Lessons learned: From 0 to 70,000 downloads in 30 days (opens in new tab)

"Make a product people want, everything else you can fix later."

That's the real meat there.

From the articles, it looks like the extension isn't listed in the Mozilla or Chrome galleries. Is there a reason for this? How do you think it affects the distribution and exposure of the product?

awesome piece and great lessons learned. a word of advice, from personal experience of having a start-up featured in NYT, Forbes, Businessweek, RWW, etc launch news to pubs is about 50X more interesting than updates or follow-up stories. as someone who has used and referred the product, i am providing a word of caution that you really need to think about opening other channels to get reach because your 3rd month referral traffic could very possibly be less than 20% of this month's.

Beware of the pit of despair though, media coverage is like fireworks, it goes up and then explodes with a bang to fall back to the ground. Make sure you engage your users and make sure that you get enough of a tie to them that you can entice them to come back.

In the case of a download add a feature that checks for updates and maybe 'newsworthy' items that you can present to your users using the app.