Why browser extensions are a good way to start indie hacking
If you’re looking to get into indie hacking, you might take a look into making browser extensions — I think they’re a surprisingly good place to start!
Here’s why:
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Your extension can modify functionality of existing sites instead of having to build your own app from scratch. This lowers the scope of what you need to build while also allowing you to piggyback off the existing customer base of the existing app for your own extension — their customers can become your customers.
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Chrome extensions are popular and there’s not a lot of them. Chrome itself has around 3 billion users and there are only ~200k extensions listed in the Chrome web store (and most of them are pretty bad). Compare that to the ~1 billion iPhones in the world with ~3.6 million apps in the App Store.
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The Chrome Web store can give you a surprising amount of organic traffic with no effort. See Marko’s great post There's One Acquisition Channel Where "Build it and They Will Come" Still Holds True for how marketplaces can help your product grow without much effort on your part (although I’d still recommend having other distribution channels in mind too).
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It's free to make and distribute extensions. Well ok, I think there’s a one-time $5 fee to register as a developer on the Chrome web store, but other than that… it costs nothing to build an extension yourself, your extension is distributed for free on the Chrome Web store, you don’t have to pay any hosting costs, and no company will take a cut from your profits like Apple.
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Extensions are just JavaScript. This makes them pretty simple to develop and often makes them a good way to learn to code.
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You can charge for extensions easily with ExtensionPay. ExtensionPay is a service I made to help extension developers get paid. It lets developers take one-time and subscription payments directly in their extensions without needing to write any complicated server code or pay for hosting — it’s literally just
if (user.paid) …. ExtensionPay is also open-source and works across all browsers. It’s great — I made it to use in my own extensions and it has vastly lowered the amount of time and money it takes me to build and charge for extensions.
With how easy and low-cost it is to build, distribute, and charge for browser extensions, I’d say that makes them a pretty good place to start indie hacking. It lowers a lot of barriers so you can focus on learning to make and iterate on a valuable product.
Some downsides to starting with extensions:
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In general, customers aren’t as familiar with paying for browser extensions vs. apps or SaaS. Even so, I found that extensions created by indie hackers can actually make a good amount of money (here's 8 extensions that do).
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Some users are wary of using extensions because they can access data on sites they visit.
That’s all I can think of now. Are there any other downsides?
How to get started?
To get started I’d google for tutorials, try to find complaints about the functionality of relatively large sites, or think about common issues you encounter on the popular sites you visit and how you’d like it to work instead.
If you want to make money, I’d suggest building an extension for a site where customers are already paying money to use it — this way you know they’re already willing to pay.
To get ideas for extensions, you might also look on the Chrome web store for extensions that have a lot of users but haven’t been updated in a while, or extensions with a lot of users with poor reviews. I made a spreadsheet with all Chrome store extension data here. As our own @TimLeland points out, there are lots of potential opportunities coming up with the forced shift to Manifest V3.
Nice post!
Here's an open-source Typescript + React starter project for anyone wanting to skip a few steps of hassle with just plain JS: https://github.com/abstractalgo/ext-react
It's a custom setup so you can build content script, popup script and options page as React apps, and all those and a background script transpiled from Typescript. All gets built into a ready-to-publish files.
Great post! Over the past few years, several companies have built their initial user base from Chrome extension. Loom, Honey, Grammarly, and 1Password to name a few. Without browser extensions, these companies most likely wouldn't exist.
The key takeaway is to use the extension to enhance your company. Users usually think of extensions as free tools so to charge, you have to change their mindset. I'm attempting to do this with my free URL Shortener Extension that has paid plans to access additional features when users sign up to T.LY.
Feel free to reach out if anyone has questions about browser extensions.
https://twitter.com/Tim_Leland
this fact gets shared a lot but IMO it's the wrong way to look at it..
The browser equivalent of an iOS app is not an extension, it's a web page. And there are billions of web pages out there.
The iOS equivalent of a browser extension is called an App Extension - something that customizes the experience. Dunno how many there are but it's probably in the thousands instead of 3.6 mill.
If you are going to ship a successful extension, you'll need an idea that actually needs to be delivered to customers as an extension for it to work. It's not just an app.
thanks for sharing! And wonder if you are planning to add multiple Payment processors like Paddle on ExtensionPay?
Interesting, I havent really considered extensions, but its a good idea
Hmmm, I agree.
Even at instaminutes.com, we first built our Chrome extension to test our idea.
As you mentioned, we could build the extension using JavaScript in much less time and got great feedback from our early users. Though, It's a tool to summarize meetings into short notes automatically, chrome extension only works when our users are taking meetings via Chrome browser.
Other users who take meeting on Zoom desktop app or mobile, they are not able to use Instaminutes Chrome Extension.
Any solution would you suggest to solve this problem?
It's indeed easy to write extensions there easy to go to the market, great for MVPs or to validate an idea.
Reviewing process takes few days tho, looking forward to implement ExtensionPay for my extension which I created for German market.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kleinanzeigen-plus/cgailbbhhcmdglfanagajfjffdmbcfoi?hl=en-GB
Highly agree!
I'd say the same thing applies to Visual Studio Code extensions. If developers are your target audience, this is a great opportunity. Note that VSCode extensions do not necessarily need to provide functionality for coding. Have a look at vsinder which is a funny one.
If you’re looking to get into indie hacking, you might take a look into making browser extensions — I think they’re a surprisingly good place to start!
Here’s why:
They’re cheap and fast to develop. You can make one in a day or two. And if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t sunk much time or money into it.
They’re easy to market. They have that “viral” aspect to them — if someone likes yours, they start using it and recommending it to others who also start using it. And the process repeats itself.
You can make money with them! If yours is popular, you can charge for it. Or you can put ads on your extension (but be careful with this).
I think the biggest reason browser extensions are such a great starter project is simply because they’re really fun to make. I did one recently as a hobby project, and I was surprised how well it turned out!
great post Glen.
After a couple of pivots, we realized that the Chrome Store was an easy and fast way to try our new beta. In fact, I dug so deep, that I built my own benchmark to better understand how others were doing. Feel free to use it: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B8YvdeGZRzA3NISgqlCHI9c6cf2_DYGC_P8mh18tEb0/edit#gid=1397467689
Just to play Devil's advocate:
Wouldn't you double the platform risk?
First Google can shut you down anytime, since they're your sole distribution and revenue channel.
Next the website you're building an extension for can also prevent extensions from working reliably if they don't agree with your use case.
Just a few things to keep in mind!
Great points extensions can be removed but in my experience building extensions over the past 7 years, as long as you follow the developer guidelines you should not have any issues. There are extensions built on top of Gmail that can break when Google updates its UI. Those are tough extensions to get to work consistently.
Now that you mention it, I feel like it's par for the course for indie hacking.
Any API, library, framework, package, etc. can introduce updates and breaking changes at any time and then deprecate the older versions you're using, and all of a sudden you have to drop everything you're doing to do the migration.
I'm quite surprised there isn't much competition for Chrome extensions though.
Wouldn't the low barrier-to-entry attract a whole bunch of indie hackers to every single niche?
Really agree with this. The easiest way to start is when you find want to tweak/customize/automate your experience in one site.
I made BetterSearch -- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bettersearch/dljpnnljallpkofiiajajdnakilolkoh because i wanted to easily search through some articles on Medium straight from my homepage.
Completely agree! One of the core parts of https://www.swipewell.app/ is a Chrome extension.
The tech is a lot of fun to work with and there are many possibilities for what you can build
Thank you for this Glen!
I had an app idea years ago that I shelved because my cofounder and I didn't have the technical expertise to build out a full app, or, in our first stage a personalized quiz. (the idea was finding beginner-friendly camping gear on any site, the landing page is still up)
I've been in reviving mode lately and I definitely think a Chrome extension is the way to go.
I had no idea there were so few extensions!
Plus it's a easy way to dip into marketplaces without code - you can build extensions with Buildr.
Funny you say that because I have actually created a simple chrome extension that I am still convinced it is the most useful product I created so far XD. I even did a podcast episode about it. However, I realised that people don't like to install this kind of extensions so much because all the power they have...
Hi there!
Thanks for bringing up the theme! It's an excellent beginning to Indie Hacking.
I just launched a browser extension named RatePunk (https://www.ratepunk.com/), which compares hotel prices live. We included the main booking sites & it pops up showing the prices on other websites, so you only need to search on one.
The most significant downside is that people often confuse it with an app or don't get the way extensions work in general.
We didn't really have plans to monetize it just yet, but your tool might be super valuable in the future!
ExtensionPay seems really nice, might give it a go for https://www.updog.marketing if we decide to monetize one day 😄
What is the ideal tech stack to start building chrome extensions? (I'm new to web dev)
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all you need to get started. A trick I don’t think everyone knows about is you can view the source code of any extension using this tool: https://timleland.com/how-to-view-source-code-of-an-extension/
Any stack you can learn fast. Vue, React, jQuery - you'll find all of those js libs if take a look at the code of extensions already installed in your browser. Personally, I'd prefer react or vue. Play with both of those in any online js sandbox and make your own decision
There are plenty boilerplates you can pick from (basis what you are building). I prefer react over standard CE setup. Have built multiple CE before can help get started.
Here's a few resources you can check -
https://github.com/satendra02/react-chrome-extension
https://github.com/lxieyang/chrome-extension-boilerplate-react (I suggest this)
This is a good read on how to build a CE -
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-to-build-a-rich-chrome-extension-quickly-with-create-react-app-and-redux-d9b64cf64832