I chatted with Klaas Foppen, the CTO and Co-Founder of Promptwatch, to learn more about their use of ScreenshotOne. During our conversation, I realized why they are winning in the AI search space and are already the best product in that category or will be.
But before sharing the core insight, I want to tell you a few words about their product first and how ScreenshotOne helps them. It will help to set things in the perspective.
Promptwatch
Promptwatch tracks and optimizes your visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI search engines—helping you drive high-converting traffic to your site.
At the moment of writing they are used by used by 5,800+ brands and agencies.
In addition to prompt tracking, they have crawler logs, content creation and many more features.
Use case
Promptwatch has a content creation tool that allows you to create content optimized to rank on Google and AI platforms.
That’s where ScreenshotOne comes in. Enriching generated content with screenshots makes it more engaging and appealing to readers. It can help collaterally to rank images on Google and adds more (visual) context to the content.
“It is super simple, works very well and fast.”
However, one question still couldn’t leave my head…
Build versus buy
A long time ago, I wrote a guide on how to build a screenshot API. I didn’t share everything, otherwise it would take a book to write, but you can check out that post and see how complex it was to build a reliable and scalable API.
However, with the latest AI coding tools, the task of building everything in-house might become seeming rational. And as the founder of a developer tooling company, I find myself increasingly thinking about building versus buying. So, I asked myself an uncomfortable question: why not build your own solution in the age of AI?
Klaas responded:
Building a screenshot taking API is extremely difficult, it sounds easy but dealing with all the cookie banners and DOM loading events is just to much work!
And that’s the core insight of this post. It also resonates with the feedback I get from most of our customers who are focused on their product and core features:
Of course, you can build everything in-house. But if you are in a competing space and can’t allow yourself spending time on the low ROI secondary tasks, why not to buy tested tools.
Today, at least, I find myself doing that, too. I pay for a lot of software, because I want to focus on my product first. And that’s one of the ways to win today.
Summary
Promptwatch is winning in the AI search space because they are able to focus on their core business and solve their customers’ problems first and foremost.
It is not the only reason, of course, they have a great team, expertise and are customer-centric.
But it really helps to focus when you outsource secondary tasks with low ROI to existing polishing reliable solutions like ScreenshotOne (e.g. for screenshot automation).
