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61 Comments

$70,000 in revenue with CSS Scan browser extension

My browser extension https://getcssscan.com reached $70,000+ in sales!

Who said that browser extensions couldn't be monetized?

It took me 9 months to get the first $10,000 and just more 9 months to get more $60,000.

Currently has an average monthly revenue of $4,000 but January is already near $10,000!

Now I'm also trying a subscription model on browser extensions with the newest CSS Scan premium product: https://cssscanpro.com (free demo on the website)

Printscreen from Gumroad:
https://i.imgur.com/V8hjN51.png

Thanks, everybody, for the support! 💖
Let's make it to $100,000!

  1. 3

    Wow, congratulations!

    In retrospect, to what can you attribute the growth of the product? What was your go to market strategy for this? Can't be just organic growth, can it?

    I bet there is about 10,000 people with amazing product that gets lost in the seas of stuff, that could learn a thing or two here.

    1. 5

      It is organic, mostly (around 99.9%) 😄

      Well, I should write a detailed post about this, but the market strategy is: keep testing higher prices, constantly optimize copywriting and landing page, get good reviews, reach influential people, read classic books about success (think and grow rich, secrets of the millionaire mind, etc), set goals, share everywhere you can, believe in yourself and in your product.

      1. 1

        great advice, congrats on the milestone

      2. 1

        Where do the customers share your extension? Do they come mainly through the Chrome store, or are you mentioned a lot on somewhere like Reddit, or something else?

      3. 1

        Yes please, write a blog post about this :)

      4. 1

        The mostly part is what carried it. I see you had Version 1 released last year and it was featured on product hunt, so that helped.

        What prompted you to make first one to begin with?

  2. 2

    Congrats, I follow you on Twitter and your whole story is pretty awesome, @CSallen should have you on the podcast!
    🇧🇷

    1. 1

      Thank you! I'd love to do that :)

  3. 2

    Just bought the 2.0 version, it's so much easier than screwing around in the dev tools. Thanks for making this :)

    1. 2

      I'm so glad to hear that! Thanks for supporting my work. If you have any questions or suggestions please let me know and I'll answer you ASAP!

      1. 1

        How did you make the pro site and how did you record the videos? They both look great and are super smooth.

        EDIT: And how do you manage licences for v2.0?

        1. 1

          Thanks! I made the website from scratch - having Sketch's website as an inspiration. Regarding the videos, I recorded them with Quicktime. :)

          Licenses are managed by my own backend using Gumroad's API as the license key system.

  4. 2

    Well done,

    The idea of being able to directly use the product is pretty cool.

    Cool "call to action" too with the discount.

    But being able to use your product right away is great, and more powerful than any word.

    Would be glad to provide more insight.

    But, would be cool to get tips about learning to promote a product, and to reach a market?

    Did you use online communication mostly?

    Thanks, and well done, like you say, let's make it to the 100 000 fast

    1. 1

      Thank you for the feedback!

      I'd be glad to write more about this. Maybe a new post?

      Yes, online communication mostly. And 99.9% organic.

      Let's make it to the 100,000 fast!! I loved this haha :)

      1. 1

        Wow, really impressive...defies lots of things we hear, here and there...

        Of course, I'd be glad to see a post about it, as it really might inspire other guys, with low budgets, who struggle to imaging their products taking off without massive investments.

        Anyway, well done , I wish you the best, and that it's just the beginning of the growth...

        I won't hesitate to come back to you if I got any other remarks about your product...

  5. 2

    Congratulations! Can you give some growth bits?

    1. 2

      Thanks!

      • reach influential people to help you share the product
      • answer questions on quora
      • post on twitter every day (balance business with fun things about life)
      • share everywhere you can
      • reach out to blogs
      • discounts
      • discounts links
  6. 2

    Wonderful, hard work pays off!

    1. 1

      Definitely. Thank you, brother!

  7. 2

    Excellent work 👍

    1. 1

      Thank you, Jordan! 🙌
      I love your work.

  8. 2

    This is such a COOL product! Well done, it's beautiful ! Can you make a little clearer what the main differences are between the PRO version and standard? To me the Hero licence seems to cover everything?

    1. 2

      I'm glad to hear that! Thanks for the feedback.

      Sure. I will also add that to the website soon, as some people are asking.
      PRO version has everything the Basic one has, plus:

      • A color eyedropper (pick colors from any website - works on images too)
      • Get the whole color palette of the website
      • Precisely select any element with the DOM control (with arrow keys to go up and down - parents, children, siblings etc)
      • CSS Keyframes reading (understand any CSS animation you see on the web)
      • Real-time advanced ruler for measure distances and elements
      • Scans all pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements (while Basic only scans the pseudo-class :hover)
      • Check all the changes made in the CSS and copy it or export it to a file
      • Guidelines to check alignments
      • Scans inherited styles (it gets font-size, font-weight, and other properties that Basic can't catch)
        1. 3

          Have you written about your experience building this product? It's a really great product and I'd love to learn more about what went into building it.

  9. 2

    Congrats, that's tremendous! Great evidence that it pays off to play on the extensions playground!

    Also, contrary to what it may seem it's actually quite simple to develop one - I just had my first weekend with them and was amazed with how fast you can deliver useful things!

    How are you sharing your codebase across the browsers? Do you use a polyfill of some sort?

    1. 2

      Thanks, mewa! It's very easy to port from Chrome to Firefox. In CSS Scan case, it shares 100% the same code - except the manifest.json 😄

      Safari is the hard one though, as you have to re-write your whole background script in Swift.

      1. 1

        I didn't find it easy to port from chrome to firefox :(
        Also, do you maintain separate projects for firefox & chrome?

        Plus, it is really annoying to add google analytics in firefox.. have to do lots of extra stuff :-/

      2. 1

        Cheers!

        Yeah, I was mostly interested in how you sorted out the Safari bit :) Chrome and Firefox seem to have a lot in common, but personally when developing the selector picker for thedjinn.io I chose to use this polyfill just to be on the safe side.

        If you'd like to dwell a bit more on the tech details - have you come across this issue where some webpages remove your extension's injected content? Or unobvious permission errors?

  10. 1

    Congratulations.

    I just joined IH, and am from Microsoft Edge team, focusing on engaging with devs who build or want to build for Edge Addons Store. Feel free to reach out (@varadarajans on Twitter)

  11. 1

    HI Rizzo, i was luck to get css scan for five bucks, consider me a early seed buyer.
    glad you introduced hover class, but it can't be copied.

    1. 1

      Hi! Thanks for buying CSS Scan and supporting my work.

      It can, you need to turn it on through Options > Hover styles > Copy it separately (or nested).

      Hope that helps

  12. 1

    Just wanted to say this is one of the coolest and smoothest products (and websites) I've ever seen on this site. The "Try it free" feature is amazing. Good luck in the future!

    P.S. If you added the ability to add and edit HTML/CSS/JS elements on a page you would have a tool that you could use to craft an entire website from scratch within the browser. Pretty neat stuff!

    1. 1

      Thank you! And also thanks for the suggestion :)

  13. 1

    Great work! How are you feeling about one-time payments vs subscriptions? Are you hoping to move to subscriptions for the future of the product or still exploring and developing learnings?

    I’m working on a chrome extension too and I should get around to posting more updates on my side! https://www.indiehackers.com/product/full-page-screen-capture I went for the subscription approach at a relatively low price point and am trying to make up for it with scale. It looks like you’re taking a similar subscription approach to Sketch, with “all updates within 1 year”. Does that mean you’re delivering the extension code outside of the web store platforms?

    1. 1

      Thank you. I LOVE your extension, I use it a lot.

      Oh, I'm not taking the Sketch approach. Pro licenses, if expires, they don't work anymore.

      How is your revenue going? Is it good?

    2. 1

      You are the owner of that extension? haha...too funny. small world, I've been using it for years and used to recommend it to everyone even though they could never figure out why I liked it so much.

  14. 1

    Congrats!

    I'm getting an issue (seems to be z-index) when Gumroad opens up on your site and it actually blocks out the "I want this" button. I'm using the latest version of FireFox on Ubuntu.

    1. 1

      Thanks! Oh, that's bad. I couldn't reproduce this. Does it still happen? Could you record a video, please?

  15. 1

    Wow this is such a cool idea. Congrats! :)

  16. 1

    Nice stuff! I was wondering, do you like gumroad?

    1. 1

      Thanks! Yes, I do. Without it, I wouldn't be able to do it :)

    1. 1

      This is the Pro version, it has only 2 months.

      CSS Scan (the Basic version) was launched in the end of July 2018.

      1. 1

        Got it, thanks!
        The result is very impressive. How long did it take to develop the extension? And how you promoted it?
        Thnks!

        1. 1

          Thank you!!

          It took me 50 hours to develop the first version, and I recorded all of it! So you can check those 50 hours in only 2 minutes here:
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtsNNXpXcYs

          I promote it on Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, Reaching Press, Twitter, Reaching Blogs, Answering Quora questions, Making Discounts, Sharing discount links, etc. That's what works better for me yet.

          1. 1

            The video is pretty funny!
            I wonder, how you came up to the idea? There are free products already like Chrome developer tools, why you thought you can make money on it?

  17. 1

    So it's basically the dev tools inspector but without opening dev tools? Plus some other extra little features.

    Well, congrats honestly, such a simple product yet so successful, cheers!

    1. 1

      Thank you for the feedback! Appreciate it. 🥂

      I think you're oversimplifying it. It's all about the speed, ease of use and not having to dig into multiple panels in the dev tools. It is developed to make your work with CSS easier and faster.

      1. 1

        Yeah, it was oversimplified and with a little bit of envy that I wrote haha. It's the "I could do that... how did I not think about that before..." thought that kicks in when seeing this kind of products.

        Yet, that does not take any credit away from you, again, it's awesome and you're making good money with it! Respect.

        1. 1

          Haha. No problem, mate. Thank you again!

  18. 1

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      I appreciate you being honest. It is a challenger pricing, for sure. I'm working my best to deliver more and more value to my customers. One day you'll see a reason for this pricing. It's going well. $646 MRR. It's in the very beginning (2 months) so I still need to learn a lot on how to make this grow faster.

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted a year ago.

        1. 1

          Thanks for your feedback! Appreciate it.

  19. 9

    This comment was deleted 7 months ago.

  20. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 1

      Thanks, fredddie! Yes, that's right!

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