My Chrome extension made its first sale after I removed the pricing page
On September 13 I got a notification from Paddle. Someone bought a lifetime plan for Foldif. $79.
Small money, I know. But it's the first payment my first indie product ever made. And the weird part is I had already removed the pricing page from the site.
Some context. Foldif is a Chrome extension for organizing and annotating your AI chats on ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
When I started it I had the same dream as everyone. Launch it and start making money fast. I added features the competitors didn't have and did all the launches. They actually went well. Product of the Day and #1 of the month on Fazier, top 3% on Product Hunt.
To get money coming in faster, I limited free use to 5 days.
Users came. After 5 days they left. Came, left. Came, left. After a month or two my user count was basically flat. I could see new people on the dashboard every day, they just didn't stay.
I tried SEO for the Chrome Web Store too. Nothing moved. The store watches installs and uninstalls, so if people keep removing your extension you're not going up, no matter what keywords you use.
At that point I told myself the problem was that I don't have an audience. I didn't quit Foldif, I kept fixing things. But I picked my next project with that in mind, something that could help me build one. That's Tablif, but it's a story for another post.
Foldif kind of stayed in the background. Nothing I tried was working and I was pretty much losing hope. So I did one last thing. I extended the free premium period from 5 days to 90.
And honestly, that's when it started working.
About 80% of new users kept using it. Some days 1 new user, some days 10. Some still left, but it kept going. My ranking went up too. I think I'm around #6 or #7 for "ai chat organizer" now.
Then one day, while I was buried in data for Tablif, that Paddle notification came.
What I took from this:
The 5 day limit hurt me twice. People left before they really got the value. And every uninstall told the store my extension wasn't worth showing, so it pushed me down.
I thought my only problem was audience. Maybe that was part of it. But people were already finding Foldif, I was just sending them away after 5 days.
I was in too much of a hurry to make money, tbh. The sale came when I wasn't even trying to sell. I'm not saying hide your pricing. But people seem to pay once the thing is already part of their day.
And don't kill a quiet product too fast. If I had shut Foldif down in month two, none of this would have happened.
This week I shipped a chat map feature for Foldif. 78 users right now, and this time most of them are staying.
Has a trial or pricing change ever flipped things like this for you?
Congrats on the first sale. The 5 to 90 day change is a great example of optimizing for habit formation before monetization. I would track the first meaningful action and compare retention for users who reach it in week one, since that should show whether the longer trial is creating real product pull rather than just delaying churn.
Yeah, honestly I didn't really know what they were interested in. I'm adding that in the latest update, and I'll steer future development in that direction too. Thanks for sharing my excitement!
This is a useful reminder that “time to value” can matter more than trial length. I’d track activation and week-4 retention by cohort, then compare the 5-day and 90-day groups on the same events, such as creating a first annotation or returning three times. That should show whether the longer trial is doing the work or whether the users who activate early are simply the ones most likely to stay. A lightweight in-product prompt that gets new users to one clear win may compound the result.
That makes sense, I'll keep it in mind. Thanks!