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Show HN: I make $3K/mo from a browser extension
- fajarsiddiq 5y agocongrats on the hitting your goal dude!
- trungdq88 5y agoThank you!
- fajarsiddiq 5y agoYou’re most welcome! so happy for you dude
- tmaly 5y agoI am interested to see your article on building an audience. This aspect of the product is often overlooked in favor of the technical details. Congrats on reaching 3k MMR
- trungdq88 5y agoThank you! I'll write more about that soon in my next newsletter issue!
- tgflynn 5y agoYour product page (https://blackmagic.so/ https://blackmagic.so/) is very well-done. My first impression is that it is even one of the best I have ever seen. What tools/frameworks did you use for building the frontend ?
- trungdq88 5y agoThanks! You can see the complete tech stack I used here: https://tdinh.notion.site/What-is-my-tech-stack-2fe29f9df5314c1ca178ab517b772b7c https://tdinh.notion.site/What-is-my-tech-stack-2fe29f9df531...
- stefanvdw1 5y agoThanks for sharing this! Always interesting to see the tech stack for one-man projects like this
- daniel1969 5y agoWhere have you learned about design? Your apps look awesome. My look like command prompt. Is there any course, book, tutorial, blog that you would recommend?
- trungdq88 5y agoHello HN, I see another post sharing their success micro startups today on HN so I thought I should share mine. I started working on this browser extension for Twitter 8 months ago. It took 3 months to reach $60/mo, 3 more to reach $400/mo, and 2 more to reach $3K/mo – where I am now. When I start, I had 0 followers on Twitter. When it reaches $400/mo, I quit my job. I now live freely from corporate drama and travel as much as I can while building products I love. I share my entire journey publicly on Twitter and my newsletter, including revenue, stats, product launch process, and marketing strategies, etc. I just want to say that opportunities are everywhere, and it's never easier to start a profitable micro startup to sustain yourself and live an independent life. Cheers!
- elpakal 5y agoYour products all look very well done - just curious, do you build them all yourself (including your awesome landing page)? Congrats on the early growth and best of luck. What a great product - I’ll be looking out for your post on how you built your 13.9k audience!
- trungdq88 5y agoYes, I'm a 1-man army :) I used to work on frontend/backend/mobile/devops, so I have the advantage of doing everything on my own. Thanks for the kind words! I'll write another piece about my audience building journey soon!
- Rastonbury 5y agoI second this, your landing page is very well done
- trungdq88 5y agoThank you! I spent a lot of time on that :)
- 5y ago
- jamescampbell 5y agoVery cool and inspiring. Good luck getting to $10k MRR. I think building out a large community of 9900 free users was very smart for this type of app.
- trungdq88 5y agoThank you!
- vsnf 5y agoSomething I’ve noticed in many of these threads showcasing successful products is that they all focus on marketing. Advertising software, analytics software, etc. I rarely (never?) see any one post about their successful non marketing solution.
- godmode2019 5y agoMaybe people who think about marketing problems, tend to have more marketing knowledge and are better at marketing their own products and are people more likely to post on websites like this promoting their products. I know I have folders and folders of unmarketed products.
- jcims 5y agoThat's why it's easy for banks to make money, it's just sitting there.
- quickthrower2 5y agoBanks need to do marketing. I get to choose who I bank with!
- jameshush 5y agoSelling more sales (aka marketing) is the ultimate value proposition. Google and FB print money because they call up business and say “Pay us $$ and we’ll give you $$$”.
- cosentiyes 5y agoIs the "one year of updates and then renew" pricing model for DevUtils.app common? Upgrading a license for new OS support seems somewhat reasonable (eg Little Snitch selling a new license for Catalina -> Big Sur) but I wouldn't want to pay for anything that isn't a major version update
- trungdq88 5y agoLast time I checked, you can see the same license model for popular apps like JetBrains IDE, Sketch, TablePlus, Parallels Desktop, any many more.
- StopHammoTime 5y agoI LOVE devutils.app, it's great! Thanks for building useful things!
- trungdq88 5y agoThank you!
- cyounkins 5y agoThis is more than just a browser extension right? The data displayed comes from a server component?
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoIt's an interesting platform approach - create a browser extension aimed at enhancing / integrating into a single page - there must be a large number of individual targets - every enterprise saas? And it may even work for cross site integration?
- trungdq88 5y agoThat's actually a very good way to look for new ideas!
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoThat's what I was thinking - one could churn out a large number of extensions - one for each saas product, and see what sticks.
- vcool07 5y agoCongrats on the milestone. As per my understanding, Google doesn't support paid chrome extensions anymore, so how are you monetizing it ?
- trungdq88 5y agoI let people buy a subscription directly on the website blackmagic.so and use Paddle.com to process the payment.
- gnicholas 5y agoAren't Show HNs supposed to link to the actual product for people to play with, not a blog post about making money? There's nothing wrong with sharing wins here, or new products. But it feels 'off' to me to see a Show HN next to a braggy blog title (I'm used to seeing plenty of either on their own, though!).
- trungdq88 5y agoSorry if I misused the Show HN. In this case, I want to show the journey and the story more than the product, and want to let people know I'm available for any questions like other Show HN posts. (I don't think the product itself is very interesting for the HN crowd)
- santiagobasulto 5y agoI find your post very interesting. I don’t care what the “rules” about Show HN are, this is a good read and that’s it. Thanks for sharing.
- autonomousErwin 5y agoI agree - this post is really interesting as I've been following Black Magic for a while and doesn't bother me that much but perhaps it doesn't belong in the Show HN section as it's not showing anything new technically
- capableweb 5y agoPost is interesting, I give you that. But why should we ignore categorization all of a sudden? "Show HN" is strictly about something people can use or play around with, not just read, this is defined in the rules/guidelines of HN itself. For the same reason good titles are enforced, so it gets easier to navigate everything.
- santiagobasulto 5y agoI stand corrected, I agree with you now that I see it that way. Thanks for the perspective.
- veeti 5y agoAny thoughts on Manifest v3?
- trungdq88 5y agoSoon I guess.
- sgt 5y agoLooks good - you're an inspiration to other aspiring Indie developers. I'm not interested in Twitter, but DevUtils looks like something I would actually use.
- trungdq88 5y agoThank you! I'm glad you like it! I use DevUtils everyday :)
- erdemozg 5y agoDo you exclusively use the official Twitter API or do you also perform web scraping? How much did you spend last month for runnig this system?
- trungdq88 5y agoI only use the official Twitter API. My last AWS bill is ~$600
- xuki 5y agoWhat’s the breakdown of that? $600 is 20% of your revenue, and that’s a lot.
- trungdq88 5y agoIt's for EC2, RDS, and bandwidth, mostly evenly contributed. I‘m running the system at 70% spare capacity. I'm not worrying too much about the cost as of now because I have some free credits to spend. Also, it's more rewarding to double my revenue instead of halving my server cost.
- xuki 5y ago> it's more rewarding to double my revenue instead of halving my server cost. How about cutting that cost to 1/10 of what you’re paying AWS, for a much better server? Since you’re running EC2, I assume you’re able to manage a server. Get a Heztner server and run your db locally: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax?country=ot https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax?count... Run back up hourly if you need to. You do not need AWS, not for what you’re using them for.
- trungdq88 5y agoI have expiring free credits and I really like RDS Performance Insights :) I would probably move to somewhere else after the credits run out. Will check out Heyzner then. Thanks for recommending.
- droidno9 5y agoThe two incomes from your apps would allow you to live very well in VN, especially if you live outside of SGN. Suất sắc!
- trungdq88 5y agoYes it is! Cảm ơn bạn!
- noselfpromote 5y agoThis is not a small product, there is so many features! How long have you been working on?
- trungdq88 5y ago8 months
- turblety 5y agoI'm still not 100% sure, but I think the product is BlackMagic.so, at the link: https://blackmagic.so/ https://blackmagic.so/ This post should really link to the product, not the blog post.
- trungdq88 5y agoYes it is the product. Thank you and noted on linking the product!
- warabe 5y agoWhat a great story! Congrats to your success! Actually, I am considrring developing useful browser extension, but I am from a different field(finance, actually) so i am a bit loss where to start. So, if possible, could you please tell me how you started your journey? i.e. how you gain your knowledge and started developing extension etc. Assuming, web extension development is just like web app development, then becoming web developer is the best way... obviously.
- trungdq88 5y agoThanks for the kind words! I'm an average developer, studied Software Engineering, and worked in the industry for 7 years before going full-time on my side projects. I always point people to freecodecamp.org to learn to code, they have a great roadmap and free. You should check it out. Good luck!
- dhkn 5y agoCongrats! This looks awesome, just curious on what does the stack looks like between the browser extensions and mobile apps?
- trungdq88 5y agoThanks! You can see my complete tech stack here: https://tdinh.notion.site/What-is-my-tech-stack-2fe29f9df5314c1ca178ab517b772b7c https://tdinh.notion.site/What-is-my-tech-stack-2fe29f9df531...
- caractacus 5y ago"One thing that will definitely help is to have a good product" o rly?
- niix1 5y agoNice job man. Crazy timing too, I'm in the early stages of starting my own extension and want to hit similar goals. Subbed to the newsletter.
- trungdq88 5y agoThank you for the sub and good luck!
- dSebastien 5y agoCongratulations Trung, awesome progress!
- trungdq88 5y agothanks!
- swyx 5y agowhat are your concerns and struggles with building a business on the Twitter API so far?
- trungdq88 5y agoPlatform risk and spam is definitely a concern. I have seen a few people struggling with their Twitter SaaS being attacked by spammers and get suspended. Trying hard not to step into the same issue. Other than that, I think Twitter Dev Community team is very supportive and encouraging. The new V2 API announcement is pretty awesome.
- Timwi 5y agoHate to be the party pooper, but the fact that you could talk about nothing but marketing and money and never spend a single word telling us what the software even does, speaks volumes on where your priorities lie. I am left with the impression that the software probably does nothing special, or even useful, and if I ever have any issues with it or suggestions for improvement, I will probably be completely ignored unless I come up with a way it would make you more money. I find it strange that this type of personality even calls themselves a hacker.
- achairapart 5y agoYou should see Marketing as a multiplier of the value of a product. That's it, it can grow the value of your product by 1.5x, 15x or 1500x. There may be some wizards (or con-men) that can multiply a zero in a greater value, but that's not the norm for sure. At the end you can have a great product even without marketing, but usually not the other way around.
- have_faith 5y agoThis sentence seems to sum up why the money was important to him > I finally have the confidence to take things a bit slowly, take care more of myself, and go on this vacation I really need. On top of that we don't know what else the money will help with (maybe they have an aging parent to take care of, we don't know). Your comment reads in a very overyly negative tone to me when the article seems to purposely exist to go over the financial aspect of the product.
- trungdq88 5y agoSorry that the post give you that impression. I do have some links in the post that link to the product, but yeah I agree the context is a bit vague for the HN crowd. I added a small notice to the post hopefully to fix it. FYI, I'm not trying to promote the product, it's the story I want to share. Cheers!
- sdiepend 5y agoI really appreciate you taking your chances and building something for yourself and being able the live off of it is even better. I'd call it "hack your life" ;) and find Timwi's reaction overly negative. I also share the feeling it could have been a Tell HN instead of a Show HN. But let's be honest, of course you want to promote your product. It's not a bad thing to admit that.
- filipemcg 5y agoThis is very inspirational. Great job! Your work looks very polished
- trungdq88 5y agoThank you!
- Abimelex 5y agoYou do awesome and I love you devUtils App. Just installed it. But my personal guessing is, that your 25k Followers on Twitter make things a lot easier. :)
- trungdq88 5y agoThanks, Abimelex! I'm glad you like DevUtils! I had almost 0 followers when I started building DevUtils & Black Magic :)
- rediahila 5y agocongrats tony!
- trungdq88 5y agothanks!
- d3vmax 5y agoGreat job. Love the value provided, design and landing page too. Also its great you made a mobile app as well. I don't care what others tell you. All it takes is 1 more click to check out your whole product. You are providing value to those who use twitter heavily and don't get enough data from twitter to take meaningful action. Similarly I find Instagram to provide very basic analytics / data, do you want to collab on creating something similar for Instagram or snap?
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoHow do you market your extension and how do you fee your users are to an extension itself? I’m building an extension right now and curious as to what normal browser users think of extensions.
- Tehchops 5y agoA lot of the comments in this thread aren't doing anything to put the memes about HN commenters to rest.
- iJohnDoe 5y agoYes, I’m seeing a ton of jealousy. It’s very obvious.
- iJohnDoe 5y agoWell deserved. Signed up to give it a try. Very cool so far! I had no idea the level of engagement I was getting.
- Glench 5y agoAdding on to the pile, I make around $250 / month helping people make browser extensions that make money :) https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com
- vldr 5y agoThe whole marketing post was a bit TL;DR for me. How long have you been making $3K/month? How much time (man-hours) did you invest in developing the product and were other costs involved? How much time/money does it currently cost to keep things running (e.g. updates, support, hosting)? A decent developer can easily make $100K/yr, which is quite a lot of months of making $3000