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

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

What are some useful extensions for the HN crowd?

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

> to increase the number of active weekly users?

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

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...