How I Built It: $20K/Month Chrome Extension

learned how to build an extension and launched my first extension within like two or three days and today it's at about like 20 to $30,000 Mr how does one guy make over $20,000 a month with a simple browser extension well it's because he's building in the hottest niche in business right now ai s aadi started his journey as an employee working for almost a decade in Corporate America in different startups but now he's a solopreneur making a pretty good living while working on a side project he's passionate about so I spent over an hour talking

to him and getting the complete scoop on his $20,000 a month AI business turns out it's actually pretty simple and it's not as saturated as you might think there's still plenty of opportunity you just need to know where to look in this video s shares a master class on building in AI where to find good ideas where to build those ideas and some unique ways to monetize those ideas even if you're a beginner all right let's get into it I'm Pat walls and this is starter story welcome s it's great to have you tell me

about who you are in this business that you built my name is s um I'm a software engineer chat GPT extension that I built it's called super power chat GPT it's a browser extension basically that adds a bunch bunch of extra feature to chat GPT I started this about a year and a half ago and today it's at about like 20 to $30,000 mrr I'm the only person who's been working on the extension it has been downloaded close to like I think 260 70,000 times weekly active users for the extension is around like 150,000 okay

so you built a Chrome extension to over $220,000 a month what do you think is the best strategy for someone to do something similar two ways I'm thinking about this either building for an existing really big platform like Gmail for example or like Roblox Facebook YouTube Twitter they already have all these users all you need to do is to just build the extension and those users will find you Twitter had like hundreds of millions of users and if only like 2,000 people want that features that's like a good amount of like revenue for you to

just live off of the other thing I recommend is going after platforms that have like an existing Marketplace but a smaller user base Zoom or Salesforce it's a lot easier to compete in a Marketplace like that they have less number of users but at the same time they have less number of people building for those platforms so that's another good place to build some product let's talk about the opportunity of building plugins in marketplaces what makes this better than launching a traditional SAS that has its own website most people when they want to start a

project they just thinking about from s of like a standalone platform like a website that has all of its own back end and front end and everything but competing with like everyone on the Internet is a lot harder than competing with like a limited number of players in a smaller like Marketplace and it also helps a lot with validating the the product like it's a lot easier to build like a simple extension that runs on a user browser that way you can at least know if the idea is going to work out or not and

if it's worth like spending more time on it got it so building for an existing Marketplace is a lot faster it's less crowded and it's a lot easier to validate your idea can you tell us how to actually come up with an idea for a Marketplace platform when Chad GPT was launched I already had some idea what features missing and initially when I was building the features I was mainly building the extension for myself and later I tried to go find the places that my users will hang out subreddits are one of them Discord channels

are other one SL groups is another one Facebook group is another one I just like join all these groups and I started listening to people and trying to figure out what features other people want to see in chat GPT I think this is probably one of the best way to like come up with idea just go where your potential customers hanging out and see what they are asking for and just try to build that and this was actually one of my probably biggest like growth um hack that I apply to this extension just listening to

people what they want trying to implement the feature and then going back and telling them that okay I added this feature you can use this extension and have that feature as part of the chat GPT interface s is the perfect example of a crafty internet Builder he finds his ideas by spending time researching researching in communities researching through his own problems and frustrations and most importantly researching other businesses to see if he could build something better now what if there was an easier way to shortcut all of this research well that's why we made this

solo developer Deep dive it breaks down 50 different solo developer business ideas including their business models their customer profiles the platform they built on and a whole bunch of other cool stuff you'd want to know so if you're actually serious about building a profitable side project like sayah head to the first link in the description and I'm going to give you the Deep dive of 50 developer ideas for free and hopefully it helps you find your own idea now let's get back to S okay so we know where to build and what to build but

what about how to build it what kind of experiences or coding languages do you need to learn if you know how to build a simple website you'll know how to build like an extension JavaScript HTML CSS that's how I built the very first version it was very very simple only had like two features basically but actually I have never built any browser extension before I learned how to build an extension and launched my first extension within like two or 3 days basically after chat GPT was launched so I'm not saying like every like simple project

could work timing is really important here I bu really really early okay so you can find build and launch a product pretty quickly but how do you actually get users or eyeballs on your product I have not done any ads or anything for the extension and all of it happened organically by word of mouth or by me like posting on like different platform like I think the very first place that I posted it was on Reddit I think it went like to the top of that subreddit that I posted for that day but at the

same time like just people who like are on social media started writing reviews about like top like 10 chaty PT extension for example and my extension had those features basically so I didn't write them I didn't pay for them to be written I've never like actually paid anyone to write any article and it was all organic people started finding it started using it they like the idea they like the features and started sharing those ideas with their audience and that helped a lot with growing the um user base wow so you didn't spend any money

on marketing yeah clearly being early helped a lot but I think what stands out is that people basically started marketing your plug-in for you because you built a really great product are there any other early opportunities that someone watching this could take advantage of right now and how can you build standout products in those niches AI is really powerful but it's still very early in doctors maybe are not thinking about bringing AI into their job but if you do there are a lot of like opportunities there one of my favorite thing is to talk to

my users and every time I talk to any users I try to learn as much as I can about them what they do what's their background and how they use Chad GPT learning about how a lawyer is using Chad GPT to make their job easier or a doctor is using trpt to make their job easier is one of the best way to come up with new ideas and build new product for people who don't directly use AI okay let's talk about monetization we know how to build it and how to get users but how did

you actually make your first dollar first for the first 9 months or so the extension was completely free like every feature of the extension was 100% free if you ask me today um I think I should have like monetized the extension earlier but at the same time I do feel like it helped a lot with like growing my user base so I wanted to capture that audience and I started writing a newsletter basically for like the the user base that I had and this is like three or 4 months after I started the extension I

also posted my newsletter on some of the website that like you can get a sponsors for I like within the like week or two I had like a my first sponsor paying me like a few hundred dollar to just poster ad on the newsletter basically when I first started writing the newsletter it would take me like maybe six or 7 hours every day now it takes like maybe 2 hours or so to write a newsletter wow so you took a pretty unconventional route and started making money from the newsletter first but how did you monetize

the actual Chrome extension after like that like first 9 or 10 months I started to think about new features that I can add to the extension and ask people to pay for those extra features basically so I didn't ask anyone to pay for any existing features that the extension had and all of those features stayed free and I tried like different pricing like I experimented like higher price lower price and I like kind of found like a midle grounder that I think was the best way to price the extension so what are the coding languages

tools and software you use to build as a solar preneur I spend most of my time inside vs code it's a code editor um that's where I write all of my code for all of my projects when I was bu building the extension I went back to like pure JavaScript with no Frameworks I used AWS uh for all of my backends all of my project basically live on like AWS for like the newsletter I use beehive one of the nice thing about beehive is like their monetization features they actually they have this thing called boost

you can just like include some links in your newsletter and make money from it I use passion fruit that's where people find me and reach out to me to a sponsor the newsletter all right before we wrap things up I want to talk a bit about a controversial Topic in the AI space you know you built this product to over $20,000 a month but it's a chat gbt rapper right is there any downside to this and do you worry about this at all open AI can kill this product any day I was scared of that

for a very long time and at this point I kind of feel numb to it I don't want to like worry about it today literally if my extension stopped working at some point I'm probably going to try and build other extension for one of these other major platforms that's going to make my my life a lot harder all right s final question what advice would you have to someone just starting out who wants to build their own software business or Plugin inside of a Marketplace try to validate the project as fast as you can just

build the very first version and launch it and see if you get some users from it try to do that and the other thing I mentioned this earlier focus on your strength in my case it was building a product sharing it with people for free and like getting my first fewe users from that so those two things are the most important thing in my opinion yo guys I really hope you enjoyed the video and got some hopefully good tips in Golden nuggets from s but I want to say something real quick at the end of

the day the point of these videos is to show you ideas and show you it's possible but hopefully you take these ideas and go start your own profitable thing and your own successful business while learning this stuff is important taking action is the thing that's actually going to change your life so spend time researching learning finding ideas but then go build that thing as fast as you can if you're still feeling a little lost on this right now well click the first link in the description and you're going to get a free report of solo

developer ideas that are actually making money right now so you can get going on your thing much love and I'll see you guys in the next one peace [Music]