Launched our first chrome extension 😳

What

We just published the 2.0 of our niche product to transcribe your YouTube videos to the Chrome Web Store.

You can now transcribe your videos directly from YouTube Studio instead of having to remember to use our service, we simply insert a button next to where you usually add subtitles to your video already anyway.

Check the pic below 👇 for a showcase and to see my balding progress 😎

This changed a flow from:

1. Remember to go to our website
2. Click around 5-6 times
3. Visit 2 different websites (YouTube and ours)

to just:

1. One-click in YouTube studio

And the "trigger" for the action being right where you expect it is "unbeatable" as the friction is super low.

Why?

We did this for 2 main reasons:

In short:

Retention and carving out our USP

Long story 👇

1. Make it super easy for recurring customers to get their job done efficiently (we have a handful of customers that come back multiple times per week, despite our old solution being super clunky)

2. We're a niche solution that's just for YouTube videos, this allows us to build a feature set that's tightly integrated with YouTube and now having to worry about being a general-purpose transcription product (there's a bunch of those already), this enables us to stand out between other competitors that are casting a wider net and is one of the main advantages of niching down.

Learnings

Building Chrome extensions is a bi*ch, especially interacting between the different parts of the app that run either within the context of the website you're trying to add elements to (Content script) or the main UI elements of your app (Popup).

Now we had close to zero experience building a chrome extension before and I'd definitely either be sure to: Know what I'm doing or be very certain that the extra effort is worth it. As a comparison it took us:

• 1 day to build the initial MVP on Web
• 2-3 months (part-time) to build out the chrome extension

Now granted a lot of the time was also spent integrating Google login and YouTube API but those were known time-drags (deep integrations are usually costly in terms of time) we definitely underestimated the amount of work that goes into the extension itself.

Next steps

• Launch 2.0 on Product Hunt
• Link building outreach (SEO)
• Content creation (SEO)
• Sell-out
• Bro down

Plugs

If you use YouTube as a channel for building your audience, feel free to check out the extension in the Chrome Web Store or click the next link if you're unsure why you should be adding transcripts