This is a story of how I built a product with 900+ users.

In April I was frustrated with myself that I was not making any progress. One night I decided to make something. I had a list of ideas in a Trello board, and I picked one that would take the least amount of time to build it.

Here's the board 👇

So, I decided to make a Year Progress Extension. In four hours I finished the product and launched it on Product Hunt (This was before Progress Bar OSX went viral). It was great. I got really good reviews and it was the #5 product of that day. I could not sleep properly without knowing what would happen to the launch.

Everything was great and I got around 300 users from the launch. I didn't want to disappoint the users, so I decided to work more on this. Within 2 weeks, Softpedia added my extension to their store 🤷‍♂️

Time went by, and I saw incremental growth in users, especially from Russia. I investigated the reason for the user growth from Russia. I learned that it was featured on LifeHacker Russia

That gave me the momentum to work more on this. And I did. The Extension went through a couple of name and design changes. I added Month, Week, and Day progresses. I added Motivational Quotes, Background Images, etc. I decided to stick to the name Eternity. I bought a domain hoping one day I could monetize the product.

Later it was featured on LifeHacker Japan. It gave a huge boost in the number of users. Even better than LifeHacker Russia. Recently, it was featured on briian.com -  A Taiwan based software recommendation site.

Up until this point, I have 900 users from Google Chrome Store. Completely organic users. And everyday I think about monetizing the product. Everything else is great. I'm getting constant number of installations. Once in a while I tweet about the status of Eternity. But still I'm getting stuck when I think about monetization. At one point, I started a BuyMeACoffee Page and put the link to page in the extension settings. I got $30 from the donations. That stopped 2 weeks after. I don't want to charge for the installation of the extension. I want to try a different type of business model. So I'm reaching out to the Indie Hackers community to help me up. Do you have ideas to help me up? Comment on the post 🤗 Thanks in advance 🙏

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