Chrome Tools

I've had reaching out to influencers on my TODO list since the project started, but wanted to figure out pricing before doing that. Now that I think we've figured out how and how much people are willing to pay I decided to reach out to a bunch of bloggers ranking highly for key search terms related to the tool. So far I've gotten no responses though. Since the tool is a little "black hat" I suspect most people won't be willing to endorse it sadly. This is one of the limitations of the business and one that I'll be sure to avoid in future businesses.

After switching back to the one-time purchase pricing, we've made $47 in the last 7 days, which is nearly double what we made over the same time period when we tested increasing the price from $1 to $10. Let's see what the rest of the month has in store for us :)

We tried going with a subscription payment model after validating that people would pay a $10 one time fee. We left a $5 /month subscription payment model in place for 1 month to see what the data would suggest. It turns out, no one was willing to subscribe.

We got our first purchase after receiving the negative review a few days ago. This makes me feel like everything is going to be OK. Yes, it sucks getting a negative review, but some of our existing customers rallied around us and turned this into a positive. If you get enough volume of customers it's inevitable that you'll eventually get a few negative reviews no matter what the product is.

We got our first negative review. I reached out to the customer to understand their problem, but never got a response.

I took to social media to see if anyone else was experience the issue mentioned in the review, and everyone only had positive things to say about the extension (a few even wrote reviews in defense of the extension).

Today we made our first sale of $.99, of which Google took a $.38 cut. If this continues to be a viable product, likely the first thing that needs to happen is to get off of the Chrome store in order to avoid the hefty fees. There is also a risk of getting removed from the Chrome store. See the next paragraph for the risks inherent in the product.

There are obvious roadblocks to this business as the previous update illustrated. I've since created a Facebook account for this product for customer service purposes (I introduced a minor bug in the last version of the extension that needed remedied). However, creating this Facebook account gave me the idea to join a few Facebook groups with Medium writers, and this account was also removed from one of these groups. Obviously, the majority of the Medium community is diametrically opposed to the idea of this extension, but it has also now been validated that people will pay for this extension. It remains to be seen if one outweighs the other, and only time will tell.

We currently have 27 total users. We doubled from 10 to 20 in the span of 6 days by using the bot itself to follow users on the Medium platform. Now that we've validated that people will use the extension, we will likely start charging a small amount to future users in order to ensure that people will pay before implementing more features and continuing to market the extension further.

We finally reached more than 10 users on our first product. To reach this small milestone we've used our own product to follow users on Medium. Our Medium account bio has a link to the Chrome store to install the browser extension. We've also written a blog post on Medium outlining how to use the Chrome extension and it's various features.

Finally, we've added some code to provide feedback to the user as to what the bot is doing by hijacking the error message modal on the Medium page. Previously the bot started scrolling to the bottom of the page without providing any feedback to the user, but now it will provide a helpful message informing the user how many scrolls it will take to get to the bottom of the page and why the bot is scrolling. There is also feedback when the bot starts to follow people.

The reason this feedback is necessary is because the automated following happens at the top of the page after the bot has finished scrolling to the bottom of the user's list, so there is no visual feedback that anything is happening after the bot finishes scrolling to the bottom of the page.

Ideally, the bot would scroll back up to the top of the page, or do the follow clicking in batches, but this was more difficult and I didn't want to spend too much time on it until I was certain there would be a big enough demand for the software. If the extension starts to make revenue I will consider a more robust long term approach to this problem, but for now the feedback will have to do.

It took 2 weeks, but I'm finally done building the minimum viable product for the Medium Auto Follow Bot. I worked mostly nights and weekends, and I coded the whole thing in vanilla Javascript. In hindsight, I cut a few corners (for example, scrolling to the bottom of the page for the list of users to follow is not very responsive). But I'm excited to start talking to customers and see what they think about the product so far!

I've read so many times that you should solve your own problem, so last week I sat down to code up my first chrome extension! The chrome extension is a tool to manage following and unfollowing users on Medium. There are already tools that do this on other social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, but none existed for Medium. Until now!

Now that I know how to build browser extensions I've got a number of other ideas I'm going to pursue, to include additions to this Medium tool if there is enough interest in it. Because of this, I've decided to open source everything I build in this project.