Highlighter Extension: A product for a existing google search, but without understanding much audience
I am more of a hobbyist (or wannabe indiehacker?) and this time I decided to try something different: build a product, not just for the existing problem, but for existing google search. And to [hopefully] piggyback on google's own self-promotion try doing a google extension.
I have found an area that I, as a software developer, have a bit of sympathy - need to search for many terms simultaneously (e.g. when you search for "alert", "warn" and "MyBadClass" on the same page with the logs streaming.
Popularity study
Semrush research showed a bunch of relatively popular terms. Some examples are (showing number for USA audience only):
- highlighter extension - 1000 searches a month
- highlighting extension chrome color - 2400
- highlight extension - 1000
and so on, with a relatively low keyword difficulty.
Search results seem to be about a product I am developing indeed: there are mostly exactly search-highlight tools, but also tools to highlight-yourself-we-save-the-highlights and a bit of hair highlighting (but that's clear 3rd group :)). I have also checked that similar extensions have dozens of thousands of users and are even paid (i.e. demand exists).
Main target audiences seem to be not exactly software developers, but researchers, students and sometimes OSINTers who sometimes need to search for dozens or even hundreds of terms at once.
The product - Highlighter Extension
And here's the creatively named (also to stay closer to search terms) Highlighter Extension - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/highlighter-extension/dfhmehiahpefcffojiocmodpapdbglfc
Works nice, looks beautiful, was published about a week ago and has 80+ users from just few reddit posts and people just finding it in and.. I am not sure how to continue with it. Thing is without really understanding the needs of the exact target audience I've built a tool that probably works for them a bit, but more for my own use cases.
What do you think of the approach?
Have you tried building products for the existing search demand? How do you make sure that you are not just satisfying the search questions, but actually understand the problem and the target user needs?
