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

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...

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

#45

Post by throwup238 » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 6:23 PM UTC

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!

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.

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

#46

Post by kiwicopple » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 7:30 PM UTC

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!

> 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/

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

#47

Post by seanwilson » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 8:02 PM UTC

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.

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

#48

Post by dgosling56 » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 10:14 PM UTC

[dead]

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

#49

Post by leeeeeepw » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 5:18 AM UTC

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

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

#50

Post by paradite » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 7:23 AM UTC

kiwicopple wrote: post #46

kevmo314 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> 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/

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/