How I Increased Chrome Extension Users by 270% in 9 Months

Finally! Something that seemed impossible a year ago was only a matter of time — my Web Highlights Chrome Extension reached more than 10,000 users in the Chrome Web Store 🎉 🎊

Last year in April, when I posted My Journey to the First $ 9.99 with My Side Project, my online highlighter had only 2,703 active users. Today, I want to update you on how things are going and outline how I managed to grow my user base by 270% and my organic SEO impressions by 16,666% in less than a year 🚀

Back then, my Chrome extension had:

• 2,733 weekly users
• 7,102 created user accounts
• ~ 3,000 organic SEO impressions

Today, Web Highlights has:

• 10k+ weekly users (↗ 270 %)
• 18,240 created user accounts (↗ 157 %)
• ~ 473k+ organic SEO impressions (↗ 16,666 %)

I’m currently trying my hand on Twitter and regularly post earning reports like this and many more insights about programming, SEO, and updates on my side projects. I would be thrilled if you accompanied me on my Twitter journey 🙌

Build Something You Love

My primary goal is still, and will always be, building a product that my users love. My most significant advantage is that I am the heaviest user of my own extension.

Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like. — Paul Graham

If you want to build something and need some advice, my number one tip would be to build something you are passionate about. It will make the journey much more enjoyable and fulfilling.

As I am constantly using my app, I always try to improve it. Just recently, I figured that I would appreciate it if there was a way to be reminded about bookmarks and articles I saved. Too  often, I add articles to my reading list and forget about them…

That’s why I built this reminder which works similarly to the Gmail “Snooze” functionality for emails:

However, a great product alone is not enough to achieve growth, and I had to work hard to ensure that Web Highlights continued to grow. Here are some of the strategies I used.

Talk About Your Product

“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.” — Seth Godin

When I started developing Web Highlights, I built in “Stealth-mode.” While I wasn’t worried about someone stealing my idea, as it wasn’t entirely new, I found it challenging to speak publicly about the project. I often felt that the product wasn’t polished enough and feared receiving negative feedback, which led me to keep quiet about it.

“Stealth-mode” refers to a startup or company working on a new product or service without publicly announcing it or revealing too many details about it.

Luckily my mind has shifted entirely in this regard. And hopefully, I can convince you too. Instead of avoiding feedback, try to get feedback as early as possible. I can only encourage anyone who builds things online to participate in the #buildinpublic community.

I regularly share updates about my product, even before the features are officially launched. This not only allows me to gather direct feedback from my audience, but it also helps to increase awareness and build excitement for my product.

Increase Organic Traffic

Increasing organic traffic is one of the most essential steps for every possible product you can build.

Of course, you could have a large marketing budget and spend tons of money on Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc. I have tried this, but that’s not a long-term growth strategy.

I very much like the way how Rick Blyth puts it in his Micro SaaS Handbook eBook:

I like to think of organic traffic vs paid traffic akin to building a campfire.

You want to set up a foundation of large slow-burning blocks of wood (your organic content marketing/referral marketing/affiliates etc). This will ensure that the fire will burn steadily for a long period of time. You will consistently add to these foundations over time (more blog articles/referral schemes/affiliate partnerships).

Once the fire is burning well, you can pour on some gasoline (paid advertising) to increase the height of the fire for a short period of time.

However, gasoline can be expensive and is also out of your control. The price of gasoline (cost of ads) can skyrocket and ad accounts are notorious for being shut down (leaving you with zero traffic) so you can’t rely on this alone

Organic traffic is the foundation for all SaaS products. SEO plays a huge role in this. In recent months, I have almost only worked on improving SEO to take care of the organic traffic, even though I would much rather just build new features to make my product better.

You can build the most outstanding product in the world — if no one hears about it, it’s doomed to fail.

The great thing about SEO and organic traffic is that you can quickly see results. Here is the organic traffic of my web-highlights.com website in December 2021 compared to December 2022:

In my article, 3 Instant Ways to Increase Your Google Ranking I wrote about the three things I did to achieve such growth:

• Hosting a blog
• Improve Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO score
• Creating Backlinks

Check out the article for more information.

Final Thoughts

Reaching the milestone of 10,000 users with Web Highlights is a fantastic achievement, and I am very grateful to all the users who have supported and promoted the extension. I look forward to improving the product and reaching even more users in the future.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article. I am always happy to answer questions and am open to criticism. Feel free to contact me at any time 😊

Get in touch with me via LinkedIn, or follow me on Twitter.

3 Instant Ways to Increase Your Google Ranking

Anyone can implement these three essential points to make their product visible on Google, Bing, and Co.

Web Highlights BlogMarius Bongarts