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Ask HN: I Built a Extension, but I'm Struggling with Promotion – Any Advice?
I developed a browser extension, and the conversion rate is pretty good. However, I’m stuck on how to promote it further.
I believe this is a critical problem for many developers — building the product is relatively easy, but promoting it is the hard part.
I'm facing this challenge once again. In the past, whenever I ran into marketing difficulties with a product, I’d just set it aside and move on to building something new. But this time, I really want to solve the problem once and for all.
What are some effective ways to promote your own product?
I’ve already tried many approaches — launching on Product Hunt, building backlinks, creating videos on TikTok, and more — but none of them have brought significant results.
Are there any other proven or creative strategies I could try?
- PaulHoule 1y agoPersonally a browser extension is the last kind of software I want to install. Circa 2000 all of my "normie" relatives had 20 or 30 different "toolbars" installed in their browsers from the likes of Yahoo, Lycos, Hotmail, Infoseek, Altavista, etc. They had horrible 640x480 screens that were effectively 640x120 but they thought it was normal, didn't have a choice, etc. When you install plugins into GUI applications they eventually die of "pluginitis" as something adds 0.2s of latency here and something else adds 0.3s and... wow, a race condition! The cases I will install an extension are: (1) it is required for work, a project, whatever or (2) I expect it to improve, not reduce performance, such as an adblocker or anti-tracking tool. It might seem like an anachronism, but I still make bookmarklets that do pretty fancy things such as to cue a personal webcrawler.
- jasonthorsness 1y agoEven the 1Password extension which I absolutely rely on injects huge JS into every site; screws up lighthouse scores and leaves me ill-at-ease. Extensions are an incredible attack vector.
- PaulHoule 1y agoPersonally I think extensions like 1Password are the worst. I've had talks w/ so many people at work who want me to install them, I tell them about the awful things that are going to happen with these vendors, then they come true.
- zy5a59 1y agoYou're right, browser extensions are indeed not as convenient as direct web pages or apps, but sometimes certain browser extensions can really improve efficiency.
- Urahandystar 1y agoWell I know you aren't good at promoting it, you have told us what it is or where to find it!
- zy5a59 1y agoSorry. It's called NoTab, and its feature is to preview links on the current page. You can find it here: notab.wand.tools.
- jasonthorsness 1y agoMy heart still wants to believe that if you build a great product the users will appear like the old pre-scientific "spontaneous generation" philosophy around how mice appear. But it definitely doesn't work like that. In some sense it's adversarial like trading/investing, people who have a working strategy can't share it or it won't work anymore. But the bread-and-butter is probably setting it up correctly to facilitate word-of-mouth, influencers, ads in communities your users frequent.
- PaulHoule 1y agoI'd say "marketing is hard". It's easy to fault advocacy organizations that spend 90% of their donations on fundraising and overhead but it's the way that it is. When I was in college I was the PR manager for college radio station KTEK which was notorious for having dances where hardly anyone showed up. My prescription was plastering the campus (2000 students or so) with a ream of paper worth of posters with 15 different designs. Our DJ crew was great so we retained people once they came, but it took about two years of that to get to the place where people expected a KTEK dance to be hopping. My expectation is that if I tasked a young person with that kind of marketing task today they'd make one poster, put up four of them, and have some excuse like "anybody who wanted that information would seek it out." Doesn't work that way.
- zy5a59 1y agoYou're right. For me, development is way easier than marketing and promotion.