[HN Gopher] Ask HN: To those with successful browser extension(s...
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       Ask HN: To those with successful browser extension(s), how did you
       grow it?
        
       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?
        
       Author : dandrew5
       Score  : 24 points
       Date   : 2024-11-22 21:27 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
       | switz wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | I've built a tool for this. How can I DM you?
        
             | dandrew5 wrote:
             | I've added my contact email to my profile, thank you.
        
               | ATechGuy wrote:
               | You will hear from me shortly. Thanks!
        
             | datasert wrote:
             | I would like to know as well. Can you please DM me?
        
               | ATechGuy wrote:
               | Sure, but there's no contact info in your profile.
        
       | kevmo314 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | dandrew5 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | throwup238 wrote:
         | 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%
        
       | smallerfish wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | OlegWock wrote:
       | 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
        
       | dmitrygr wrote:
       | > to increase the number of active weekly users?
       | 
       | what is the motivation to seek this goal?
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-22 23:01 UTC)