Brave Browser - Product Breakdown
To hone my product sense, I’ve started to use at least 1 new trending product every week and try to analyse it in terms of its utility, usability, core value proposition, and monetisation strategies.
Product of the week: Brave Browser
The core value proposition:
A faster and more secure web browser. Last month more than 1 million users migrated from Google Chrome to Brave. With over 25 million Monthly Active Users as of Feb 2021.
Brave claims to be 3x faster and more secure than Google Chrome due to its ad-stripping technology.
This was surprising since it was built on top of Chromium, the open-source project Google maintains.
Brave is faster as it eliminates ads and ad trackers, which means it downloads much less content from a website.
I have been using Google Chrome for as long as I can remember, the thought of switching costs associate with changing browsers made me stick with it for years. Think about your browser history, bookmarks and saved passwords.
Utility:
Overcoming high switching costs: The moment I install it, Brave gives me an option to import all of my bookmarks, history and saved passwords from Chrome and does it within seconds.
Metrics: I see a dashboard with how many trackers have been blocked, bandwidth and time I have saved so far by using Brave! Very cool and highlights the brand’s North Star metrics.
Privacy with ease of use: I can press a keyboard shortcut and open a Tor search window. Tor hides your IP from the sites you visit by routing it through various servers in the middle.
Usability:
The user interface is very similar to Google Chrome which almost eliminates any learning curve. Bonus points for also having the grouping tab feature from Chrome!
Monetisation Strategy:
Brave uses ‘Basic Attention Tokens’ or BATs which have their value derived from a cyber-currency.
Get paid to view ads: Users will be given tokens based on the time they spend viewing ads. The tokens can also be passed to publishers as support for their sites.
Usually, browsers display websites where those sites are earning ad revenue, Brave has inserted itself into the money stream.
Brave is the entity earning revenue from ads, even though the user views the same site as, for example, Edge, which earns nothing.
After using Brave as my default browser for 24 hours, I truly believe, with their familiar to use, ad-free (If you opt-out), secure, crypto reward-based speedy web browsing experience, Brave is here to stay.
Let me know what you guys think below, were you familiar with the company, are you going to check it out?
