Meet List

MeetList got its first paying customer today, ~36h after the official launch. 🎉

Well actually 2, but the other canceled the subscription soon after we had a chat over email, as it was not what he was looking for.

Now it's time to add more premium features to increase the conversion rate and start doing some marketing.

I was cooking this for a while, but every time I started to work on it, I would do it for a few days and then quit.

On the 30th of October, I announced on Twitter that I've taken 2 weeks of holiday to work 100% on the Premium platform of Google Meet Attendance List and so I did. For the next 14 days, I documented what I was doing and posted about it publicly on Twitter.

Finally, MeetList.io was live.

Google stopped updates for Manifest V2 and announced that at the beginning of 2023 they will start enforcing Manifest V3.

This forced a lot of Chromium browsers extensions (myself included) to migrate to the new APIs which was a pretty big change, especially since there was no way back once released.

Luckily, Google Meet Attendance List is not heavily using Chromium APIs, the only challenge that I had to solve was switching from background.js to Service Worker and making sure that data persists on storage as the Service Workers have a limited life span.

On October 30th, version 4 of the browser extension was released.

An unexpected amount of people started to use my Google Meet Attendance List browser extension, from all over the world.

All the countries that were struggling with Covid and moved their classes online are using it. Asia, Europe, and the States.

I start to realize how big and important this milestone is and so started to put more effort into improving the functionality.

Since version 1, I was thinking about how can I make this entire process automatic, but this was not something easy.

There are a number of ways into achieving automation, such as monitoring DOM changes, listening for API updates, and others.

Finally, after days of reverse engineering the source code of Google Meet, I managed to consistently track the events of people joining and leaving the call. I quickly updated the dashboard to reflect the latest data additions. This was big.

In previous version, at the click of a button, it would start downloading a CSV file with the participants in the meeting at the current time.

I quickly realised that this file can be easily misplaced, and so I decided to build a UI for my browser extension.

This UI should be simple and present you with a list of all the meetings that you've been in and the participants that joined along with you.

On October 14th, I decided to launch my browser extension on Chrome Web Store, with no expectations.

I completely forgot about it during the winter holidays and quickly checked how the installs were performing in January 2020.

To my surprise, there were about 2000 people that were using it, and that felt unbelievable. For the next few days, I kept a close eye on the installs.

My girlfriend was teaching some classes at the University and since everything recently moved online (check 2020 news), she was thinking about how should she do the attendance now, over G Meet.

A few options came up:
a) grab a piece of paper and do name-calling
b) take screenshots of the participants' tab

I realized that none of the options were really helpful as the meeting would be interrupted or more time would be spent analyzing the screenshots.

So over the weekend a quickly built a prototype of a Chrome browser extension that would take attendance with a press of a button.

This extension is now called Google Meet Attendance List:
👉 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/appcnhiefcidclcdjeahgklghghihfok