Ask HN: To those with successful browser extension(s), how did you grow it?

[dandrew5]

I maintain a handful of browser extensions and one of them is gaining traction. I'm now looking for marketing avenues and curious to hear from anyone that may have gone down this path before.

Since it appears the Firefox and Chrome stores themselves don't offer any kind of visibility-boosting features, are there any other tools/services you've found useful to increase the number of active weekly users?

[kevmo314]

I used to have a pretty successful browser extension that I shut down because the site it worked on shut down.

I grew it by adding features that people would ask for on the site's forums, for example a user would say "hey can we have x feature?" and I would respond saying "great idea, I added x feature to my extension y!" This was very effective and over time others would start responding saying my extension had whatever feature they were asking, capitalizing on how relatively slow companies are to implement features.

This does rely on the extension having a site it operates on and having a forum for users though. If I were to do it today I'd focus on finding places where my extension's users concentrate, Discord, a community Slack, or otherwise, and doing the same thing.

[throwup238 → kevmo314]

I have a similar type of product that depends on a third party and I use LLMs to automate most of the work. I feed it batches of Discord/Discourse messages from the third party’s community along with a prompt containing my feature set and it flags messages that might be relevant so that I can reply to them (manually, although the LLM generates some starting points based on examples replies).

The false positive rate at first was over 50% but with some prompt tweaks and back testing, it’s approaching 10-20%

[kevmo314 → throwup238]

That tool itself might be worth publishing. I've noticed some cofounders (Supabase's kiwicopple comes to mind) that are very on top of HN comments and I am not sure if they're literally reading all the HN comments or doing that in some automated, "notify me when someone talks about Supabase" kind of way. Could be very valuable to notify when even a related discussion happens!

[kiwicopple → kevmo314]

> I am not sure if they're literally reading all the HN comments or doing that in some automated

i use f5bot[0] and have notifications set up for "supabase". it helps that supabase is a unique word so I don't get many false-positives.

[0] https://f5bot.com/

[paradite → kiwicopple]

Hey. I actually just built a dashboard and filter for f5bot hits. Would love to know your thoughts and if you think it is useful!

https://tracker.16x.engineer/

[throwup238 → kevmo314]

The script is a few hundred lines mostly dealing with the Discord API and Discourse scraping, written entirely by GPT4 so anyone can do it easily. If anyone wants to take the idea and run with it, all the power to them!

HN is easier since you can just use the HN Firebase API. I think people like kiwicopple just use basic string matching, don’t even need LLMs. I only use it because I need to match against my feature set instead of a simple string.

[rovr138 → kevmo314]

‘Brand monitoring’ is definitely a thing and there are platforms for it.

You could even start very basic with Google alerts for example.

Still up for new things. Looks like a fun project.

[dandrew5 → kevmo314]

Great ideas, thanks. I've had similar success searching for common problems using Google, finding the highest-positioned Reddit result, and leaving a response with a link.

[mfrisbie]

I run Track & Trace Tools[1], an extension directly targeted at the legal cannabis industry's main compliance platform Metrc.

Since it's targeted at businesses and not consumers, word of mouth has been powerful for me. I've rapidly grown in the state of Michigan thanks to a few very enthusiastic operators.

I also went on a slate of podcasts last year to talk about (read: promote) my product. Podcast hosts are always looking for guests, and most of them didn't cost me a thing.

It's also been helpful to be a Google Developer Expert for web extensions, the Chrome team interviewed me and that gave me a platform to talk about what I was working on[2].

[1] https://trackandtrace.tools

[2] https://youtu.be/8P-Sc8ZaViY?si=tLhx3LMIlNqHBvfB

[pimlottc → mfrisbie]

> Podcast hosts are always looking for guests, and most of them didn't cost me a thing.

That implies that for some podcasts you can pay to be a guest?

[mfrisbie → pimlottc]

Some charge a nominal fee, and one I had to travel to a studio to record. Made for a nice weekend in LA with my wife.

[switz]

I have no experience to share on the creator side, but as a user I am ever fearful of extensions getting rugpulled. Many popular but fading extensions sell out to nefarious companies just looking for users to adspam. Please don't do that.

The simplest way to grow it is to share the link to it in this thread – you have eyes on you, take advantage of them.

[dandrew5 → switz]

Thanks for the idea of sharing the extension but I'd like to focus any discussion around growth itself.

As for being concerned about a rugpull, I definitely get it. My approach is to keep as much of the product open source as possible and be very transparent around any ownership changes.

[ATechGuy → dandrew5]

I've built a tool for this. How can I DM you?

[dandrew5 → ATechGuy]

I've added my contact email to my profile, thank you.

[ATechGuy → dandrew5]

You will hear from me shortly. Thanks!

[Alupis → ATechGuy]

You all have to know this guy is most likely trying to scam you?

Has a secret tool that will grant you success, can only DM you, won't share in public. Scamola if I've ever smelled one...

[datasert → ATechGuy]

I would like to know as well. Can you please DM me?

[ATechGuy → datasert]

Sure, but there's no contact info in your profile.

[purple-leafy]

I have made 4 extensions in the last 1 year, with over 1000 users.

- 1 over 100,000

- 1 over 10,000

- 1 over 5,000

- 1 over 1000

Only marketing was a single post on Reddit for each.

Getting a featured badge is a must for organic growth on the chrome store. Without it, you're screwed.

I have other extensions hovering around ~100 users that don't grow as they don't have a featured badge.

[dandrew5 → purple-leafy]

For your Reddit posts, did you target a subreddit that might have interest in the extension or did you use one meant specifically for extension development/promotion? If the latter, which one?

[purple-leafy → dandrew5]

I used mainly r/webdev showoff saturdays

r/chromeextensions is too small to get any traction, and only has other extension developers

[tconfrey]

I think it's like marketing any other type of software or service online - SEO, find user communities, influencers, ads/paid promotions etc etc. In my case I got lucky and impressed a tech writer who gave BrainTool a write up on ZDNet and gave me a jumpstart on the first 2K+ downloads. I wrote about the experience here:

https://braintool.org/2021/01/14/First-Two-Thousand-BrainToo...

[acorn221]

Hey, I am the creator and owner of LighterFuel For Tinder, an extension which shows when your matches made their accounts amongst other features designed to help identify fake accounts. LighterFuel grew by its self over 3 years thankfully, without any external promotion.

I've recently been trying to promote my other extensions though and I'm having a lot of trouble getting any traction with them too, and I managed to successfully run a small media campaign where I made myself the most liked man on Tinder for a day by making my users swipe on my account for April fools. Although I did meet my target of 1 tabloid news article, there was no noticeable uptick in installs from that article, however it did get the attention of some YouTubers recently and I'm just working with them now to promote LighterFuel and my other extensions.

It's difficult to know the best way to promote your extensions but I'd personally start with focusing on the Chrome web store, as it's the biggest extension store, getting your listings to look great so you can then get your featured badge which looks also good to users, then linking a website to your extension to get the "verified" badge which means "Created by the owner of the listed website. The publisher has a good record with no history of violations. " which makes it look more official.

From there, I would recommend getting in key words if possible (in my case Tinder helped) to just get better SEO and discovery.

Then finally, I would always recommend setting up your own analytics (I use Google Analytics) as I've found the CWS store analytics to be unreliable.

Get your featured badge here: https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/contact/one_stop_...

My news article: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/27142401/tinder-hack-swiping-r... The LighterFuel listing: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lighterfuel-for-tin... My LinkedIn article about the campaign: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-i-became-most-liked-man-t...

[smallerfish]

Since this is the right crowd, for those who make money with your extension, how do you do it? I'm contemplating building an API for license checking and a simple webapp for registration / subscription management, but if anybody's using the off-the-shelf options I'd be interested to hear about your experience.

[tconfrey → smallerfish]

I've heard good things about ExtensionPay[1]. It didn't have what I needed at the time so I hand rolled my own on Firebase using a Stripe integration component[2]. As you probably know the issue with extensions is that the whole codebase is exposed so you need some kind of back end if you're handling payments and associated secret stores.

[1] https://extensionpay.com/ [2] https://extensions.dev/extensions/invertase/firestore-stripe...

[dandrew5 → smallerfish]

I'm in the process of adding payments as well and I'm starting things off with Stripe. Specifically, their payment links and subscriptions features. Longer term, I may switch, and am building things in a way that migration will be easy.

[jborden13]

Do you have any creative ways to source traffic?

I run:

https://www.getspence.ai/

I've sourced data important to our users. I am leveraging it by making it useful for our users and to drive traffic and visibility to our services. My data will be discoverable on broad platforms.

[wordpad25 → jborden13]

looks like you format resumes, what kinda data are you talking about?

[jborden13 → wordpad25]

It's related to the service and a means to source traffic. Unfortunately it's not launched yet but relevant to the services utility.

[seanwilson]

For https://www.checkbot.io/, I did posts on reddit, hackernews, producthunt and directory websites, and also put time into writing relevant articles that I can post links to. After the initial effort, organic backlinks and Google traffic have built up over time. Its search rank within the Chrome store is pretty good too, guessing large numbers of positive reviews helps here.

Feels like there's a lot of luck involved here as the search algorithms could change whenever, but building up good backlinks and reviews is going to help.

[OlegWock]

I was lucky enough that video about my extension blew up on tiktok (it wasn't even my video lol), which bring around 34k users. After that extension started slowly getting more traction from here and there (tech sites, personal newsletters, etc), but that didn't bring any substantial audience, to this day (1.5 years passed) tiktok was the biggest success and provided most of current audience, partially because I stopped actively working on the extension about year or so ago

[serial_dev → OlegWock]

It would be great to have a link to the TikTok video and your extension.

[OlegWock → serial_dev]

Unfortunately, original poster deleted his account/got banned on tiktok

[tconfrey]

While there aren't visibility-boosting features, don't downplay SEO on the app stores. That is, if your's is the kind of extension that people will be searching for when looking the solve their problem. The Chrome store also shows a bunch of 'related' extensions at the bottom of every listing. It can't hurt to show up there.

Also, since you don't mention it, list on the Edge Add-ons store. My user count over there is ~40% of the Chrome store number.

[dandrew5 → tconfrey]

Great call on expanding to other add-ons stores. I'll need to look into compatibility and find a Windows machine to test...

[tconfrey → dandrew5]

The Edge store was stricter in some ways but I find I can submit pretty much the same bundle to both. Note also that Edge runs fine on MacOS.

[Guillaume86 → dandrew5]

Edge has Linux and MacOS builds

[jerrygoyal]

I built 2 popular extensions:

1. Notion Boost: 80K downloads with $10k in revenue

I wrote about my whole journey here: https://gourav.io/blog/notion-boost

2. ChatGPT Writer (https://chatgptwriter.ai) : 700K downloads with $20K MRR

This one I shared on reddit and it grew from there. I will write a post about it soon as well.

[julianeon]

What are some useful extensions for the HN crowd?

[fancy_pantser → julianeon]

Recipe Filter: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcd...

[hehehheh → julianeon]

YARC - Yet Another Rest Client https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/yet-another-rest-cl...

[leeeeeepw]

Have a site called webfiddle that got popular because of seo mostly but then got blocked, it makes it easy to develop extensions and share them by using a proxy server, the proxy server itself is what caused it to get blocked.

But same SEO strategy of building lots of content still works

[dgosling56]

Still trying to figure this out for https://rockyai.me/ (an extension that lets you chat with a webpage). So far most of the growth has come from sharing it with friends!

[dmitrygr]

> to increase the number of active weekly users?

what is the motivation to seek this goal? Is your extension paid?

[dandrew5 → dmitrygr]

Yes, I have a monetization plan in mind.

[rizs12]

I've been working on marketing my Chrome extension too. It alerts users to when a company is offering a free sample of the item they're looking at on Amazon.

I've been posting on Reddit about it - that's gotten me a few early users and a bit of useful feedback. I am thinking about what to do next.

Here it is btw (all feedback is most welcome!): https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/freebie-alert/mofbl...