I mow lawns during the day and build a screen-time extension at night. Here’s where Saturn is after one summer.
This summer, most of my days have been split between mowing lawns and building a Chrome extension called Saturn.
I originally built it because normal screen-time reports weren’t telling me what I actually wanted to know. Spending 15 minutes on a website doesn’t sound terrible but opening that website 50 times while trying to work is a completely different problem.
Saturn started as a basic website blocker. Since then, I’ve added daily limits, scheduled blocks, usage tracking and a system that looks for patterns in how distractions return.
For example, it can recognize when you:
Close a distracting site and reopen it shortly afterward
Keep returning through fresh tabs or redirects
Repeatedly request more time after reaching a limit
Visit a site frequently without spending much total time there
The extension currently has roughly a dozen active users and costs $5 for a lifetime upgrade. I launched it on Product Hunt at the beginning of July and got seven upvotes. It wasn’t exactly a breakout launch.
Since then, most of my distribution effort has gone into short-form content. The results have been inconsistent: some posts stop around 100 views, while a slideshow about my favorite Chrome extensions reached around 1,400 views and produced several saves. My best day so far brought five installs.
That was encouraging, but I’m still trying to solve the more important problem: raising the normal baseline instead of relying on occasional spikes.
Building the product has honestly been the more straightforward part. If something isn’t working, I can inspect it, change it and test it again. Distribution is harder because the feedback is much less direct. A post can fail because of the topic, hook, timing, audience or execution and the analytics rarely tell you which one.
My current plan is to keep publishing consistently, continue improving the store listing and test a few focused distribution channels instead of submitting Saturn everywhere I can find.
If you’ve grown a browser extension from its first 10–20 active users, what actually helped you establish a dependable baseline of installs?
Saturn: https://saturnfocus.com
