4 successful founders shared how they grew their browser extensions. A recent thread on Hacker News revealed some of the strategies bootstrapped founders use to grow their Chrome extensions:

• TikTok: "I was lucky enough that video about my extension blew up on TikTok (it wasn't even my video!), which bring around 34k users."

• Edge Addons store: "...list on the Edge Add-ons store. My user count over there is ~40% of the Chrome store number." You don't have to change (almost) anything to re-publish your Chrome extension to Edge, which is based on Chromium.

• Target subreddits: "I have made 4 extensions in the last 1 year, with over 1000 users. 1 over 100k, 1 over 10k, 1 over 5k and 1 over 1k. Only marketing was a single post on Reddit for each. I used mainly r/webdev showoff Saturdays."

• Don't ignore keyword optimization: "While there aren't visibility-boosting features, don't downplay SEO on the app stores. That is, if yours is the kind of extension that people will be searching for when looking to solve their problem. The Chrome store also shows a bunch of 'related' extensions at the bottom of every listing."