Building a Chrome extension is one of the most accessible and profitable entry points into the indie hacker ecosystem. You only need standard web technologies—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—to build a tool that lives directly in your users' workflow. However, the Chrome Web Store (CWS) is incredibly crowded, and discovering how to market a utility tool is a completely different skillset than coding it. For an indie developer, building a Chrome extension in public is the fastest way to bridge this gap. The Chrome extension community thrives on shared knowledge. When you build in public, you aren't just coding in a silo; you are publicly navigating the transition to Manifest V3, dealing with opaque CWS review times, and finding early beta testers willing to sideload unpacked extensions. By documenting your journey, you transform a simple browser utility into a compelling narrative. You attract users who relate to the pain point you are solving (like managing 100 open tabs or extracting data) and fellow developers who can help debug a stubborn background service worker. Building your Chrome extension in public on BuildInProcess gives you the distribution channel that the Chrome Web Store entirely lacks.
The Chrome Web Store is essentially a black box. Relying purely on App Store Optimization (ASO) is a slow burn. Building in public creates external demand; you drive educated, high-intent traffic directly to your installation page from your social updates.
Before dealing with the headache of official CWS reviews, you need feedback. Building in public allows you to share a ZIP file of your unpacked extension with a dedicated community, letting you squash bugs and refine the UI before the official launch.
Getting a Chrome extension approved—especially one requiring broad permissions—can take weeks. By sharing your rejection emails and the exact manifest.json tweaks that finally got you approved, you provide immense value to other developers while building your audience.
Should you use ExtensionPay, Stripe, or a freemium model? Sharing your pricing experiments and the resulting conversion rates is some of the highest-value content you can post as a solo developer.
We built the exact tools you need to share your journey without wasting hours on marketing.
Specific, concrete updates that actually drive engagement in this niche.
The entire ecosystem is moving to Manifest V3. Document your migration journey—how you replaced background pages with service workers, and how you managed to keep your extension functional. This is highly searchable technical content.
Share the results of changing your extension's name, promotional tiles, or primary keywords in the CWS. Did an updated description jump your ranking from page 3 to page 1? Tell the community exactly how you did it.
Post a detailed breakdown of how you got your first 100 active users. Did you launch on Product Hunt? Did you post in specific subreddits? Share the exact analytics and referral sources.
Share the code (or at least the architecture) of how you implemented a paywall in a browser extension without ruining the user experience. Show your Stripe dashboard when that first $5 monthly subscription hits.
Chrome extensions break all the time because the DOM of target websites (like LinkedIn or Twitter) changes. Write an update about a bizarre CSS conflict you had to resolve; it proves you are actively maintaining the product.
Installs are vanity metrics; Active Users are reality. Share your weekly active user graph and discuss what features you are building specifically to prevent uninstalls.
The perfect platform to document your technical journey, write comprehensive case studies on your marketing tactics, and auto-post your extension updates to X and LinkedIn.
The go-to tool for indie hackers looking to easily monetize Chrome extensions without building custom Stripe integrations from scratch.
Highly active Reddit communities where you can post links to your BuildInProcess articles and gather brutally honest feedback on your extension.
Modern React/Vue frameworks for building browser extensions. Sharing your development stack using these tools attracts top-tier developer engagement.
Guilherme built CSS Scan, an extension that lets developers easily copy CSS from any element. By sharing his development process and marketing it heavily on Twitter and Product Hunt, he blew past $100k in revenue.
While not a pure extension, many massive SaaS companies start as simple browser utilities. Building small extensions in public often leads to uncovering massive B2B pain points.
Many solo developers in the build-in-public space (like those building AI wrappers for LinkedIn or Amazon sellers) utilize Chrome extensions to reach $1k+ MRR within months by solving highly specific workflow problems.
Create your profile on BuildInProcess. Your first post should outline the exact problem you experienced that forced you to start writing this extension.
Chrome extensions live in tiny popup windows or injected sidebars. Share a Figma mockup of your UI and ask the community if it seems intuitive before you start coding.
Don't wait for the CWS. Write an update providing instructions on how to load your extension in 'Developer Mode' and ask for 10 brave beta testers to try it.
The submission process is daunting. Write a thread or article detailing how you filled out the privacy policy, justified your permissions, and created your store assets.
The moment Google approves your extension, blast it across BuildInProcess, LinkedIn, and X. This is your launch day—capitalize on the momentum of finally being in the store.
While general categories like 'Ad Blockers' are saturated, niche B2B tools and highly specific productivity wrappers are thriving. Building in public helps you dominate these niches by driving external traffic.
You must build an external marketing engine. Writing SEO-optimized articles on BuildInProcess about the problem your extension solves is the best way to drive high-intent organic traffic to your store listing.
Absolutely. Many indie developers use freemium models, charging $5-$15/month for advanced features. Extensions like CSS Scan and Gmass have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Write about the marketing strategy you plan to deploy, share the landing page you just built, or do a technical deep dive into how you structured your background service workers for Manifest V3.
BuildInProcess acts as your dedicated developer log and marketing megaphone. By drafting your updates here, we help you format beautiful technical content and automatically cross-post it to the platforms where your users hang out.