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?
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.
The false positive rate at first was over 50% but with some prompt tweaks and back testing, it’s approaching 10-20%
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].
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.
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.
- 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.
r/chromeextensions is too small to get any traction, and only has other extension developers
https://braintool.org/2021/01/14/First-Two-Thousand-BrainToo...
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...
[1] https://extensionpay.com/ [2] https://extensions.dev/extensions/invertase/firestore-stripe...
I run:
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.
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.
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.
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.
But same SEO strategy of building lots of content still works
what is the motivation to seek this goal? Is your extension paid?
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...
