Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 50 posts

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

#31

Post by mfrisbie »

pimlottc wrote: post #30
mfrisbie wrote: post #23

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…

> 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?

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.

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

#32

Post by wordpad25 »

jborden13 wrote: post #15

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.

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

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

#33

Post by 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...

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

#35

Post by 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.

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

#36

Post by dandrew5 »

purple-leafy wrote: post #35

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.

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?

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

#37

Post by jborden13 »

wordpad25 wrote: post #32
jborden13 wrote: post #15

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.

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

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

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

#38

Post by rovr138 »

kevmo314 wrote: post #24
throwup238 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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!

‘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.

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

#39

Post by purple-leafy »

dandrew5 wrote: post #36
purple-leafy wrote: post #35

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.

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?

I used mainly r/webdev showoff saturdays

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

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

#40

Post by OlegWock »

serial_dev wrote: post #20
OlegWock wrote: post #13

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 stop…

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

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