6 weeks solo, 2 rejections, finally live but nobody told me marketing would be this hard

Congrats on shipping Adrian! This is me though - saw another indie hacker post with the same marketing struggle.

The Reddit karma issue is real. I got banned 3 reddit acc :(((

Day 2 numbers tell you almost nothing, so do not read defeat into them. The real issue: Tabby solves a problem people feel but never search for by name. Nobody types "RAM-pressure-based tab suspension." They type "Chrome using too much memory" or "laptop slow with too many tabs." Meet them there. Two moves that work for utility extensions: tighten your Chrome Web Store listing around those exact pain phrases (the store is a search engine, treat it like SEO), and find the 3 or 4 subreddits and Discords where heavy-tab people already complain (devs, researchers, traders running 80 tabs). You do not pitch there, you answer the complaint with the fix. And the cat is your edge, lean into it. People share a stressed cat. Nobody shares a memory optimizer.

Congrats on shipping and pushing through the rejections. One thing I've noticed is that getting the first users often feels harder than building the product itself. The founders who seem to break through are the ones who spend time talking directly to users and understanding their frustrations before scaling marketing. Keep going — you're much closer than the numbers suggest.

Just launched solo too and hit the same wall. Building felt hard until I had to actually tell people about it. What's helped me a little is getting very specific about who I'm targeting instead of posting everywhere. Still figuring it out.

Reddit low karma problem is real — I hit the same wall. One thing that worked better for me: find 2-3 subreddits where your target user already complains about the exact problem you solve, and lurk for a week before posting. Drop value in comments first. The karma builds fast when you're actually helpful rather than promotional.

Also — 'payment setup took longer than building' is the most universal indie hacker truth I've read this week.

Congrats on shipping, Adrian. Two Chrome Store rejections is practically a rite of passage.

For marketing a RAM tool specifically: don't post on Reddit, search it. Use Reddit search to find threads from people actively complaining about Chrome eating their memory, then reply directly to those people with Tabby as a solution. You're not promoting, you're solving a problem they literally just described. It survives the low-karma filter and converts way better than a launch post.

One more thing worth doing: record a 10-second before/after GIF showing the RAM drop when Tabby sleeps a few tabs. Put it at the top of your Chrome Store listing. For utility tools, motion beats static screenshots every time.

Those Day-2 numbers aren't a marketing failure — 1.6K Reddit views against 9 installs is a message-match problem, not a reach problem. When I launched my lightweight memo app solo, my first ~30 users didn't come from any launch post either; they came from one subreddit where I'd spent a few weeks just answering questions, zero links. By the time I mentioned what I'd built, I wasn't a stranger dropping a tool — I was the person who'd helped them last week.

That's why low karma "hurts": it isn't the number, it's that you haven't banked any goodwill yet. For Tabby, the tab-hoarders who actually feel RAM pain sit in very specific places — show up there as a power user first, ship-log second. Which communities are you already a real member of, not just a marketer in?

One thing I would add: for utility products, the strongest copy is usually a tiny panic moment, not the feature list.

For Tabby that might be "Chrome froze five minutes before a call" or "fans spin up every time I open docs," then show the RAM pressure trigger and a 10 second before/after proof. People do not buy monitoring, they buy the relief of catching the problem before it ruins their flow.

the 9 installs from 1.6k reddit views is actually completely normal for cold reddit traffic (~0.5% is the industry average for browser extensions discovered via posts). the marketing-is-hard frustration is partly miscalibrated expectations versus the actual conversion benchmark. chrome extensions usually need 5k+ store impressions before the conversion data even means something. the chrome store rejection cycle is the actual unsolved pain in this post though. did the second rejection give you a clearer reason than the first?

Man, I feel this so much. Huge congrats on finally getting it live through those rejections, that’s a win in itself!

But you are spot on. I love the coding part, playing with design, and bringing concepts to life. I have a few apps in the App Store myself, but every single time I hit launch, reality hits. Marketing is just incredibly tough, and to be completely honest, pretty boring at times compared to building.

Building is where the fun is, but finding those first users feels like a completely different job. No real advice here (sorry!), just wanted to say you are definitely not alone in feeling this way. Keep pushing!

Two things that moved the needle when I was stuck at the same stage:

Pick ONE distribution channel and run it for 30 days before switching. Most early founders rotate weekly between SEO, Twitter, Reddit, cold email — none of them get enough volume to actually signal anything. Pick the one your ICP already lives on, and post 4× a week minimum.

Track "qualified clicks" not signups. A signup is a lagging metric — by the time it doesn't move, you've burned 2 weeks. Qualified clicks (right ICP + landed on a feature page + scrolled past the fold) tell you within 48 hours whether your messaging is broken or your channel is.

Marketing for solo SaaS is mostly grim repetition with very few feedback points. Hang in there.

One channel that hasn't come up yet: Show HN on Hacker News. Your target user is specifically developers running Docker + VS Code + 40 browser tabs who feel their machine slow to a crawl mid-workday — that's almost exactly the HN audience. They'll immediately understand why monitoring actual hardware RAM pressure is different from Chrome's fixed-timer sleep, and a genuine "I built this to solve my own problem" post survives there regardless of account karma. A short write-up with your honest day-2 numbers (the kind you posted here) tends to land better than polished launch copy. Might be worth trying alongside the Reddit search strategy people have mentioned above.

The Chrome Store rejection loop is brutal — respect for pushing through twice. On the marketing side, one thing that helped us early: stop trying to find users and start going where they already are. We got 258 users in 2 days just by sharing in WhatsApp college groups and personally DMing people on LinkedIn for feedback. No pitch, just 'hey I built this, would love your honest opinion.' People respond to that way more than a cold product link. Tabby solves a real pain — heavy users with 50 tabs open know exactly what you're fixing. Try finding those people in r/productivity or developer Discord servers and just asking what they think. The 1.6K Reddit views means the problem resonates, you just need to get in front of the right crowd

Totally agree — the hardest pivot for me was realizing distribution needs as much iteration as the product itself.

Marketing really is the hardest part — shipping the product feels like a relief compared to getting anyone to notice it.

This really resonates.
Just launched my own solo project this week and the marketing reality hit hard. Building felt like I had full control — marketing feels like shouting into a void.

The Reddit karma point is painfully real, found that out today myself.
What's worked best for you so far in terms of getting those first real users beyond the Chrome Store listing?

one of the things you should have done was to get people to pay before you launch, that way you can easily know if people really want what you are building or you get a real feedback on what will make them pay.
but you have shipped already my advice as a conversion optimizer would be that you try to go deep into the problem the extension solves. position it as a problem that needs solving. show them in your messaging, what they will get if they use the extension and what it will cost them if they don't use the extension (that's a salesman strategy).
there are ways to get users on social apps, it usually takes a while (that's if your ideal users are on the apps). you have to be patient
happy to help with positioning

The gap between 'I built it' and 'people found it' is almost never talked about in builder communities. Most build advice stops at the code.

What actually helped me: instead of thinking about 'marketing', I made a rule -- for every hour of building, I spend 10 minutes in one relevant community. Not pitching. Just answering questions where what I built is a natural example. Slow at first but it sharpens what you build next too.

The distribution problem hits harder than expected every time. What worked for me was creating dedicated landing pages for each specific use case — not a generic homepage, but one page per exact query someone might search. Organic SEO is slow but compounds. For something on the Chrome Web Store, I'd try posting in subreddits where your target users hang out, even with low karma — the trick is to lead with the problem you solve, not the product.

6 weeks solo and actually shipping is already a win.

Curious, where did the 9 installs come from? Chrome Store search, Reddit, Product Hunt, or somewhere else?

I've noticed a lot of builders expect marketing to start after launch, but distribution often turns out to be the harder problem than building.

Felt this. We're a small team building Machine Arena, and the first month of marketing was the same wall — building the thing was the easy part. Two unglamorous things that actually moved for us: (1) Treat your Chrome Web Store listing as the main SEO surface, not an afterthought. Someone searching "suspend inactive tabs" or "reduce Chrome RAM" is already high-intent, and your title + short description carry almost all the weight — put the exact phrases people type there instead of clever branding. (2) For a brand-new account, dropping links in communities mostly gets you ignored or removed; the only thing that compounded for us was showing up as a real participant first and letting people find the product through the profile. Slower, but it stopped feeling like shouting into the void. What does retention look like a week after install? That number usually tells you whether it's really a marketing problem or a positioning one.

Felt this. Just shipped my Shopify app after months solo and hit the exact same wall — the build was the easy part, getting in front of merchants is the actual job. What channels have you tried so far? I'm finding the obvious ones (Reddit) are walled off to developers.

yea marketing does suck.... Do you have editing experience? You could post on social media

The part that got me too: building has a compiler that tells you when you're wrong.

Marketing just gives you silence — you ship and wait a week for noise. Congrats on getting it live though; that's the 90% most people never finish!

The marketing muscle is just newer, not missing.

You said Reddit is brutal for low-karma accounts, and that's true for POSTING. But you don't need to post. You need to reply.

Every day someone writes "Chrome is eating my RAM" or "why is my laptop so slow with 30 tabs open." That person just described Tabby for you. Go find those threads (r/chrome, r/productivity, r/browsers, even X) and answer that specific person with the specific fix. Link only when it genuinely helps them. Helpful replies don't trip the spam filters the way a self-promo post does, and they land on someone at the exact moment they feel the pain.

It's slow because it's one human at a time. But your first 20 users this way will hand you the 5 words they actually use for the problem, and those 5 words become your store listing, your PH tagline, all of it.

What's the most common phrase you've seen people use when they describe this pain?

build/market mismatch hit me the same way. coding's got feedback loops - something breaks, you see it immediately. marketing feedback is just silence, and silence looks identical to 'nobody cares' for weeks.

The “real RAM pressure vs fixed timer” angle feels like the clearest wedge, but it may need to be shown with a very concrete before/after rather than explained. I’d probably aim early marketing at people already complaining about Chrome memory usage in specific contexts (devs, heavy research, too many SaaS tabs) and test whether they care more about “faster browser” or “stop Chrome eating RAM.”

I went through the exact same thing — shipped a Chrome extension, got some Reddit traction, but converting to paid users is a whole different challenge. Still figuring it out myself. Let's keep pushing together.

Congratulations on shipping - the Chrome Store rejection loop alone would have stopped most people. The gap between 'built it' and 'sold it' is where most technical founders get stuck and you've named it honestly which is rare.

The Reddit low karma problem is real - the communities that matter most (r/SaaS, r/entrepreneur) are brutal to new accounts. One thing that helped others I've spoken to: spend a week just answering other people's questions in those subreddits before posting anything about your own product. Karma builds fast when you're genuinely helpful and then your own posts don't get buried.

On the memory pressure angle - have you tried positioning it as a productivity tool rather than a technical one? 'Stop your computer slowing down mid-meeting' might land better with non-technical users than the RAM pressure framing.
Good luck - day 2 with any installs at all is further than most get.

For reddit, low karma makes direct link posting tough. A more effective approach is to jump into threads where people complain about chrome memory or ask for tab managers, and give specific, helpful advice without linking, then mention the extension only when it exactly addresses their need. Subreddits like /r/chrome_extensions have dedicated promotional threads, but building a bit of trust first can increase visibility. The chrome store rejection story you just lived through is the kind of narrative that clicks in developer communities; a post about that experience (without a call to install) could build interest and karma at the same time.

Also, Have you tried digging into where those 1.6K redit views came from? A single thread or keyword might reveal a warm audience to engage with next.

Good luck!

The 6-week grind where nothing happens is the part nobody screenshots, so it feels like you're the only one in it — you're not. Two things that helped me as a solo founder: (1) treat the store listing as your real landing page. For a memory/tab extension, people are literally searching "chrome ram" / "suspend inactive tabs" — put those exact phrases in your title and first line, because store search is intent-driven and compounds without you doing anything. (2) Pick ONE channel you can sustain daily rather than blasting everywhere once. Build-in-public posts (your honest 6-week story, with real numbers) tend to land far better with technical audiences than polished launch copy. The "getting tired 72%" UI is genuinely charming, by the way — lead with that personality. Congrats on shipping.

Congratulations on shipping.

After many years of development and publishing multiple apps is that building the product is only half the battle. Marketing, positioning, distribution take more time (and money) than development itself.

Don’t get discouraged by the early numbers. Most products don’t get traction on Day 2. Keep improving the product, talk to users and keep shipping.

The fact that you went from idea to a paid product in 6 weeks already puts you ahead of many people who never launch at all.

Good luck with Tabby!

Same experience here. What ended up working better than traditional SEO or social was optimising for AI assistants — structuring content so Copilot and ChatGPT cite you when users ask relevant questions. Zero ad spend, but now showing up in AI responses with ~40% share of authority in our niche.
The insight: AI engines prefer structured, branded data over generic content. Worth exploring if you haven't already.

This resonates hard. We had nearly the same week: ~$80 on ads, 51 clicks, and exactly zero signups. The lesson that finally landed for us is that cold/interruption traffic barely converts when the person has no context yet for why they should care.

Two things that have actually moved the needle since: (1) writing genuinely useful content around the specific problem we solve, so people arrive already half-sold, and (2) showing up in communities like this one instead of renting clicks.

For a Chrome extension specifically, 9 installs from 1.6K Reddit views says your leak is the click-to-install step, not awareness. The Store listing's first line and first screenshot do most of that conversion. I'd lead with the felt pain ("Chrome's tab sleeping ignores your actual RAM") instead of the feature name. Congrats on shipping, though — week 2 with real users beats every project that never launches.

Te recomiendo actualizar el campo de la Descripción Corta en la consola de desarrollador de la Chrome Web Store con la siguiente estructura de conversión optimizada, ejemplo :

“Suspende pestañas de Chrome inactivas solo cuando la RAM real se agota. Optimiza el hardware sin temporizadores fijos molestos.”

Esta modificación estratégica permite capturar la demanda de búsqueda existente sin necesidad de realizar promoción activa fuera de la tienda y aporta tres ventajas inmediatas para el posicionamiento del producto:

Eficacia de Indexación: Incorpora las palabras clave con mayor volumen de búsqueda en este nicho de mercado ("suspende pestañas", "Chrome", "RAM") en el campo de mayor peso de la tienda.

Diferenciación Técnica Explícita: Clarifica de forma instantánea al usuario el factor de innovación de la extensión frente a la competencia y las funciones nativas del navegador ("solo cuando la RAM real se agota", "sin temporizadores fijos").

Eliminación de complejidad: Reduce el tiempo necesario para comprender el funcionamiento de la herramienta, facilitando la toma de decisiones por parte de los visitantes de la tienda en menos segundos.

El marketing de extensiones de navegador suele abordarse erróneamente mediante la promoción intrusiva , cuando su ecosistema natural es la búsqueda orgánica basada en la intención del usuario . La Chrome Web Store funciona como un motor de búsqueda vertical altamente indexable que se beneficia del posicionamiento en el motor de búsqueda general de Google.

Observa las herramientas consolidadas en el nicho de optimización de pestañas, como "The Great Suspender Reloaded" o "Tab-Suspender", basan su éxito en la captura de términos de búsqueda recurrentes dentro de la tienda. Estas extensiones estructuran sus descripciones con base en palabras clave de alta conversión como "ahorro de memoria RAM", "suspender pestañas inactivas", "hibernación de recursos" y "liberar memoria del navegador".

La diferenciación competitiva de Tabby (actuar únicamente ante la presión real de la memoria del hardware en lugar de usar temporizadores fijos) debe integrarse sistemáticamente en los campos de metadatos indexables. El título de la extensión y la descripción corta son los elementos más críticos para la indexación y la conversión en la tienda, representando los factores de mayor peso para el algoritmo de búsqueda.

Las audiencias técnicas y los profesionales de la productividad no responden favorablemente a los mensajes de mercadotecnia tradicionales, pero muestran una alta conversión ante los datos empíricos y los registros de desarrollo honestos.

Reddit es impracticable y hostil para la promoción de nuevas herramientas de software para cuentas sin reputación previa.

Two Chrome Store rejections before approval is honestly more common than people share — most developers quietly eat that experience and it's rarely part of the success story. The fact that you pushed through twice says a lot about your commitment to shipping. What caught my attention in your numbers is the 10 early free users alongside 9 paid installs — that's almost a 1:1 ratio, meaning people clearly want this when the friction is removed. That's a strong early signal. It might be worth experimenting with a short free trial even for the paid version, just to collect real activation data and get a few honest reviews on the Chrome Store. Reviews are often the difference between someone installing vs bouncing, especially for a newer listing with no social proof yet.

The "Reddit is brutal for low karma" part hit home — I'm in exactly that spot with a newer account right now, and the thing actually working isn't posting about the product at all. It's answering the questions my future users already ask, one by one, until the account has enough history that people (and automod) stop treating it as spam. The ones you genuinely help end up clicking your profile on their own.

For Tabby specifically, I'd chase the frustration, not the category. Nobody searches "tab manager" — but people constantly write "Chrome is eating all my RAM", "my laptop freezes with 40 tabs open", "why is Chrome using 8GB". Find those exact threads (r/chrome, r/browsers, dev subs, low-end laptop communities) and just be useful where the pain is already on the table — say what helped, not your link. The install tends to follow the help.

Out of those 9 installs, do you happen to know which came from the 1.6K Reddit views vs Product Hunt? That split alone would tell you where the next 6 weeks should go.

Congrats on shipping. Honestly, 9 installs on day 2 is not bad at all for a solo launch with no existing audience.

One thing I’m learning myself: early marketing is less about “more channels” and more about finding where the real pain already exists. For your product, I’d probably focus less on generic launch platforms and more on very specific groups of people who constantly hit RAM limits: developers, researchers, people with many tabs open, low-RAM laptop users, and Chrome power users.

The first useful step might be to talk to those 9 installers directly if you can. Ask what made them install, what almost stopped them, and what problem they expected Tabby to solve. That feedback can probably tell you more than another launch post.

Shipping is already a big step. Now it’s mostly about tightening the audience and message.

The 9 installs on day 2 framing is worth flipping: those aren't "only 9," they're 9 people who saw a real problem and acted on it. Most launches get 0 outside the founder's network. One channel done deeply beats five done shallowly — and the conversations with those 9 are worth more than any launch post. Ask each one what almost stopped them from installing.

Congrats on shipping — Day 2 with paying users and real installs is more than most people ever get.

The marketing wall is real. A few things that helped: (1) Don't fight Reddit karma — find the niche subs where you're not competing against big accounts. r/productivity, r/chrome, r/webdev tend to be more welcoming to tools than the mega subs. (2) The Chrome Store is brutal for organic discovery on its own; treat it as a repository not a channel. (3) The frame that unlocked things for me: "distribution before polish" — spend 50% of your time showing up in the communities where your target users are venting about the exact problem you solve.

We're doing the same thing with BillWatch (utility bill tracking for small businesses) — building in public, posting in threads where small business owners vent about messy bills. Still early but generating pre-order interest: billwatch-landing.vercel.app

Keep going. The product sounds genuinely useful and the Day 2 numbers aren't bad at all for a solo dev with no audience.

"Reddit is brutal for low karma accounts" I can totally relate to this. It is indeed a brutal experience.
I had been struggling with marketing too, and lived it with many startups.
But I know written content is sales for people who hate sales calls, it does the uncomfortable conversation asynchronously, at scale, while you sleep. So I decided to invest on it at the beginning and to systemized it.

the design look great mate good luck

9 installs on day 2 with no established audience is fine. The numbers that matter right now aren't downloads, they're activation rate and whether those 2 active users keep using it after a week.

A few things specific to Chrome extensions:

Your Chrome Web Store listing is your landing page. Most extension installs come from people searching the store directly, not from external traffic. Spend time on your store description, screenshots, and especially the first screenshot (it shows in search results). Search "tab manager" and "memory manager" in the store and look at what the top-ranked results do differently with their listings. Match the format that works.

For the Reddit problem with low karma: don't post about your product. Find threads where people complain about Chrome eating RAM or tabs getting out of control, and leave a genuinely helpful comment about memory management. Do that for a couple weeks. You'll build karma and learn how your target users actually describe their problem, which makes your copy better.

The pricing question is tricky for extensions. Most people expect browser extensions to be free. If you're going paid, you need to make the value gap between free Chrome tab-sleep and Tabby extremely obvious in the first 30 seconds. A comparison GIF showing "Chrome's timer-based sleep vs. Tabby's actual RAM-aware sleep" could be your best marketing asset.

One channel that works well for extensions: find YouTube creators who do "productivity setup" or "developer tools" videos. They're always looking for interesting small tools to feature. Send a short email with a free license and a one-paragraph description. You don't need a big creator. Someone with 5-10k subscribers in the right niche can drive more qualified installs than a general subreddit post with 1.6k views.

Honestly, 9 installs and a handful of active users after 2 days isn't bad for a brand new Chrome extension.
One thing that stood out to me is that you're solving a problem most users don't realize they have. People notice Chrome being slow, but they rarely think "I need better RAM pressure management." That makes distribution harder than the engineering.
Have you considered targeting users who regularly keep 50+ tabs open? They already feel the pain and might be much easier to convert than the average browser user.

yeah, sales and marketing is rough. Even rougher is building something that people may not pay for though. How did you validate that the pain of the built-in sleep mechanisms is great enough to justify paying for an optimized version? Are there other products on the market doing that?

If you've already really nailed that and it is truly just a pain for distribution, a couple thoughts:

1. It sounds like you just started. It's just going to take a ton of reps no matter what channel(s) you try. 2 active users and just a PH post and 1.6k Reddit views actually isn't bad for Day 2 (assuming Day 2 marketing, not Day 2 including build time. If that includes build time too, then super kudos to you, that's awesome, actually). The bigger problem is probably does the margin justify your time investment for what you get per user.

2. Where do your target users lurk, and where does that overlap with how you actually want to engage with them? Find that overlaps

3. At your stage, I'd do a 30-day sprint, and A/B test just two channels. Give each at least two weeks, and hopefully you'll have some data to work with. Swap out the lowest performer until you have at least one channel where you know if you spend x amount of time and money that you will get y users, and that will make you z dollars (which you are happy with).

You'll just have to give some time to learn what hits and what channels work and go from there. Rapid, massive action, paired with what you learn from those actions is the name of your game right now.

Hope that helps

Solo dev too — launched yesterday and the "now what" feeling is very real.

One thing that moved the needle for me on day 2: posting a follow-up maker comment on my Product Hunt listing tied to a specific feature update (not a launch announcement). The 24-hour PH ranking window had closed but the page kept getting visits, and a fresh comment seemed to anchor people who landed there from search. Worth trying for Tabby.

Other thing I'd push you on: 1.6K Reddit views with 9 installs is ~0.5% conversion which isn't terrible for cold traffic — the real question is whether those visitors saw the right thing in the first 5 seconds. What's the first sentence on your landing page doing? If it's "Tabby manages your tabs" that's a feature; if it's "Chrome eats RAM, Tabby fixes that" it's the actual pain.

You got past the rejections and shipped. Marketing pain is real but it stops feeling separate from the build once you have one repeatable channel.

Reddit brutal for low karma accounts, felt that. I launched a fake door test today, same issue. What worked slightly better for me was posting in smaller niche subs where the audience actually has the problem, even if the reach is lower. Less volume, more signal.

Congrats on shipping. $0 day 2 with 9 installs and 1.6k views is not nothing, that's traction data.

Congrats on shipping. The fact that you got through two rejections and still launched says a lot.

On the marketing side, a few things that helped me when I was in a similar spot:

1. Your Chrome Store listing is doing the heaviest lifting right now, even if it does not feel like it. Optimize the title and description for what people actually search (things like "reduce Chrome memory usage" or "tab manager RAM"). Most Chrome extension discovery comes from search inside the store, not external marketing.

2. Reddit with a low-karma account is rough. You already saw that. The move is to stop trying to promote for now and just spend a few weeks being helpful in subreddits where your users hang out (r/chrome, r/browsers, developer communities). Answer questions about memory issues, tab management, browser performance. Build credibility first, and the organic mentions come later.

3. Product Hunt at #228 means you probably launched on a high-competition day or without enough initial upvotes in the first hour. If it is your first PH launch, you can re-launch later (they allow it for major updates). Next time, get 10-15 people who will genuinely upvote and comment in the first 90 minutes. Not fake votes, real people who tried the product.

4. The 10 free users you gave discounts to are your best marketing asset right now. Ask each one personally what they like and what they would change. Their words become your copy, and if even 2-3 of them leave honest reviews on the Chrome Store, that social proof compounds fast.

You are much earlier than you think. Most successful extensions took months to find traction, not days. Keep shipping, keep showing up.

The number to watch here isn't the 9 installs, it's the 2 weekly actives. Talk to both of them this week and ask what almost made them uninstall. If they stick, you have a retention story worth marketing. I've reviewed hundreds of decks as an investor and the pattern repeats: founders treat distribution as a post-launch chore when it's really a product decision. You built for 6 weeks before knowing where customers would come from. Flip that order next time and marketing gets a lot less mysterious.

Congrats on shipping, Adrian! I totally relate to the payment setup struggle—it always takes way longer than building the actual core product. Which payment provider did you end up going with (Stripe, Lemon Squeezy)? Also, monitoring actual RAM pressure instead of relying on fixed timers is a really smart technical approach. Marketing is definitely a grind, but you've built a solid foundation. Keep it up!

Congrats on shipping.
I got flagged on Reddit for mentioning my product too many times in first post. Low karma accounts get zero trust.
What marketing channels have you tried besides Reddit and Product Hunt?
Also ,how did you handle the payment setup? I'm about to set up payments for my own tool and dreading it.

Reddit being brutal for low karma accounts is a pattern almost every solo founder hits. The unlock is finding one specific subreddit where you've been a genuine contributor before, not posting cold. One warm community beats 10 cold subreddits every time.

Your day 2 numbers are more normal than you think. Most products launch to near-silence. The ones that "blow up on day one" either had an audience already or got lucky with timing on a single channel.

A few things that actually moved the needle for me early on:

Pick ONE channel and go deep. Spreading yourself across Reddit, PH, Twitter, IH, and five others at once means you're doing each one poorly. For a Chrome extension, I'd focus hard on the places where your specific users already complain about the problem: developer forums, sysadmin communities, maybe even specific subreddits where people post about Chrome eating their RAM. The people already frustrated are your best early adopters.

Write about the problem, not the solution. Instead of "I built a tab manager," write a short post about "why Chrome's built-in tab sleeping doesn't actually work" with the technical details you clearly know. People share interesting explanations. They ignore product announcements.

Those 9 installs are 9 real people. Email every single one (if you can reach them). Ask what made them install it, what almost stopped them, what they'd pay for. Those conversations are worth more than 10,000 Reddit views. One of them might end up writing a review or recommending you in a thread later.

On Reddit karma: it does get easier. Pick 2-3 subs where your target users hang out and just be genuinely helpful for a few weeks before you ever mention your product. The karma compounds and so does the trust.

The hard truth about extension marketing: Chrome Web Store discovery is basically nonexistent for new listings. Your growth will come from external traffic for a while. Think about what search terms people use when they're frustrated ("chrome using too much memory," "chrome tab management") and make sure you show up in those conversations, even if just with a helpful comment.

You possess the exact antidote to their pain. You can handle the conversion architecture of their landing page and design the direct-response creative assets to kickstart their marketing

"Marketing early-stage products is genuinely hard. I run Meta and TikTok ads for founders at exactly this stage happy to give you some quick feedback on what might be holding back your growth."

This hit home — I just went through the exact same gap. I assumed shipping was the hard part, and marketing would sort itself out. It really doesn't. What's worked better for me than any "launch" was picking 2–3 places my actual buyers already hang out and just being useful there for a few weeks before ever mentioning what I built. Slower, but the
rejections sting a lot less when you're not cold-pitching strangers. Which channel has felt least awful for you so far?

The rejection experience resonates. Preparing a Shopify App Store submission right now and already found a GDPR webhook requirement buried in forum threads from other developers who got rejected for the same reason. Platform-specific rejections always seem to be about something you'd only know after being rejected once.

On marketing: the store listing advice above is right. One thing that helped before having reviews: finding forum threads where people describe the exact problem the app solves, and replying helpfully, no link, just useful. A few of those turned into installs, those users left the first reviews, and the listing started converting better organically. The cold-start is a real wall but it's smaller than it looks.

One thing worth looking at: your Chrome Web Store listing itself is probably the highest-leverage thing to fix right now.

You said 44% of traffic is US, 13% Philippines, 6% Germany. That distribution suggests organic Chrome Web Store search is already working to some degree. People are finding you by typing things like "tab manager" or "memory saver" into the store. The question is what happens after they land on your listing page.

Most extension developers optimize their listing for other developers. But the person searching "why is Chrome using 8GB RAM" at 11pm is not a developer. They are a student with 40 tabs open during finals, or a freelancer whose machine grinds to a halt on video calls. Your listing copy, screenshots, and the first sentence of your description need to speak to that person, not to someone who understands memory pressure APIs.

Tactical thing you can do today: open the Chrome Web Store and search the terms your users would actually type. Look at the first 5 results. Read their listings. Figure out what they say in the first 2 lines (that is all anyone reads before clicking Install). Then rewrite yours to be more specific than theirs. "Automatically suspends tabs when your RAM gets high" is clearer than "intelligent memory management for power users."

The 9 installs from 1.6K Reddit views is actually fine conversion for a cold audience. The store listing is where the compounding happens because every person who searches that keyword tomorrow sees your updated copy.

"Development was hard but doable; marketing was a completely different game" — this is exactly the wall every technical founder hits.

We had the same thing building QRflows. Product felt like progress every day, marketing felt like guessing. The shift that helped us most: stop thinking about channels and start with the question "who has this problem bad enough to google it at 11pm?" For us it was restaurant owners whose menu URL changed after reprinting 500 flyers. That one person defined the first 10 pages we wrote.

Your 9 installs from 1.6K Reddit views is actually decent signal — that's people who completed a manual install process. The problem is probably at the CTA framing, not the product.

The wild part is that 9 installs and 2 active users can teach you more than 1,000 signups ever will. I'd probably spend more time talking to those 2 users than chasing new traffic right now. What made them stick?

This is one of the biggest surprises for technical founders. We often assume the hard part is building the product, but distribution usually takes much longer than development. Two rejections and a launch in 6 weeks is still solid progress. Keep talking to users and sharing the journey, the feedback loop compounds over time.

Congrats on getting Tabby live after two Chrome rejections — that alone filters out a lot of people who stop at the first "no."

This line really landed: "development was hard but doable; marketing was a completely different game." Same pattern on my side. Building felt like progress every day. Distribution felt like guessing.

Your Day 2 numbers are actually more normal than they feel: 9 installs and 2 WAU with 1,600 Reddit views means people looked but didn't convert yet. That's usually a positioning or landing-page clarity problem, not "the product is wrong."

One thing I'd try before adding channels: pick ONE sentence for who Tabby is for (e.g. "Chrome power users with 80+ tabs who hit RAM limits during real work") and make the store listing + first Reddit comment say only that. Reddit karma hurts cold accounts — comments that teach something small (how RAM spikes differ from Chrome's timer) often outperform "I launched" posts.

Genuine question: of the 9 installs, do you know if any came from Reddit vs Chrome search vs PH? That split would tell you what to double down on for week 2.

Happy to swap notes — still learning the marketing side too.

Congrats on shipping—that’s the part most people never finish. And I’ll be honest, marketing will be an uphill battle too. It’s an ongoing effort, but a rewarding one when you start seeing real traction build.

At this stage, I’d suggest focusing on where your users already are—find communities where people are actively talking about the problems your tool solves. Get it in front of them, ask them to try it, and most importantly, gather actionable feedback.

Real reviews and early case studies are a goldmine if used well. Double down on those, and you’ll be taking a solid step in the right direction.

My team worked on a CRO tool a while ago. We found so much luck in “roast my store” threads on Reddit. Any way, brace yourself for 6-8 months of little progress.

Very cool

The buying moment for a tool like this is when someone is mid-rage about Chrome eating their RAM. Searching X and subreddits for posts like "chrome using 12GB, help" and just genuinely replying — here's what's happening, here's a fix, and btw I built something for exactly this — tends to convert far better than launch posts, because you're meeting people at the precise moment of pain. Slower than one big launch, but every install is a real user who needed it. And 9 manual-install conversions on day 2 is a strong signal the problem is real — nice work shipping.

The marketing shock is real — almost everyone who builds solo hits this exact wall.
One thing that helped others in this position: instead of marketing the product, document the journey. Post "Day 3 of trying to get my first paying user" on Twitter/X and Indie Hackers every few days. The builder audience follows the story, not the product — and that audience eventually converts.
Also — 9 installs on Day 2 with zero marketing budget is not nothing. Most people ship to literal zero.
What subreddits did you try beyond the ones that rejected you?

Congrats on shipping! The marketing struggle is real — most builders hit this exact wall. What's worked best for me is focusing on one channel at a time instead of spreading thin. SEO content takes longer but compounds nicely. Have you tried writing about the specific problem your tool solves? That tends to attract the right audience organically. Keep going — 6 weeks to live is impressive.

the 2 weekly active users out of 9 installs is the number worth understanding before you do more marketing. that's a 78% churn rate in the first week and adding more installs on top of that just gives you more churn. curious what you know about why the other 7 stopped using it. did they uninstall, did they just never open it again, and do you have any usage data that shows whether they saw Tabby actually do anything before they stopped? that answer shapes everything about what to fix first

Adrian — looked at your landing page while reading the post. There's one gap that's probably costing you installs, and it's fixable in a few minutes.

Your CTA says "Install for Chrome." That's the Chrome Web Store frame — one click, it installs. But the actual path is three steps: download zip → enable Developer Mode → load unpacked. Your page even explains this clearly: "Tabby is currently awaiting review to be listed on the Chrome Web Store. In the meantime, you can install it manually." That's honest. But it's below the CTA.

Most visitors make the install-or-skip call at the button, before they scroll to the explanation. Someone who clicks "Install for Chrome" expecting the standard CWS flow and lands on a Developer Mode instruction page will often just close it — not because the install is hard, but because it wasn't what they expected.

You posted 9 installs from 1.6K Reddit views. The people who made it through actually completed a three-step manual process. That's strong. The drop-off is likely happening before they get to Step 1 — at the CTA framing.

Two paste-ready options:

Install Now (2-min manual setup)

Or, if you want it friendlier:

Get Tabby — Step-by-Step Install Guide

Either version tells a motivated user what's coming before they click. No surprises, no bounce from the Developer Mode screen.

If this is useful, I'd love to hear how it goes.

The "nobody told me marketing would be this hard" part hits. Building the product felt deterministic; marketing some days feels like shouting into a void. What's been your single best channel so far — or is it still all experiments?

Respect for shipping and being transparent about day 2 numbers — most people hide this.

The Chrome Store rejection loop is brutal, glad you pushed through.

I'm building Modify, a Shopify CRO SaaS — same situation, first real users are the hardest part.

What moved the needle for me early:

• Direct outreach to 20-30 people who have the exact problem (not Reddit cold posts)
• Find one community where your target user hangs out and add value before pitching
• Show the "before/after" of your product visually — numbers and screenshots convert better than descriptions

For Tabby specifically: post in r/productivity or r/pcmasterrace showing a screenshot of RAM usage before vs after Tabby. Visual proof beats everything.

What's your

Shipped my own first app four weeks ago (chore app for ADHD kids), so I'm reading this from one trench over. Two things I learned in week one that cost nothing:

1. View-source your landing page and search for "noindex". Mine shipped with a leftover staging tag and the site was literally invisible to Google for the whole first month - every backlink I'd earned was pouring into a bucket with no bottom. Two-minute check, ten-minute fix.

2. Start the directory clocks now, even if you plan to launch later: AlternativeTo won't accept submissions until your account is 7 days old, and TinyLaunchpad's free Monday launch slots were booked weeks out when I submitted. The waiting periods compound - create the accounts the day you ship.

Also +1 on the before/after GIF advice above - for a RAM tool, that demo IS the marketing. Rooting for the cat.

I'm not so sure marketing is the problem as much as conversions to revenue. I've only built one chrome extension that was a free tool so I can't speak 100% on experience there, but my current project orbem(dot)studio is in that same situation of people like it when they see it, but converting them from free to paid subscribers is a whole other beast. And Reddit is so mean I got turned off from any sort of self promotion there.

If you do have a website for converting, I suggest installing Microsoft Clarity. Its a free tool that allows you to see exactly what visitors are doing. What they click, have trouble with. What they're reading more and where they drop if so. I went from 0 free sign ups to optimizing and getting about an average 10 a day just from tweaks based on real user experiences.

Good luck!

Thanks for sharing the numbers so openly. Going from zero to shipping in six weeks as a solo builder is impressive. I've noticed that a lot of dev tools take time before the first revenue because users need to trust that they won't break their workflow. Have you considered reaching out directly to power users with 50+ tabs open or people using low-RAM laptops? That audience might feel the pain much more strongly.

This resonates. The hard part is that “marketing” is too broad until it becomes exact-intent. For Kinetic Override I stopped thinking “Android users” and started hunting for very narrow pain: no-root auto clicker, macro recorder, repeated taps/swipes in idle games, permission trust. Much easier to write useful replies when the pain is that specific.

I too am trying to market my product but really struggling to do so, especially on reddit. Could you tell me exactly which reddit pages did you post on to acquire users?

Congrats on shipping, Adrian! Surviving two Chrome Store rejections is basically a rite of passage for extension developers.

Your product solves a highly specific, visceral pain point (anyone whose laptop fan starts screaming because of 50 open Figma/Docs tabs understands this).

Since you're pivoting to marketing, here are two high-yield, zero-budget tactics that work incredibly well for hardware-related utilities:

1. Visual Proof (The "Before/After" GIF): For RAM tools, seeing is believing. Make a 10-second screen recording of your system's Activity Monitor/Task Manager showing the exact moment Tabby sleeps a tab and frees up 1GB of RAM. Put this at the very top of your landing page.

2. Guerrilla Reddit (Pain-Intercept): Reddit is brutal for direct promo. Instead of making posts, stop posting. Use search filters to find people in subreddits like r/chrome, r/macbookpro, or r/sysadmin who are actively complaining about Chrome eating their memory. Reply to them directly, explain why the built-in Chrome timer is flawed (what you wrote here), and offer your tool as a direct solution.

You've built the engine, now you just need to direct the traffic. Keep pushing!

Congrats on shipping! Most people never make it past the idea stage.
The numbers may look small, but you've already got users, feedback, and a working product. That's more valuable than months of planning. Keep sharing your journey publicly and focus on showing real-world RAM savings. The marketing learning curve is brutal, but consistency compounds.

Rooting for you 🚀

The Chrome store rejection angle is actually content gold, especially the fact that they rejected a memory tool twice. There are a lot of devs who've dealt with the Chrome store review process and would read a post about what happened. Could be worth writing up the experience even if it feels off-topic from marketing — it reaches exactly the right audience.

One thing extensions have going for them that most SaaS products don't is the store itself acts as a distribution channel over time. The listing page ranks in Google for specific queries, so if someone is out there searching for ways to reduce Chrome memory usage, the right title and description can keep bringing installs months after launch. That long tail adds up.

The directory grind is underrated for tool products like yours. This week I worked through the free tiers: AlternativeTo (needs a 7 day old account, worth the wait since it ranks for X-alternative searches), SaaSHub, SourceForge, and Fazier (free tier wants 3 comments plus a footer badge, takes 20 minutes). Half of the supposedly free directories turned out to be paywalls after you fill the form, BetaList and Toolify among them, so check pricing before writing copy. For a RAM tool specifically I would answer actual Chrome-eating-my-memory questions on forums rather than doing launch-style posts, that search intent matches exactly what Tabby solves.

The marketing shock is real. Most builders hit the same wall. The product gets finished and you suddenly realise distribution is a completely separate skill set nobody warned you about.

Two things that actually helped me early. Reddit requires patience before it pays off. Low karma accounts get buried but if you spend a couple of weeks genuinely contributing to threads before posting anything about your product, you get treated differently. That karma threshold matters more than people talk about.

With a utility tool like Tabby your buyer is already out there searching for the problem. Someone right now is typing "Chrome eating all my RAM" into Google or Reddit.

Are you showing up anywhere in those conversations? One well placed answer on a thread where someone is actively complaining about browser memory can outperform a Product Hunt launch.

Day 2 is still Day 2. The people who crack marketing are just the ones who kept showing up after the first week of silence.

The numbers honestly look normal for Day 2. A lot of founders compare their launch to the rare success stories and forget that most products start with single digit users, not hundreds.

One thing that stood out is that you already have 10 people willing to install and try an early version. I'd spend more time talking to those users than chasing bigger launch platforms right now. Understanding why they installed, whether they keep it enabled, and what made them care is usually more valuable than another thousand impressions.

Also, browser extensions have an advantage many SaaS products don't the problem is often visible every day. If users genuinely feel their browser slowing down because of memory pressure, word of mouth can compound surprisingly well. The hard part is proving that value clearly inside the first few minutes of use.

I'd be careful assuming the hard part is marketing.

The product is live, people are installing it, and the bigger question may be what specific moment makes someone decide their current tab-management workflow is no longer acceptable.

The risk is collecting lots of marketing advice before you're sure what event actually creates the buying decision.

That's not a call I'd make casually in a thread.