Show HN: I make $3K/mo from a browser extension | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I make $3K/mo from a browser extension

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333 pointstrungdq88155 comments

Aren'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!).

Sorry 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)

IMHO, "Show HN" is to show your creations. You should put the title without "Show HN" when you're linking to a blog post, even if it is about a product that you've created.

I agree. OP should have used "Tell HN:"

Well noted, thanks!

There's [Tell HN] for posts like these. This post got engagement /despite/ the wrong tag, try not letting the unnecessarily negative tone of the original comment get to you (I'm sorry).

And thanks for the great share.

Thank you for the support! I definite should have used Tell HN.

I've been on HN for many years and also wouldn't have thought of this distinction. The post was interesting and relevant, thanks for posting it!

On the "Show HN" page that shows all the Show HNs, there is a link in the top to the rules for Show HN, in case you've missed it. It's pointing to https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

TLDR is:

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

> Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.

I 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.

Post 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.

I stand corrected, I agree with you now that I see it that way. Thanks for the perspective.

I 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

He’s showing us the money.

yes but sometimes I feel like a bit of context about why or how someone makes a product helps.

If you would have known the author - you would know he is one of the most humble indie hackers out there.

Maybe the title is misleading but totally deserves the upvotes, comments and attention. Just one more click away from the product is not a big deal...

Hello 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!

Some browser extensions turned into paid products have morphed into $B dollar companies: (postman.com) https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/mQkDX9-zvcI

Good luck!

Thanks! :)

Your 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!

Yes, 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!

Impressive output for a single person. How do you organize yourself to get so much done and prioritize the areas you focus on? I work mostly on frontend stuff so when I work on personal projects I tend to focus on that area and neglect other ones. What backend stack are you using?

Overall I think the aesthetic is very polished. Very well done!!!

Being familiar with every aspects of software development definitely gives an edge when creating your own product. Well done on your success, and I'm also looking forward to read your post about building your Twitter audience.

Thank you! I'll definitely write about it soon in my newsletter :)

I second this, your landing page is very well done

Thank you! I spent a lot of time on that :)

Your profile page is nice and notiony. I'm kinda new to Notion and curious if that custom desing / layout is defined within notion?

Nope, it's just CSS. https://github.com/trungdq88/tonydinh-com

I like Notion style too!

Isn’t quitting at $400/month a bit premature? That’s $4800 a year, which isn’t even more than one paycheck from a software engineering job.

Depends on where on Earth you live, I guess.

Being able to see a quick video of each feature in the pricing page is a genius idea !

How do you generate those and keep them up to date though ?

Congrats for your success

Good question!! - there is definitely a market for a product for automatically capturing UI screenshots and demos on every UI release, with a permalink usable in documentation that will always show the latest image / video. Could be driven by an existing automated test framework. I know this as a web UI product owner with several years experience in enterprise software doing documentation updates after new features are added.

Thanks!

I recorded every single feature with LICECap and update them manually.

More details here: https://tdinh.notion.site/Every-pricing-page-should-have-GIF...

How do you source the data to provide such analytics? Do you have to be constantly scraping Twitter?

Yes :)

On average, I send 3 requests/minute/user to Twitter API.

So you're not really "scraping" Twitter, just using their API (but carefully not to go over rate-limiter/flagger)?

Yes, I only use the official API.

How did you build the follower base in such a short time?

I spent 3 hours/day everyday for a few months straight. I'll write about it in more details in my next newsletter issue :)

...writing on twitter? wow! It seems hard work is paying off, congrats!

How did u grow the twitter followers at the start?

I'll write about that soon in my newsletter.

You’ve got a sign up!

thank you!!

which payment service do you use?

I use Paddle.com

Is there any reason for using Paddle instead of Stripe or something else?

The only reason I use Paddle is because it handles VAT tax for me as the merchant of record. Stripe doesn't.

Good question. I can't seem to find out anything about them on their website. It's just buzzword after buzzword. WTF is "revenue delivery"?

I figure a pricing page would tell me what they do, but they don't even have one of those.

For those who wonder Paddle pricing like I was, it is in their privacy page :)

Paddle Checkout: 5% of SRP plus $0.50 https://paddle.com/legal/

They have a comparison here: https://paddle.com/compare/stripe/

Frustrating that I can't find a price.

I agree, I tend to avoid products without pricing page out of principle, but in this case I think the tax liability will force me to go with paddle for a product I'm working on.

They take about 5%

congratz on the success of new launch, Trung.

Thanks! Do we know each other? :)

How long have you been programming professionally? YOE?

7 years

Hate 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.

This 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.

Sorry 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!

I 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.

Thanks, sdiepend! I definitely should have used “Tell HN”

Thank you, it was an interesting read.

Obnoxious comment with a lot of unfounded presumptions. Why so hostile?

Because I don’t even know what the product is after glancing at the page

You 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.

I'm a little suspicious that this could be marketing by one of those guys that message extension authors to sell their user's data. Kind of a, hey look, you could be making money. Why don't you say yes the next time I message you.

Something 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.

Selling more sales (aka marketing) is the ultimate value proposition. Google and FB print money because they call up business and say “Pay us $$ and we’ll give you $$$”.

I wonder how much of it is a zero sum game. Some amount of advertising would induce impulse purchase but surely some of it like marketing for a plumber just causes sales to be redirected to the one who spent the most on marketing rather than actually creating new sales.

Google's business model for the last decade has been to pitch people who want advertising against each other, bidding ever higher for top placements.

It's up to you to decide whether that's a zero-sum game (personally I don't think it is by a strict definition), but Google is certainly responsible for more and more companies allocating an ever growing part of their budget to advertising.

It isn't immediately obvious whether that results in more business. Some of these companies may be spending more and more just to keep the same amount of sales due to bid prices increasing.

This effect is somewhat masked in a vibrant and growing economy, so it's not that easy to distill.

I suppose in theory people only have so much to spend but on the other hand growing the economy grows that disposable income.

What I found was indirect competitors with deep VC funded pockets were bidding rates high enough that it wasn't viable for me. I say indirect as they didn't compete against my product but did bid on the same keywords.

I wonder if there is some upper limit on how much advertisers can extract from the economy before they start to weaken it.

If your plumber's marketing is 'hey I'm plumber mcplungerface, call me' then yes. If your marketing is 'Hey <local high school football team mascot>s, protect your family from black mold! For $249 we'll inspect and treat your sump pump and water conditioning system and guarantee the work for ten years' you'll generate demand.

Plumbers are a bad example: Its hard to find one thats even available around here. Some just say “sorry booked for 3 months”

There’s one not far from me that has taken a more modern approach and now has 20 employees.

Good for them. But thats 20 people who are not working elsewhere and the macro supply/demand ratios are the same.

Maybe 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.

That's why it's easy for banks to make money, it's just sitting there.

Banks need to do marketing. I get to choose who I bank with!

During a gold rush, sell shovels.

Sell services to shovel sellers.

Sell a NFT shovel, it is 2022!

So you are saying I should build a no-code platform?

A no-code platform with a shovel as the only icon.

He also makes devutils.app which is very 'HN-er' and from his blog looks like it's a good chunk of his ncome!

I don't think it's about marketing. I think it's because it solves an immediate problem or gives people something that they want and as it happens, the opportunities for the folks at HN or Producthunt are in that area because it's not a solved problem unlike things like developer tools, messaging or e-mail.

Think about it, what makes you funny inside? Knowing more about people or sending messages through slightly different UI?

My other product is a developer app, which I also considered successful :) (see my previous Show HN posts)

Maybe a wild guess, but anything thats not related to ads/marketing/analytics etc., are too difficult to monetize by a solo founder ? Or maybe the other areas too difficult to get into not just in terms of software complexity, but in terms of support requirement , availability SLAs etc ?

Vanity (metrics) is a great sales driver.

Great 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?

Thank you for the kind words! As of now I don't have enough capacity to take on another project, but let's keep in touch!

Fair enough. Thanks. Keep up the great work.

I'm still not 100% sure, but I think the product is BlackMagic.so, at the link: https://blackmagic.so/

This post should really link to the product, not the blog post.

Yes it is the product. Thank you and noted on linking the product!

Very 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.

Thank you!

It'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?

That's actually a very good way to look for new ideas!

That's what I was thinking - one could churn out a large number of extensions - one for each saas product, and see what sticks.

I LOVE devutils.app, it's great!

Thanks for building useful things!

Thank you!

What 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.

Thanks 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!

I 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

Thank you! I'll write more about that soon in my next newsletter issue!

Do 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?

I only use the official Twitter API.

My last AWS bill is ~$600

What’s the breakdown of that? $600 is 20% of your revenue, and that’s a lot.

It'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.

> 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?count...

Run back up hourly if you need to. You do not need AWS, not for what you’re using them for.

I 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.

Adding on to the pile, I make around $250 / month helping people make browser extensions that make money :) https://extensionpay.com

You 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. :)

Thanks, Abimelex! I'm glad you like DevUtils!

I had almost 0 followers when I started building DevUtils & Black Magic :)

Nice 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.

Thank you for the sub and good luck!

Congrats on the milestone. As per my understanding, Google doesn't support paid chrome extensions anymore, so how are you monetizing it ?

I let people buy a subscription directly on the website blackmagic.so and use Paddle.com to process the payment.

Is 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

Last time I checked, you can see the same license model for popular apps like JetBrains IDE, Sketch, TablePlus, Parallels Desktop, any many more.

Your product page (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 ?

Thanks! You can see the complete tech stack I used here: https://tdinh.notion.site/What-is-my-tech-stack-2fe29f9df531...

Thanks for sharing this! Always interesting to see the tech stack for one-man projects like this

This is not a small product, there is so many features! How long have you been working on?

8 months

Where 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?

How 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.

Looks 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.

Thank you! I'm glad you like it! I use DevUtils everyday :)

Congrats! This looks awesome, just curious on what does the stack looks like between the browser extensions and mobile apps?

Thanks! You can see my complete tech stack here: https://tdinh.notion.site/What-is-my-tech-stack-2fe29f9df531...

The two incomes from your apps would allow you to live very well in VN, especially if you live outside of SGN. Suất sắc!

Yes it is! Cảm ơn bạn!

Well deserved. Signed up to give it a try. Very cool so far! I had no idea the level of engagement I was getting.

This is more than just a browser extension right? The data displayed comes from a server component?

Yes. There is a server.

Are you using analytics data from twitter or generate it yourself?

Twitter provides some data via API, the rest are calculated/aggregated in my server.

Any thoughts on Manifest v3?

Soon I guess.

This is very inspirational. Great job! Your work looks very polished

Thank you!

Congratulations Trung, awesome progress!

thanks!

what are your concerns and struggles with building a business on the Twitter API so far?

Platform 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.

The 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

congrats on the hitting your goal dude!

Thank you!

You’re most welcome! so happy for you dude

A lot of the comments in this thread aren't doing anything to put the memes about HN commenters to rest.

Yes, I’m seeing a ton of jealousy. It’s very obvious.

congrats tony!

thanks!

"One thing that will definitely help is to have a good product"

o rly?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com