One-click automations for your repetitive tasks

✋Hi Product Hunt,

I'm Artem, co-founder and CTO of Bardeen.

Wanted to share a bit of history of why we thought something like Bardeen should exist and how it came to be:). While in my previous job, there always was a nagging feeling that someone would write a not-so-sophisticated Python script that would replace me one day. I was running a pretty sizable organization at a time. Most of my day was spent juggling many projects and trying to stay on top of everything going on in a dynamic and fast-growing startup. I started moonlighting on mini-me - a slack bot that would literally pretend to be me. It would take away most mind-numbing and repetitive tasks that anyone who manages anything is painfully familiar with.

A while after, I talked to Pascal. I was really surprised (to say the least) when he literally pitched me my own idea(!) to me without me saying anything about it 🤯 fast forward a few months, and a bunch of us quit our jobs, and we're working on Bardeen with some old friends.

All of us were really fascinated by the idea of heavily leveraging NLP and were 100% certain that the world needs the "terminal for the web, but better." It took us a few months to get there, but after that, the initial architecture started to take a distinct shape. We start with a DSL that's specifically designed to be as close to the human language as possible. At the same time, its structure should allow for an 'easy' (well, for some definition of the word anyway 😅) translation from the natural language. Next, we came up with an interpreter to transform our DSL into executable workflows as well as a data layer (a graph database in our case) that allows us to cache and search the data that we receive from applications. Everything is running locally in the browser, so we never need to have access or deal with your personal data 😎.

Once the core engine was in place, we spent quite a bit of time figuring out what we wanted the product to look like and what a user experience we wanted to provide. This was quite a bit more challenging for us than developing the engine because we definitely shipped more than a few infrastructure software pieces in the past, but never something that was directly facing the end-users 😱. Luckily we have a designer on the team who is an absolute 🦄. It took us a while, but we ended up with what we are releasing today 🎉!

Next, we are going to focus on ironing the kinks out of the existing product, adding more integrations, making the UI even better (right now, we're at about 30% of our 🦄 designer's vision 🤓), heavily investing into the `.ai` part of Bardeen. That includes improving the matching and prediction engine to make more accurate playbook and auto book suggestions, but more interestingly, it will be able to synthesize playbooks uniquely suited to a particular user on the fly. We believe that it's going to be a game-changer and will enable automation for the 97% of the internet users who are doing everything manually today.

Please let us know if you have any questions. We welcome any and all feedback! We will be hanging out here, and you can always find us in our Slack https://bardeen.ai/slack.

Thanks to the thousands of users who helped us to get here, and a warm welcome to the many more to come 🚀!

Cheers, Artem.

👋 Hello ProductHunt! 🚀

Pascal here, co-founder and CEO of Bardeen.

We’re suuuuuper excited to be sharing Bardeen with you all today. This is the result of almost 2 years of hard work from our incredible team. I’ll be posting a bit more about our journey so far below here in another post - if you’re curious 🙂

For now, let’s jump into what you can do with Bardeen:

Bardeen allows you to automate workflows that were not possible to automate before. You can build custom workflows with multiple web apps and even content from the currently opened web page and other contextual data.

For example, here are the playbooks I used to prepare for this launch: (shared them using the Bardeen sharing tool so you can use them too!)

- Copy top Product Hunt posts to a Google sheet (link: https://bardeen.ai/s/eHAcbW4HKU9T) - Create Jira issues with a shortcut and from an email thread (link: https://bardeen.ai/s/HFNQcHgUaDl3) - Automatically join the next meeting and open meeting notes just before the meeting (link: https://bardeen.ai/s/YVAVUw0ECDEQ) - Every day at a given time, send the top ten products to a Slack channel (link: https://bardeen.ai/s/fAopEgxiJyZi) - Send outreach email to a Github user from the currently open profile (link: https://bardeen.ai/s/dWQoLg0tTnRW)

Our current users use Bardeen for use-cases like sales or hiring outreach and list-building, market research for their investment portfolios as well as various project-management tasks like logging bugs from emails, etc. Others have come up with cool stuff like curating their movie library in Notion or joining meetings and opening their notes one minute before the meetings start or even curating their list of plants they want to buy for their garden and comparing and tracking prices across different shops 🌱 You can automate almost anything. If something is boring and repetitive it should be better done automatically 🤓

Bardeen lives entirely in your browser: That means all your data and communication is directly between your browser and the apps you’re using. The only exception for that is some authentication calls which we need to route through our proxy not to give everyone our oAuth keys and some high-level analytics on what commands you run to help us improve the product over time. We’ve built Bardeen in a way that prioritizes your privacy and security in every way possible while maintaining a seamless automation experience.

I hope you enjoy our platform and save yourself a lot of time in the process. Our mission is to help everyone win back at least an hour per day from doing manual work. 🤓🚀

We’ve made Bardeen free to use for a while and when you sign up from Product Hunt, you will get 3 months free of our premium features down the line. While we do plan on adding paid “premium” features soon, the most core functionality will always be free forever to help us bring automation to everyone. All we ask for in return is your honest feedback. It’s like gold to us in the early stages.

Now, the best way to get started is to run one of the playbooks from the catalog. Try it! It takes just a few minutes to get started and will save you a lot of time.

Our entire team will be hanging out here and in our Slack community (https://bardeen.ai/community) all day today. Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or if you need any help getting started.

Enjoy! 🦄🚀 Pascal and the Bardeen team

P.S. Big thanks to @kevin for hunting us and helping spread the word.

So, as mentioned, here’s a short story about our journey so far: 🚀

When @artem_harutyunyan and I started Bardeen, we were trying to solve our own problems when running engineering orgs and product teams: We found ourselves with countless tabs opened and constantly clicking around to pull up basic information, and copy-paste data between apps. We realized how much time we’re wasting doing that type of boring and repetitive work - so we set out to solve it:

Our first iterations of the product (we called it “mini-me” or “me.ai” back then!) were inspired by the command-line we were used to working with for our engineering workflows, where if there’s anything I need to do many times, we just build scripts for our terminal and run them with simple shortcuts or fully automated (via cron jobs or so). We wanted to bring the same concepts to our “non-engineering” tasks.

It was a very cool, geeky UX - you literally had a “terminal” window to control your web apps and build “Playbooks” to automate your work. When we put it in front of early users we received mixed feedback - some (mostly engineers) loved it, since they knew how to use the terminal; but others just didn’t get it... (if you’re feeling adventurous, you can still get back to the old command line by pressing the “Option + O” shortcut and then clicking on “Compose” 🤓)

So over the last 2 years, we iterated in close collaboration with our early users (Huge thank you for your time, patience, and ideas to everyone who was brave enough to give us a chance in the early days!) and removed most of the “too complex” and “too geeky” terminal-inspired features and look-and-feel, to provide a simple, seamless UX that enables *everyone* to discover, customize and build their own automations.

We currently are a team of 11 working fully distributed from the US, Germany, Greece, Armenia, Switzerland, and Russia. It’s been an amazing journey and I am super proud and grateful for our team and the work we’ve done over the last two years.

There’s a lot more to do: We’re continuing to expand our integrations to all the tools and services you use. Our goal is to bring automation to *everyone* and in order to achieve that, we have built some very powerful abstractions and tools which will ultimately make automation entirely frictionless: think about a smart elf 🧝‍♀️ sitting on your shoulder, watching you while you waste your time with tons of tabs and copy-pasting and then it (builds and) suggests you the right automation in the right context: Magic 🦄🪄

Hey folks,

Renat here! I am the voice behind that video and chief user feedback hunter.

I’d like to answer a few common questions that I’ve heard from talking to 200+ early adopters in person. It should give you context on how you can get the most out of Bardeen.

How is it different from other automation tools? With Bardeen, you can take a part in your automation. This is known as “human-in-the-loop” and was previously accessible only to large companies.

In traditional automation apps like Zapier or Integromat, you set up a process with a trigger. And it runs exactly the same way every time.

But if your process is not fully automatable with a fixed process or a trigger, you are stuck with doing things entirely manually. And 60% of our time on the computer is spent on manual tasks!

In addition to what traditional automation apps can do, Bardeen allows you to:

🚀 Trigger automations manually Ex: launch the next meeting ✍️ Input data to be used in the automation Ex: create a to-do 📃 Use the content on the currently opened page Ex: save LinkedIn profile to CRM

Can you create triggered automations? An autobook is what we call a triggered automatically. There are two types of triggers: when something happens and scheduled.

The first trigger type activates when something happens in your web apps. For example, when a new meeting is added to your Google Calendar.

The second trigger type runs on a schedule periodically. You can set a time, frequency, and max number of runs. For example, every Monday send a call agenda for the upcoming week in Slack.

If no trigger is set, you can run the playbook manually by clicking on it.

Bardeen is a Chrome extension. What happens to my autobooks if my computer is turned off? When your computer is off, your Autobook will not run until the computer is back online.

When the computer is online again, Bardeen will check if any of your autobooks were triggered. If they were, Bardeen will execute them right away.

Later this year, we will launch cloud automations, which will run regardless of whether or not your computer is online.

- My favorite playbooks - Waiting in the meeting room reminder - Join meeting automatically - Find meeting participants on social media

— I am thrilled to finally go live on Product Hunt after almost two years of iterations and grind. Automation software is really freaking tough to build. Hats down to our engineers for developing a rocket engine equivalent with a tiny team.

As the only non-technical guy on the team, I’d be happy to answer any questions below or in our Slack community. I promise they won’t include words like “dangling promises” and RPC.

Cheers!

👋Hello Folks 👋

Manvel is here, responsible for everything Scraper related at Bardeen.

In 2012 I was working for a matchmaking company as a developer at the online marketing department, affiliate tracking pixels installation was part of my regular job, I had to manually test each single of them going through 4-5 pages sign-up form with a bunch of validation fields. Sometimes that would occupy 40-50% of my time and was quite a frustrating task. That was the time when I decided to create CBA - a prototype extension that helped me optimize the task to only take less than 3% of my time and generate automated reports.

1 year ago I joined Bardeen💻 as I was amazed with what the team has achieved so far and I felt like it's a missing link in unblocking basically every single person in creating sophisticated automation without needing to know how to code.

Please Checkout https://www.bardeen.ai/scraper and give it a try and let me know what you think about the tool and how you want to see it evolve.

I am very much looking forward to learning more about your workflows and making it possible to automate with a single click🚀

We have a huge roadmap on what is coming next for Bardeen, so please let us know what you want to automate and what you would like to see in Bardeen next.

And don’t forget joining our community channel in slack https://bardeen.ai/community

Cheers🍻 Manvel

Huge congrats to the team!

Bardeen really removes a ton of friction from countless workflows and helps save time! Big fan!🚀

Just wondering what you'll be shipping next and where you see this going?

Hello everyone 👋

Ivan here, a Nocode expert and PM who fell in love with Bardeen. Don't work there, just an early user who wants to share its experience.

Trust me on this...Bardeen is the #nocode tool of the year 💥.

It has everything to become the next Zapi*r.

Bardeen integrates with the most common productivity tools on the market (Sheets, Notion, Drive, Slack, Calendar, Clickup) to generate automations between them and save you from 1 to 60 minutes doing it manually.

Once you get a hang of it, you'll discover amazing use cases for your work, your company and even your family!

Some things I've done with Bardeen:

👉 As soon as I learned Bardeen I discovered and shared +10 use cases to optimize my company's processes

👉 I used Bardeen to build my side-project Soonicorns.club, it allowed me scrape data seamlessly from Crunchbase when no other scrapping platforms worked.

👉 I've used automations to: - Send a slack message before my team's daily begins, - Get updates on slack whenever a Product Roadmap item is added, - and the most useful of all... Open my next meeting on Calendar automatically when it starts in 1 min. (you can't imagine how valuable this is for disperse people 😂🤯)

I'm so happy for their launch, they are such a talented team that has made decades of progress in 1 year and with only 12 people... That's something you don't see often.

Will keep using it on a daily basis, now it's time for everyone reading this to try it out!🏃‍♂️