The problem was to persuade managers that they were worth the effort, persuade workers that I wouldn’t “screw up” their preciously-pristine browser, and persuade IT not to use their “UNAUTHORIZED SOFTWARE!!11!” flamethrower. In short, exclusively people-problems.
Keep that in mind, in terms of who you need to sell this to.
How did you push through all the people-problems? Was the productivity gained from the extensions the angle you pushed?
One big issue most managers care about, is long-term maintainability. When you sell this, you should probably advise customers to have more than one person skilled up and responsible for maintaining the resulting tools. I was often bounced because "once you leave, nobody will know how to fix this" (which is fair, and happened more often than not). Making it easy to share projects is key.
They scale up and hire a shitton operations people with a small technical knack - while working with the same shitty systems that they built for the first year of the company.
Combine that with the massive blitscaling they do by just constantly opening new cities and new countries.
And you have a massive demand for quick fixes to bandaid scaling issues. Ive seen companies use shit like iMacros extensions, vimium browser extensions and also custom chrome extenstion to fix that.
Nowadays its pushing more to google appscript (gsheet scripting language) and stuff like airtable/coda, maybe in some cases advanced shit like retool (INSANE).
We are incredibly excited to share what we have been cooking up . After building Chrome Extensions for recruiters and marketers, we got a glimpse of the power of browser extensions. However, we also got a taste of how hard extensions are to create. This led us down a path of exploring whether companies were interested in building custom internal extensions.
We studied hundreds of custom internal extensions that companies are using today. We've seen companies extend legacy internal tools to increase development speed, create context-aware tools that surface info employees need wherever they are. We've even seen extensions add missing features to purchased software. After synthesizing into a few modes, we set out to build an easier way to create internal extensions.
Come say hi! We are excited to meet you and hopefully help you build some extensions too!
Kevin, Will, James
Lmk if you have any questions! I'll be here :)
There are also tools like Selenium, AutoIt and iMacros to automate workflows but I think the best thing is to have in house made native solution for your workflow automation but I guess not all companies can afford it.
Selenium is a bit tough because you end up with scripts that are hard for business users to execute. AutoIt and iMacros are solid web automation tools, but they lack the extensibility of a custom solution (to do things like add UI) and are also hard to share with non-technical users across a company.
One category of apps I think would be interesting is caching SaaS data locally to make for fast search. e.g. Intercom is painfully slow, I want an extension that caches recent Intercom data for fast search and messaging.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sqanything/naejbcf...
Another route is to use something like http://alasql.org/ to cache data in localstorage so you can query it instantly. Would a search UX be better, or a text box to directly write SQL over your data?
can i use this to extend them (like add buttons, UI elements, surface data from API calls, scrape data)?
One of our big use cases is to extend/customize internal tools with UI/data/logic. Could you share more details? If you're more comfortable offline kevin@extension.dev
some are SaaS where we don't have access to the codebase. think Salesforce, Zendesk, or Jira.
