Amazing Tabs From Mars

As I've used the Chrome extension myself on my daily activities I've also been the main test user. Small issues have popped up and most of the times those have been quite quick to resolve.

Oh, I did move the whole backend side of things from AWS to GCP during one weekend. It was a bigger thing of course but in the end went faster than I expected. During November I pushed a few new versions out to the app store.

I didn't really focus on the description of the extension in the Chrome app store. Together with the fact that I haven't done any promotion nor pushed out content that would bring some organic eyeballs, I wasn't surprised that rarely would people find their way to the extension page on the app store. Nor to to the website of the extension.

That has been fine for me so far. I am, however, starting to think (read: worry) about the required marketing and "make visible" efforts I'm likely going to tackle very soon.

I got my extension published in Chrome store. And not to my great surprise it was basically hidden from public. I did add some basic description but for many weeks nobody stumbled upon the extension page, let alone install it.

It didn't really matter too much at this point because I knew there were quite a few serious bugs in my humble extension. I continued fixing these in late October, and pushed out weekly new versions of the extension. Bottom line: though a little slow, there was nevertheless progress.

Lockdown released some time to actually start thinking of the design and functionalities of browser extension. And then finally to jump into developing a first version from March onwards.

This was actually one of many streams of activities I was engaged with during Q2 2020. Q3 wasn't less hectic. For example, I had a baby boy in July. Did some time-consuming consultancy gigs august, and finally starting a new full time job in September.

But that being said, I was still able to push the project forward every now and finally pushed the first version out to Chrome Extensions web store. That was an exciting moment!

The initial idea for creating a browser tab manager came up already in 2019. I very much tackled with the problem of having too many tabs open myself. And I saw so many people having the same problem.

Over the past few years I had probably tried out all tab managers out there. Some were visually beautiful, some were functionally amazing. I did love some of these products, particularly Tabs Outliner - mainly because of its feature to "save" all open tabs automatically. In most other tab managers you would have to manually save tabs which didn't seem to work for me.

In the end, after years of using several tab managers, and still slightly disappointed, I knew there was demand for one more which solves problems other extensions don't.

How much demand? At least one person ;-) Yes, myself. There was no actual market research done as this really started (and continued) as a passionate personal project.