IJust shipped my Chrome extension after 2 months of solo building
I built LomuTab because I was frustrated opening a blank new tab 50 times a day while working. Every tool I needed was somewhere
else — notes in Notion, bookmarks buried, timers in another tab. So I built a modular widget grid that lives on the new tab page.
That's the boring origin story. Here's the part I actually want to talk about.
The flywheel I didn't plan
While building a Docs widget (think: lightweight step-by-step guide maker, like Scribe but it lives in your new tab), I realized
every shared doc is a growth loop:
- User documents a workflow → shares lomutab.com/share/... with a teammate
- The viewer sees the doc with a "Made with LomuTab" badge at the bottom
- No account needed to view it — just opens in the browser
- Viewer installs the extension
The share link is free forever, even if the creator's Pro trial expires. I want people to keep sharing.
A few technical things that nearly broke me
MV3 killed a few approaches I had planned. The side panel API (chrome.sidePanel) is newer and surprisingly capable — I built the
whole screenshot + annotation editor in there using Konva.js.
Full-page screenshots were interesting: you stitch the page by scrolling and calling captureVisibleTab repeatedly. Turns out
Chrome rate-limits that API to 2 calls/second. Found that out the hard way on long pages.
For sharing Docs I went with Supabase — the content lives server-side so URLs stay short and shareable in Slack/WhatsApp. For
screenshots I store the image in Supabase Storage with a 30-day TTL that resets on every view (so if it's being actively used, it
never expires).
Where I'm at
Just got accepted to the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lomutab/hllkbpoipcplgjidicomiakedmmombkb
Zero paying users so far. Free tier is generous on purpose — I want people to actually use it before I ask for money. Pro is
$7.99/mo for unlimited widgets, the Docs autodoc feature, and a few pro-only widgets (weather, stocks, color tools).
Using LemonSqueezy for payments. Haven't had to think about it once since setting it up, which is exactly what I wanted.
What I'm unsure about
Cold start for extensions is brutal. You need reviews to rank, but you need users to get reviews. If anyone here has cracked early
distribution for a Chrome extension without relying on ProductHunt spikes, I'd genuinely love to hear it.
Also curious — is anyone else building on the new tab page specifically? Feels like an underexplored surface.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lomutab/hllkbpoipcplgjidicomiakedmmombkb
The cold start problem is real — you need reviews to rank but users to get reviews. Classic catch-22.
I'm launching two iOS apps on June 23rd and facing the same distribution question. What's worked so far: Product Hunt coming soon page (building followers before launch day), genuine engagement on Reddit in relevant subreddits, and a LinkedIn post about the origin story that got more traction than expected.
On Product Hunt specifically — the 'coming soon' page has been useful for building a notification list before launch day rather than launching cold. Might be worth doing that for LomuTab if you haven't already.
Good luck with it — the flywheel idea with the shared docs is clever, that kind of built-in viral loop is exactly what makes distribution easier over time.
Good work - Distribution is the keys try out campeigns may help
The distribution problem may be real, but I'd be careful assuming it's the first bottleneck.
The interesting part of the post is that the Docs widget sounds like the growth loop, while the Pro plan sounds like the monetization layer. Those are not always the same thing.
The risk is spending months solving acquisition before knowing whether the behavior that spreads LomuTab is also the behavior that eventually pays.
That's worth tightening properly before chasing too many distribution experiments.
If useful, drop your email and I'll send the tighter activation-to-paid read in a way that's easier to use than a thread discussion.
That's a sharp point — and honestly the most useful thing anyone's said since I posted this. The flywheel brings installs, but I have no visibility yet into whether those users actually activate or ever become the kind of person who pays. I'm early enough that I can still tighten that before scaling anything. For now I'm watching shares and paid conversions as the only two signals I have. What activation signal would you look at first for something like this?
Appreciate that.
The reason I didn’t answer it directly in the first comment is that I don’t think there is one universal activation signal for something like this.
The useful version is figuring out which behavior actually predicts “this user is likely to become a payer later” versus just “this user liked the free widget.”
That can get misleading fast if the wrong behavior becomes the north star.
Happy to put the tighter activation-to-paid read in writing if useful — easier than trying to piece it together across thread replies.