so i'm sitting in this ridiculous meeting right now, half-listening to someone talk about quarterly planning, and i see the notification on my phone. another ai tool just hit 50k users in 72 hours. it's a browser extension. obvs
i've been thinking about this for a while ngl. the extension route feels like the obvious play right now. you build something small and focused, you distribute it through chrome web store, you get real distribution with minimal effort. people use it daily so the engagement is there. the metrics look good on a twitter thread
but honestly i'm kind of tired of the narrative. everyone's shipping extensions now like it's the only way to win. i get why, the friction is low and the upside is visible. but there's something about it that feels... hollow? like we're all optimizing for twitter metrics instead of, you know, actually building things people need
my slack thread translator is probably going to end up as an api or a cli tool instead. maybe both eventually. the extension would be easier to market, sure. i could probably get 5k installs in a month if i did the pr thing right. but my actual users (and i have maybe 200 right now) they don't want a chrome extension. they want something that lives in their workflow, not another tab. they want to pipe it into their existing tools
fwiw i think there's a real opportunity in the less sexy distribution channels. cli tools especially. everyone's obsessed with web ui and browser extensions but a good cli tool that actually solves something? that lives in engineering workflows? that's where the real money is. less flashy, slower growth, but you end up with users who actually care
i'm at $112 mrr after 11 months. it's not much. i almost quit twice. but the people paying me are paying because the tool actually does something they need, not because they installed it on impulse. that matters more to me than the idea of hitting some viral threshold
so yeah. extensions are cool and i'm not hating on the people shipping them. but i'm watching the trend and i'm deliberately doing something different. maybe i'm wrong. maybe i'm just bitter that i didn't think of the extension angle first (i did, actually, decided against it). either way i'd rather build something smaller and right than something big and wrong
anyone else choosing the unglamorous route? curious if it's actually a viable path or if i'm just doing mental gymnastics to justify being lazy