The Browser Company Is Building a Brand That Drives Viral Growth

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. I go in depth with Nashilu Mouen-Makoua, the head of storytelling and a strategic advisor to the CEO at The Browser Company. We get into her philosophy around building authentic brands in technology, how she uses LLMs in her work, and her take on the best way to position products. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

The Browser Company isn’t just building a browser, they’re building a formidable brand—and they’re doing it with AI. 

The Browser Company has driven viral user growth, a $550 million valuation, and close to 100,000 YouTube subscribers. Its brand centers people, not products. It’s messy, authentic, and refreshing—and it seeps into everything the team does, from the job descriptions on their website to announcing new features through short films and giving keynote addresses in diners.  

I sat down with Nashilu Mouen-Makoua, the head of storytelling and a strategic advisor to the CEO at The Browser Company, to talk about how she’s weaving relatable stories around new technology.

We get into her philosophy around storytelling, including why she believes centering people is the key to building a memorable brand, The Browser Company’s focus on making technology accessible to a wide audience, and the brass tacks of how Nash’s team structures meetings to generate great ideas. Nash also tells me how she’s integrated LLMs into her workflow, to do deep research, get a gut check on a new article she’s written, and put the finishing touches on her words. 

As Nash explains that the best way to position a product is in response to contemporary social context, we screenshare through her conversations with ChatGPT about the socio-political climate in America preceding the release of a Tracy Chapman song. We also use the LLM to simulate a group of Arc users and interview one of these imaginary personas live on the show to gather preliminary customer insights. Here’s a link to the transcript of this episode.  

This is a must-watch for people who want to use AI to tell compelling stories about what they’re building in tech.

Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. 

If you want a quick summary, here’s a taste for paying subscribers:

How to tell stories that humanize technology

Nash’s vision for The Browser Company’s brand is to “challenge what a tech company felt like and how it would show up in the world,” and she’s bringing it to life with remarkable success. Here’s her philosophy around storytelling: 

• Build your brand around people. Nash believes storytelling in tech should be centered around people, both the team creating the product and those using it. The Browser Company’s early creative strategy was to “be people building a product and sharing behind the scenes in a way that's never been done by folks before.”
• Find ways to flip the narrative. Nash highlights “inverting the narrative” as important in storytelling, describing it as “tak[ing] what everyone else is saying and do[ing] it differently.” This guided the release of Arc Max—AI-powered features to browse the web—where they aimed to “flip how AI felt to people,” from “big and world-changing” to something as approachable as “selling kitchen knives in a QVC TV show.”
• Cultivate an element of surprise. According to Nash, fostering unpredictability within the creative team is as important as keeping the audience guessing. “We keep ourselves guessing at The Browser Company, too—and so not falling into what has worked, will keep working for you,” she says. 

Nash thinks that The Browser Company’s aesthetic is a reflection of their team. “The DNA of this company is people who love the product that we're building, love the potential of technology, but also love something outside of technology,” she says. This is why The Browser Company chose to focus on people:

• Be real, not polished. From a philosophical perspective, Nash thinks Arc’s focus on people stems from a desire to be real and genuine in the manicured world of the internet. “At the highest level…it just felt more authentic because I think that people are tired of things being overly curated,” she explains. 
• Dare to build messy, memorable brands. Nash believes that Arc’s people-centric approach to storytelling distinguishes it from competitors like Chrome and Safari. She explains that traditional browsers are part of companies that are “too big to center people” because humans are idiosyncratic, and there’s a risk of “los[ing a sense of polish” in building a brand around different people.

Nash explains that The Browser Company’s storytelling efforts are rooted in meetings they call the “writer’s room” among the company’s creative team. Here’s more detail about how they’re conducted:

• Structure meetings for creative freedom. The meetings are structured in two ways: “no agenda meetings,” where “you can bring projects you're working on just to get people's thoughts”; and “go-wide meetings,” where “somebody has a project that they're kicking off, and we just want to go as wide as we can, throw out the biggest ideas, and pull from everywhere other than technology.”
• Iterate on ideas together. Nash describes the meetings as a collaborative brainstorm designed to support the project lead. The process involves the lead “sit[ting] with what’s most interesting” from the meeting and returning to the group with “different directions,” asking for “pushback” on them, and likely “commit[ting] to one of them.”
• Prepare to push the boundaries of creativity. The project lead’s preparation for the meeting is key in stimulating dynamic, productive discussions. This typically involves formulating “a couple of key questions,” “key reference points,” and leading the meeting in a way that’s “poking at being controversial.”

As The Browser Company grows in popularity, these are goals that the team is orienting toward:

• Tell stories that everyone can relate to. Nash thinks that building a new browser is an audacious bet because it touches the lives of a wide, diverse range of people. She believes the key to addressing the storytelling challenge of appealing to a vast audience is to “make [the brand] really tangible and tactical…like something you can actually put your arms around.”
• A browser inspired by New York City. Nash wants The Browser Company’s brand to embody the ethos of New York City, where the company is headquartered, and a place where there’s something for everyone. “Could Arc and our membership feel like the city that we’re born of?” is a question that guides their creative decisions.
• Redefine the AI narrative, from competitive race to creative tool. Nash critiques the current AI narrative as driven by competitive pressure, with companies trying to “keep up” instead of focusing on meaningful user experiences. As The Browser Company explores AI, she says, “I'm really excited for what it means to invert the story of AI…because it’s tired and fatigued,” adding that they think of AI as “new Play-Doh for the same mission.” 

How Nash uses LLMs as a creative collaborator

Nash shares that because she “cares so much about words,” it was initially hard to delegate writing tasks to AI. It took a “long time to get to a place” where she stopped trying to “replace” herself and focused on “improv[ing] the work that [she] was already doing” instead. These are the ways in which Nash has integrated LLMs into her work:

• LLMs for deep, fluid research. Nash uses ChatGPT as a research tool, especially when she’s looking into an idea in order to develop a perspective on it. She prefers the LLM to Google, appreciating the fluidity that allows her to “move between different levels of the same problem in one place” rather than “going through seven different [web] pages giving her information in an un-nuanced way.”
• Custom prompts to put the finishing touches on your work. After developing an opinion and putting it into words, Nash applies a detailed custom prompt, written by one of her colleagues, to refine the majority of her written work. “This is the only time I let ChatGPT change my words…tightening the language with a very specific prompt,” she says. 
• Get a gut check on your writing with ChatGPT. Nash uses ChatGPT to objectively evaluate her writing by inputting her work into the model and prompting it to summarize the piece, making sure not to give the LLM further guidance. Some of the questions she hopes to answer through this exercise are, “Is it capturing the message I want to come across?” and “Is it capturing [what I want] tonally?”
• Adapt content for different use cases. An underrated use of ChatGPT that Nash has discovered is repurposing information across different formats, like from a podcast transcript to a punchy episode description. With reference to The Browser Company’s new podcast, Imagining Arc, she often prompts the LLM as follows: “Here's the transcript, make it into a two-sentence description.”
• ChatGPT to organize data. ChatGPT streamlines The Browser Company’s research process by creating useful summaries of user interviews. When fed transcripts of more than 20 interviews, ChatGPT generates “tables of what all the responses were…and what are the threads across all the interviews,” saving the team considerable time.

How to position your product for the zeitgeist 

While thinking about positioning your product, Nash believes that it’s important to make sure that “you’re not just positioning for yourself” but for “something that’s going to resonate with a large enough group of people that you believe your product is for.” She adds that “the best positionings…come in conversation with the time in which they're birthed into the world.” ChatGPT is a useful tool to explore products that resonated both in the past and the current zeitgeist.

Pulling on that thread, this is Nash’s perspective on today: “[I]t's been many years of things just going faster and faster…and [we] went through a pandemic, and some people moved, and some people have had kids, and some people got married, and [we’re] just kind of more all the time; we haven't had room for pause—and we've been on our laptop the whole time,” and “the flip side of everything going so fast…is it okay to aspire for less? Is it okay to aspire for the small things?”

You can check out the episode on X, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Links and timestamps are below:

• Watch on X
• Watch on YouTube
• Listen on Spotify (make sure to follow to help us rank!)
• Listen on Apple Podcasts

Timestamps:

1. Introduction: 00:00:47
2. Nash’s philosophy around storytelling: 00:04:03
3. The Browser Company’s strategy to come up with creative ideas: 00:09:07
4. Why Nash thinks building brands people can relate to is important: 00:15:00
5. How to avoid the tired narrative around AI products: 00:18:47
6. The ways Nash has integrated ChatGPT into her workflow: 00:22:21
7. Why understanding social context is important to position your product: 00:33:35
8. How Nash uses ChatGPT to get a gut check on her writing: 00:41:10
9. What Nash thinks is the gestalt of the current age: 00:49:50
10. Nash and I use ChatGPT to simulate and interview a typical Arc user: 00:52:01

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Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.