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9 Comments

50 day challenge: how to make this Chrome extension grow and make money?

Hey everyone,

I've been working on Nudge (http://nudgeware.io/) as a side project for 3 years. Now I'm giving myself 50 days to grow Nudge and get some MRR to see if it's viable for me to work on it full time. I've set a target of $300 MRR and 3x the current DAU by the end of the 50 days, which is 2700 DAU.

I'm tracking revenue on IH (currently $0): https://www.indiehackers.com/product/nudge/revenue

Any ideas on how to make Nudge grow and make money?

Context:

Some things I've tried:

Something I'm now trying:

  • Add banners to the product which can only be removed by sharing or paying for Nudge

Something I'm considering:

  • Put existing features behind the paywall (might piss off existing users)

Looking for any suggestions, as crazy or obvious as you like. Even better if they are specific to the Nudge case, although I appreciate not everyone has time to use the product and see what's up with it.

Best,
Louis

  1. 2

    Hi @lgwb89,

    Are you still working on Nudge? More than 50 days have passed, and I was wondering how this quest went for you.

  2. 1

    Hi Louis!

    I unfortunately am not useful to your query; however, I wanted to say that your product is really cool and I think something that a lot of people could use. Perhaps your challenge is that people don't know how much they are getting distracted so there may be some customer education opportunity there. How you monetize though is a tough question and one that I am unsure about.

    Have a good one!

    • Bennett
    1. 1

      Thanks so much Bennett. I am not sure that's my challenge. The reason is that, for instance, the other day a YC-backed Chrome extension that is very similar to mine did very well on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/motion-3). Having said that, they might encounter the same problems with long term growth and monetization that I am.

      Really appreciate your positive feedback about my product. Thank you!

      1. 1

        Ah! You’ll have to excuse my ignorance then on this one. Not sure still overall on the best approach. Do you think people are extra resistant to chrome extensions because it’s a paid product, whereas the browser is free? Maybe it could be part of a larger overall product suite or service versus a standalone extension

  3. 1

    Your chrome extension (with all it's installation flow) is amazing and now I'm a Customer, but I really don't know how you could make money out of it heheh
    Have you tried looking how other extensions are making money? The adblock extension is the one I've been using the longest (https://www.getadblock.com/) and I think they survived on donations at first and only focused on growth
    Maybe if you could get people talking about you, bloggers and youtubers that talk about minimalism and productivity could help you
    Maybe you could "gamefy" it by recording the time people are spending on the nudged sites, congratulate when they use less than yesterday (last week? month?) and encourage them to share their status

    1. 1

      Ah man, thanks a lot for the compliment. Both ideas are great, and the first one is cheap so I'm going to try it out straight away (a while ago I tried contacting Lifehacker etc. and got no uptake but I'm going to widen the net this time). Thank you, I really appreciate it.

      1. 1

        I'm not sure how you could contact them, but it's really easy to find people that have an audience and could be interested: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=30+day+social+media

        1. 2

          Niiiiiiice, I gotta say that is such a great way to find these people, which I wouldn't necessarily have realised. I'm sure tons of them will be easy to contact. Jeez, excited for this.

  4. 1

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

    1. 1

      Yup I think you're right. The key question - that I'll be finding out in the next couple of days - is what the conversion from free to paid is like. And also how it affects my retention to have made the product slightly worse to try and get people to pay.

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