When Your Product Is What It Is

The company behind Arc is now building a second, much simpler browser

The Arc browser isn’t dead — it’s just finished.

The Verge

Everyone knows that there's a world in startup land that exists between complete success and utter failure. It's a really annoying place because in the state of complete success or in the throes of utter failure it's obvious what you should do: either keep going or shut down, respectively. But the in-between world presents a path where you keep going but it's never going to really work.

I found myself thinking about this with regard to the latest news out of The Browser Company. Their first product, Arc, is by many measures a success. In my own life, it's undoubtedly my most-used app now, as it's the browser I use on my Mac (and increasingly, my iPhone) on a regular basis. But to hear founder Josh Miller talk about it, they're clearly in that middle state. Arc is what it is. And what it is is great for users like me, but it's never going to be great enough to convert the masses, it seems. As David Pierce sums up the situation:

A strange thing has happened over the last couple of years, Miller says. Arc has grown fast — users quadrupled this year alone — but it has also become clear that Arc is never going to be a truly mainstream product. It’s too complicated, too different, too hard to get into. “It’s just too much novelty and change,” Miller says, “to get to the number of people we really want to get to.” User interviews and data have convinced the company that this is a power-user tool, and always will be.

On the other hand, the people who use Arc tend to love Arc. They love the sidebar, they love having spaces and profiles, they love all the customization options. Generally speaking, those users have also settled into Arc — Miller says they don’t want new features as much as they just want their browser to be faster, smoother, more secure. And fair enough!

So The Browser Company faced a situation many companies encounter: they had a well-liked product that was never going to be a game-changer. Rather than try to build the next thing into the current thing, and risk both alienating the people who like it and never reaching the people who don’t, the company decided to just build something new.

I hope that whatever path they go down for this new product – something, something AI, obviously – works out for them. Mainly because I want Arc to stick around and it won't unless the company behind it can find success – true business success. But I also hope whatever they do ties into Arc in some way because without that "synergy" – shudder – Arc at some point will either be neglected or shut down or spun out or sold off. That's just the way of things. So as an Arc user, we need this new product to feed into (or off of) Arc in some way or it's just hard to see how Arc lasts.

I have no doubt of their intentions with Arc. And while Pierce views Miller's video explanation quite cynically, watching it, I do not doubt that The Browser Company wants to keep Arc going right now. I'm just not sure they'll actually be able to in either the failure or success state of the company now that the focus has shifted.

Arc is now what it is. And that's great. But it's also not enough, clearly.