicly. Make things more human. Next time, instead of sending a poorly “personalized” email from the CEO, give the mic to someone on the team who was involved and would proudly describe what they did.
You might be picking up on a theme: Arc are incredible story tellers.
This is no accident…
The storytelling team
Our brains process stories differently than straight facts. It's why positioning and messaging is best done through stories—an employee's, a customer's, the product's, or the company's—and product marketing must be good at telling stories that bring it all together.
Arc knows that, which is why they have another unique team: a team of storytellers.
If the membership team takes people from the moment they touch our product for the first time to the last, the storytelling team is about people we don't have the privilege of serving yet. They don't use Arc, they don't know what Arc is. That could be an investor, that could be members of the press, or could be just people out in the world. It’s a mix of marketing and one-day sales. But at the end of the day, it's telling our story to people. It's telling our story to people and thinking about that holistically in full stack.
So that's how we think about teams—we start with first principles by asking, what are we really trying to do here? And what is the most direct way to manifest that, even if it's not how other people do it? In practice, one of the benefits of that is I do think it leads to certain pieces of content.
It's as simple as the intentionality of what the team is. What are their incentives? What are the disciplines on the team? Even hiring a video editor, for example, as a small company.
— Josh Miller, via Lenny’s Podcast
Like with many of the things we’ve seen with Arc—this isn’t suited for everyone. But, whether you’re writing a product strategy, coming up with a feature release, or working on a new marketing campaign, ask yourself: how can I tell a better story here?
Ciao 👋
And that’s a wrap folks on The Browser Company of New York, and Arc!
If you’re curious, you should give Arc a try! You can download it (Mac only) below. I’d love to know what you think.
Otherwise, thanks for reading! If you learned anything new today, you can sign up here for more issues. Also consider sharing this post, or perhaps becoming a paying subscriber to support my work.
Until next time.
— Jaryd ✌️
p.s If you’re a founder, don’t forget to check out Zendesk’s 6 month free offer.
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Super amazing read Jaryd, appreciate this one!
Great article, thanks a lot!