LivePage

This month I hit the payment threshold, which was nice to see hit my bank. Albeit it's a fraction of what I was making a few years ago.

Right now, I've got some 16,000 Weekly Users of my extension. I get at most 1 email a month about it. It's not exactly the worst side project. However, I am feeling I want to reduce the amount of side projects I have running so I can stay focus my hustle time on stuff I actually want to be working on.

I'm not going to remove LivePage from the Chrome Store anytime soon (£20 a month is better then £0), but I don't intend to make any efforts on it. At some point in the future I'll make it free again, so I don't need to worry about processing refunds and can safely ignore support emails for it.

After peaking at £327 a month, I was pretty happy with how LivePage was going. Each month I get a payment from Google, which always made me super happy.

But each month, that payment would start getting smaller & the number of active users would drop also. I wasn't worried though. LivePage had earned ~£5k over its lifetime, it had made a bunch of users fairly happy & I learnt a lot.

In October, I didn't a payment come in from Google so I logged in to see what was going on. This month, I was a few pounds off the payment threshold of £25.

I think this was caused by the following:

1. Better tools are out there now. You can hot reload React components now, so the amount of users who look for my extension is pretty small.
2. I had moved on as a developer, so I hadn't kept up with maintaining the extension. I stopped using Google Chrome and I don't code JavaScript that often any more. It felt like it was designed in 2011 and I think that really put off new users.
3. I don't think the chrome store pushes paid for extensions as much, in the ranking I'm noticeably behind extension with <10 ratings. Though this could be down to me not updating my extension in a while.
4. If you type "LivePage Chrome Free" you can find a copy of the extension I didn't upload. I didn't really care about piracy as originally the product was free & the code is up on GitHub. But I imagine some users might be on this version.

I opened my bank and saw Google deposited £137 into my bank, which was the cash I had earn from sales in the last month. It was good, but not amazing.

Then I made a choice which increased sales to £327 a month, I translated my extension and it cost me next to nothing.

I had been interested in Internationalization for a while, every modern framework supports a way to say "This string, OK give it to me in the users preferred language or fall back". Chrome Extensions are no different.

I sent the file which contained all the strings in my app to a translation company, along with $50. A week later my extension & chrome landing page were available in a German, French, Spanish & Russian.

Almost instantly sales picked up :D

The big take away I had from this, was to always build you app with an intension of translating it. Even if you don't translate it, having the ground work in place for by using good I18n techniques is a very good win.

No.

I had a few subscribers, but not enough to say "Yes, this is the way forward". All in all, I made £160 over the two months but almost every user cancelled their subscription almost instantly after paying.

The support time of explaining to people it's a subscription (even though the chrome store handled billing) & handling refunds was a total time sink. My plans of spending my time developing the product quickly fizzed out as after dealing with support, I didn't care for making any changes to the product.

But, I did learn that people were willing to pay for the extension & I had an inkling that a single payment would be easier for customers to grasp. So I experimented with pricing and landed on a sweet spot of $3.99.

I had be giving away LivePage for almost 3 years, it had grown to some 26,000 Weekly Active Users but I still hadn't made a penny from it.

I thought it was time to experiment with a subscription model. I thought if I asked $1 a year I'd be able to justify spending a few days a month working on it.

I tweaked my Chrome Store listing and started experimenting if users would pay, and how much.

I decided it was time to share my extension with the world. I had been using it privately for the last few months, and I was pretty happy with it.

I didn't know much about Open Source or marketing but I thought it was decent enough to share but not to charge for.

I tweaked the copy here and there, but slowly the downloads started coming in.