I shipped my first Chrome extension. Building it was the easy part.

This project started out to scratch my own itch. I love reading long articles, but screen fatigue makes it brutal. So I built a Chrome extension that reads them aloud for me.

I started small, just solving the problem for me, explored several Text-to-Speech models with a rough prototype. But I kept reaching for it daily, so I kept adding things:

• A floating player to control speed and switch voices.

• Word and sentence highlighting so I never lose sight of what's being read.

• Clicking any sentence to jump straight to it.

Each feature was small, but together it started feeling like a real product. My background is in software engineering, so this part felt natural. That part was fun.

Then I tried to actually launch it. I had no idea how much I didn't know:

• Registering a trading name

• Getting a virtual business address

• Setting up a support number and email

• Picking a merchant of record

• Writing Privacy Policy and Terms of Service pages

None of that is hard in hindsight, but each one was a new rabbit hole I didn't expect. This took way longer than building the product itself.

In hindsight, this process opened my eyes on how a product is built overall.

Now I'm learning marketing, distribution, and sales from scratch. It's gonna be a fun learning experience for me and IndieHackers seem to be a great resource to learn everything about growing your own product.

If you've been down this road, I'd love to hear what you wish you knew earlier.

Check out the demo in my landing page at https://textreads.com. You can also try it out yourself by installing it from the Chrome Web Store.