Building a free Chrome extension in 3 days and turning it into a 5-figure-MRR ecosystem

When ChatGPT launched, Saeed Ezzati saw that, while the product felt magical, the workspace around it was almost nonexistent. So, he spent a weekend building a Chrome extension for himself.

Today, Superpower ChatGPT has over 420k downloads and 150k weekly active users. And the Superpower Daily newsletter has 350k subscribers. In total, the business has a 5-figure MRR .

Here's Saeed on how he did it. 👇

ChatGPT was magical but messy

I am a software engineer and solo founder based in San Francisco. Before Superpower, I worked as a full-stack engineer for about ten years at various companies, from large corporations to startups, while always keeping a side project alive on nights and weekends. I have always liked building small tools for myself. Superpower started that way, too.

When ChatGPT launched, I used it constantly. The back-and-forth conversation felt like a new kind of computing experience. But after a few days of heavy use, I kept running into the same problem: The conversations were useful, but the workspace around them was missing.

Important threads got buried. There was no good way to organize old conversations. Search was limited. Exporting was awkward. Prompts and useful answers were hard to reuse later.

It was one of those rare moments when a new product felt both magical and obviously incomplete.

Within a few days, I built and launched the first version of Superpower ChatGPT on the Chrome Web Store. It started as a simple browser extension, but it grew into a productivity layer on top of ChatGPT, with features like local history search and sync, folders, conversation export, message pinning, prompt management, writing style and tone options, and much more.

Today, Superpower ChatGPT has over 420,000 downloads, more than 150,000 weekly active users, and thousands of reviews across browser stores. I also run Superpower Daily, a newsletter with over 350,000 subscribers, where I share AI news and useful AI tools.

The business is now at 5-figure MRR, and I still run it as a solo founder.

Prioritizing trust over revenue

My initial motivation was simple: I wanted ChatGPT to be better for my own use.

The first version was very small, but users understood it immediately. People installed it, used it, and started asking for more. Some wanted folders. Some wanted export. Some wanted better prompt management. Some wanted search.

The roadmap came directly from user emails, reviews, Reddit comments, Discord conversations, and repeated pain I kept seeing in public.

The business motivation came later. I saw Superpower as a side project at first, and I wanted to keep the product free because I believed the biggest opportunity was distribution and trust.

Free was not charity. It was distribution.

In a new category, asking people to trust a paid product too early can slow everything down. I wanted users first: real usage, real feedback, real reviews, and real trust. Once the product became part of people's daily ChatGPT workflow, Pro became a natural upgrade instead of a hard sell.

The question became, "How do I support a free product with a fast-growing user base without ruining the ChatGPT experience with random ads?'

That question led to Superpower Daily. Because the extension's users were already interested in AI, I started sharing AI news and useful tools inside the product. Users liked it enough that it eventually became its own newsletter.

Launching within a week of ChatGPT's launch

I built the initial product in two or three days and launched it on the Chrome Web Store within the first week of ChatGPT's launch. I had no funding, no team, no launch budget, and no complicated process. It was just me, my laptop, and a problem I wanted to solve.

The first version was not the product you see today. It only had a few features, and much of it was rough. But it solved one problem clearly enough that people immediately understood why it existed. If I had waited to build the full vision, I probably would have missed the timing.

The core extension is intentionally simple: vanilla JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I do not use a frontend framework inside the extension. For browser extensions, I prefer direct control over performance, bundle size, and how the extension interacts with the page.

The hardest part was not building the first version. The hardest part was surviving the platform underneath it.

ChatGPT kept changing. Buttons moved. DOM structures changed. New features shipped. Old flows broke. Rate limits shifted. A normal web app controls its own environment. A browser extension lives inside someone else's product and has to keep working as that product evolves.

That is why the simplicity of the stack has been so helpful. It lets me adapt quickly.

Outside of the extension, server-side components support the product for subscriptions, account state, newsletter workflows, and internal tooling.

If I had to start over, I would invest earlier in internal tooling, automated testing, and a more robust way to handle ChatGPT UI changes. I would also build more of the web-app side earlier, so the business would depend less on browser extension constraints.

Two revenue streams

Superpower ChatGPT is freemium. The free plan includes most of the core value, with limits on some advanced features. The Pro plan removes limits and gives power users access to the full product.

For the first nine months, the extension was 100% free. That was an intentional decision. In a new market, trust and distribution mattered more than early revenue.

Revenue grew because the free product already had a large audience that understood its value. I did not need to tell users that Superpower existed or explain the problem from scratch. Many of them had already been using it for months. The paid plan became a natural upgrade for people who used ChatGPT heavily and wanted fewer limits.

The second revenue stream is sponsorships through Superpower Daily. The newsletter started to provide value to extension users without putting random ads into their workflow. Over time, it became a serious business by itself. Sponsors want to reach people who actively use AI tools, and that audience is a very good match for Superpower.

Costs were almost nothing initially — my main investment was time. And the margins are still high because I am still solo. I do not have employees. Main costs include servers, software tools, and the time to support and maintain the product. The tradeoff is that everything depends on my focus, so I've learned to look for repeated pain, not just loud feedback.

Product and distribution should not be separate jobs

Being early and shipping something useful when people actively looked for ways to improve ChatGPT was the biggest growth lever. I launched on Product Hunt, posted on Reddit, shared updates on Twitter/X, and made the extension easy to find in the browser stores. But timing only helped because the product solved a real problem.

Reddit was especially useful in the early days. People were already discussing ChatGPT workflows, prompts, productivity, and missing features. I could join those conversations, share what I built, and get honest feedback. It was not a polished marketing campaign. It was more like: "I built this because I needed it. Does it help you, too?"

One of my biggest lessons is that product and distribution should not be treated as separate jobs.

For Superpower, the product created distribution because users shared it. The extension created the newsletter audience. The newsletter brought people back to the product. User feedback shaped the roadmap. Discord, reviews, support emails, GitHub, Reddit, and social media all became part of the same loop.

The channels worked together.

The advantages of speed and feedback

Speed was the most helpful advantage. When ChatGPT launched, the market moved faster than most companies could react. As a solo developer, I could build and ship without meetings, approvals, or a roadmap process. That mattered.

Constantly talking to users was the second advantage. Reviews, emails, Discord messages, Reddit comments, and support requests are not just support work; they are product research. Users often describe the problem better than you can because they live with it every day.

The newsletter was also a good decision. It gave me a direct relationship with the audience instead of depending only on browser store discovery or social platforms. It also forced me to stay close to the AI market. When you write about AI every day, you notice trends, tools, and user behavior much earlier.

Give it away for free — but know why

My advice:

• Start with a problem you understand personally. You build a much more useful product when you are also a user. You notice small annoyances outsiders miss, and these can become valuable features.

• Ship earlier than feels comfortable. The first version doesn't need to express your whole vision. It only needs to solve one problem clearly enough for someone to care. Superpower wouldn't exist at this scale if I had waited for the "complete" version.

• Give people something genuinely useful for free, especially if you enter a new market and need trust. But don't confuse free with having no business model. Free can be a distribution strategy, a feedback strategy, and a trust-building strategy. You still need to know your revenue source.

• Build distribution while you build the product. Post in communities, write, share what you're learning, start a newsletter, build in public, or find another channel that fits you. A good product with no distribution is easy to ignore.

• Finally, listen to users, but don't blindly follow every request. Look for repeated patterns. The best ideas usually show up more than once, from different users, in slightly different words.

What's next?

Superpower started as a small fix for my own ChatGPT workflow. The reason it kept growing is that the problem kept getting bigger.

More people are using AI every day, but their workflows are still messy. Conversations disappear. Useful answers get buried. Prompts are rewritten from scratch. Work is hard to reuse.

That is the opportunity I still care about: making AI work easier to organize, search, reuse, and build on.

My main goal is to keep making Superpower ChatGPT the best productivity layer for serious ChatGPT users. AI tools are becoming part of people's daily work, and I think there is still a lot of room to make that workflow more organized, searchable, reusable, and personal.

I also want to keep growing Superpower Daily. The AI space is noisy, and people need a trusted way to know what matters. The newsletter helps me serve that need and stay connected to the same audience that uses the extension.

Longer term, I want to keep building useful products around AI workflows. I do not want to build things just because they are trendy. I want to build tools that save people time, reduce friction, and improve their existing workflow.

The best place to learn more about Superpower ChatGPT is our website. You can read Superpower Daily here. And you can also follow me on X and LinkedIn.