Supatabs broke 100 weekly users and is growing steadily
by John BraatWhat is Supatabs and how did it start
Roughly 4 months ago I started working on Supatabs in the evenings while contracting 40 hours a week (still doing that btw). I launched Supatabs to the Chrome Web Store a month into development.
Supatabs is a Chrome extension to manage your Google Chrome tabs by saving them as links to reduce tab clutter and RAM usage by up to 95%.
Once you saved your tabs in Supatabs you can easily restore them by clicking single tab links, or even restore full sessions (groups), swapping sessions etc. I'm not gonna go into the features, as these are described on the website :)
If you know "OneTab" these kind of extensions/features might sound familiar to you.
For the ones that don't know: OneTab is a Chrome extension that does pretty much what Supatabs does, but less feature rich. It is possible that OneTab will break once Google pushes their MV3 changes, as OneTab is still on MV2. OneTab currently has 2 million users and I'm hoping to convert those to Supatabs.
I built Supatabs out of frustration with the current alternatives, which are either too complicated, track all your mouseclicks and keystrokes, or lack the most basic features.
Current state
Last week Supatabs hit 100 weekly users 🥳. At the time of writing it is already at 136 weekly users.
In my opinion Supatabs is already 10x better than OneTab which is basically the google of tab managers. Supatabs offers for example filtering tabs, richer customization and included auto-suspension of tabs (unloading tabs from memory if inactive for a user defined amount of minutes).
I currently "market" it by answering reddit questions sporadically and talking to users on there. I was really lucky to find a person who gave me tons of feedback and feature requests which I implemented right away. This person was really thankful. So much so, they have become a massive advocate for Supatabs, spreading the word on Reddit.
This is the Reddit thread in case you are interested in how this conversation looked like
I highly highly recommend talking and listening to your users as much as you possibly can. Not only will this help you advance your product, but positive feedback is a massive motivator. At least to me :)
Plans for future growth and monetization
I'm aiming to hit 1 million users with this extension and I'm expecting a big user influx around December 2022/January 2023 when Chrome discontinues all extensions still on MV2. This will obviously only be the case if OneTab doesn't upgrade their extension to MV3.
Read about the MV2 Sunset if you are interested. I'm assuming quite a few of the less regularly maintaned Chrome extension will break once Jan 2023 hits.
Again, I think Supatabs is already 10x better than OneTab. What's left to do is spread the word. It's time to slow down on adding features and go hard on marketing. I will still add bug fixes and user requested features to make it the most obvious no-brainer switch from OneTab regardless of the MV2/MV3 outcome.
For marketing I will keep answering questions on Reddit and Quora as well as DM people on Twitter to spread awareness.
It's a completely free app with no monetization plan in place except for a link to "Buy me a Coffee", which will be added with the coming update.
Luckily there are no costs besides my time investment, as I don't have any servers to maintain or any costly APIs to call.
Supatabs is very much an experiment on how far I can grow it and also curiosity as to how well a "pay what you want" plan will work for X amount of users.
I will update this product page monthly with info about marketing strategies, donation revenue and growth metrics :)
Follow if you are curious about how it goes, and add the extension to your Browser if you are interested in what it does.
