Traffic first, product second: why my first micro-SaaS is a Chrome extension
A month ago I picked a format for my first product: a Telegram bot. The reasoning was simple. I’ve built plenty of bots, so my fifty hours would go into the product, not into learning a new platform. Today I changed my mind. The first one will be a Chrome extension.
Bots aren’t the problem. I was just starting from the wrong end.
The mistake
I compared formats by how fast I could build in them. But code isn’t the hard part of a micro-product. The hard part is getting anyone besides your mom to notice it exists.
I can write the code in fifty hours in any format. I can’t bring in the first hundred users in fifty hours in any format, not if there’s nowhere for them to come from.
Traffic first, product second
So the order flips. Not “build a product, then figure out where to sell it”, but the other way around:
- Find a traffic source where people already search for solutions and already pay for them.
- Look at what they’re missing there.
- Only then build a small product for that exact place.
Paid ads aren’t in the plan at all. The first customers have to come organically: from search, from the catalog, from reviews. I have no budget for buying traffic, and spending one on a product with zero users is a questionable move anyway.
That means the traffic source isn’t ads and isn’t my blog. It’s a store where people show up on their own, with their own problem, type it into the search box, and are already used to paying. If the product sits on that shelf, people find it without me.
Why the bot didn’t make it
A Telegram bot’s distribution is a link. I used to count that as a plus: nothing to install. The flip side is that someone has to show people the link. Telegram has no store where you type “I need a bot for…” and find mine. So I’d be hauling traffic in myself, from channels, group chats, social media. For a first product and a team of one, that’s a second job on top of the first.
Why Chrome
Extensions have the Chrome Web Store. It’s a ready-made shelf:
- Search. People arrive with a problem and look for a fix themselves.
- Reviews. You can see what people like and what they complain about in other extensions.
- Paying customers. People already pay for extensions there, so I don’t have to prove from scratch that anyone pays for this kind of thing.
The reviews are a gift on their own. My pain digest already collects bad extension reviews. A one-star review saying “great, but it can’t do X” is basically a spec.
What I give up
Honestly: I have zero experience with extensions. Store review can be unpredictable, Manifest V3 breaks working things every now and then, and I’ll have to bolt on payments separately. The first week goes to the platform, not the product. The exact risk I was running from a month ago.
But the trade is clear. I learn the platform once, and every next product needs traffic. Better to spend a week on Manifest V3 than to build a perfect bot nobody ever hears about.
What’s next
The format is picked, the idea isn’t. Next step: dig through Store reviews and look for extensions people use but complain about. Wherever they complain, that’s where my first micro-product is.
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