Ask HN: I Built a Extension, but I'm Struggling with Promotion – Any Advice?
2 zy5a59 6 6/9/2025, 2:50:03 PM
I developed a browser extension, and the conversion rate is pretty good. However, I’m stuck on how to promote it further.
I believe this is a critical problem for many developers — building the product is relatively easy, but promoting it is the hard part.
I'm facing this challenge once again. In the past, whenever I ran into marketing difficulties with a product, I’d just set it aside and move on to building something new. But this time, I really want to solve the problem once and for all.
What are some effective ways to promote your own product?
I’ve already tried many approaches — launching on Product Hunt, building backlinks, creating videos on TikTok, and more — but none of them have brought significant results.
Are there any other proven or creative strategies I could try?
Circa 2000 all of my "normie" relatives had 20 or 30 different "toolbars" installed in their browsers from the likes of Yahoo, Lycos, Hotmail, Infoseek, Altavista, etc. They had horrible 640x480 screens that were effectively 640x120 but they thought it was normal, didn't have a choice, etc.
When you install plugins into GUI applications they eventually die of "pluginitis" as something adds 0.2s of latency here and something else adds 0.3s and... wow, a race condition!
The cases I will install an extension are: (1) it is required for work, a project, whatever or (2) I expect it to improve, not reduce performance, such as an adblocker or anti-tracking tool.
It might seem like an anachronism, but I still make bookmarklets that do pretty fancy things such as to cue a personal webcrawler.
In some sense it's adversarial like trading/investing, people who have a working strategy can't share it or it won't work anymore.
But the bread-and-butter is probably setting it up correctly to facilitate word-of-mouth, influencers, ads in communities your users frequent.
When I was in college I was the PR manager for college radio station KTEK which was notorious for having dances where hardly anyone showed up. My prescription was plastering the campus (2000 students or so) with a ream of paper worth of posters with 15 different designs. Our DJ crew was great so we retained people once they came, but it took about two years of that to get to the place where people expected a KTEK dance to be hopping.
My expectation is that if I tasked a young person with that kind of marketing task today they'd make one poster, put up four of them, and have some excuse like "anybody who wanted that information would seek it out." Doesn't work that way.