Looking for a solution that didn't exist: how my Chrome extension was born out of frustration.

As an entrepreneur, I keep on consuming content that can make me a better business person.

Be it online courses, Youtube videos or social media content, I frequently save interesting pieces that I organize/bookmark or download to my PC.

It was always super easy to download videos from Youtube, Facebook, Instagram etc... Tools exist for such platforms, and most of them offer a freemium option.

However it was ALWAYS frustrating to download Wistia videos.

Many courses I've purchased had their vids on Wistia, and it was almost impossible for me to save interesting lessons to my device.

I researched tools and Chrome extensions, but was never lucky to find one. I tried to go into the Wistia iframe code to look for something that can lead me into downloadable link. But nada...

For many year, I thought Wistia was designed as a black box on purpose. I thought they made it impossible for anyone to download their videos.

Last month, I came across a series of business video lessons that I really wanted save for future reference. Too bad they were uploaded on Wistia. But I decided to give it one more shot, so I surfed Google for a solution. Luckily, I stumble upon a discussion board where someone was describing a manual method to download Wistia vids.

It wasn't straightforward, took several steps to complete but it worked!

Looking back at the frustrating time I had searching for a solution, I decided I needed to automated that manual work for my own use. So I create a simple Chrome extension that easily enabled me to download any Wistia video anywhere.

It worked well for me and I wanted others to also benefit from it.

The Wistia Video Downloader extension was approved today by Google and went live on the Chrome Webstore 🙂 And I'm feeling kind of proud for creating my first extension ever 🙂

I've been following this community for over a year now and totally appreciate the many stories I've read here. That contributed to shaping my ambition and way of thinking about coming up with solutions to existing problems.

So as a way to give back to the community, I'm sharing the story of how I got started, hoping it will also inspire some of you. If you happen to use my Chrome extension, I'd appreciate if you'd share your very honest feedback (I trust you on that!)!

I'd love to hear from you on ways to improve it or offer more features.

This tiny success also got me to draft up some other ideas for a Chrome extension, I'll make sure to share my journey going forward.

Happy indie hacking!

Update: a week after launching, I stand at 200+ users 🙂