Shash7's road to $1000 in 2 weeks

Hey folks Shash here, I'll be building and monetizing a Chrome extension in 2 weeks time.

Couple of things - Don't expect clear concise grammer from these writeups. I'll be posting every 2-3 days. Also, there will be a lag of 2 days between the actual work and the writeups.

Let's go

***Preface

Hypothesis:

• Developing an app is fundamentally easy.

• If you want to earn the big bucks, focus on the 80%

In some ways, I'm doing this to prove the hypothesis.

*** Day 1
Validating the idea

So I designed a very well done widget which shows contextual information for any link on a page. Sounds ambitions eh. Well after building this, I went around trying to validate the idea but no dice. I knew it had to be a paid product as there was way too much expensive scraping going in the backend.

So I decided to use the same tech and work on something which could be validated and launched quickly.

I went to CWS and looked around for a popup widget plugin. Hunting around for niches. Then I found one. Highligher/Text annotation extensions for doing research.

Quickly I made a list of all these extensions and dumped their info in a spreadsheet. I made columns for total installs, last updated date, ratings, comment count, etc.

Then I personally tried every annotation extension out there.

This was my findings:

• I gave a rating between 1 and 5 for their UI. The max score was 4 and the average was 2.5. And that was me being lenient. All of these extensions had absolute shit UI.
• Most extensions(around 90%) required creating an account. People hate doing this. I read the reviews and saw people absolute hate doing this just to mark annotations.
• Users 2nd biggest complaint was about extensions not working sometimes. If I were to wager, this is because of server side storage and the server going offline and not saving notes.

About monetisation:

• All extensions were free but a few(3-4) were freemium.
• More on that, I truly believe some of these extensions collect data for nefarious reasons. Generally speaking, most of these extensions had very broad permission settings and this combined with the fact that they were completely free but you needed to signup meant that something was not right.
• In any case, if I value my data, I would rather pay for a extension.

About usage:

• There are heaps of users using these extensions. The biggest one clocked in at around 100,000 installs(I may have missed a zero there)
• For some reason there was a big wave of these annotation extensions 3-4 years ago. Nowadays there's none. The latest one on my list was released in '18.
• This is probably because larger note taking apps like Evernote offer annotation features. I'm not worried about this, in fact this will be my USP.

Armed with this knowledge, I'm off to creating a gameplan. Here's how it looks like:

I'll be releasing updates every 2-3 days. You can follow me here for notifications.

Let me know if you any questions.