Show HN: I make $3K/mo from a browser extension

That’s not a small audience at all, and the success of the beta program and the launch are heavily affected by the existing audience I have.

That’s what you should do, even if you don’t have any product at the moment: building an audience.

(I plan to write about my journey building an audience on Twitter at some point, this issue is already too long! – Stay tuned! 😊)

2. The free users

I have ~6,500 free users before the beta program. Most are people who use the other fun features of Black Magic like Profile Progress Bar, Real-time banner, etc.

After 2 months of beta program, the total free users was ~9,800.

Free users require a lot of resources to serve (server cost, support, etc.), but there are a lot of potentials to convert a lot of people to paid customers.

The launch announcement also helps to gather more attention/support, which is extremely valuable!

So, if possible, you should offer some free features or free tiers of your product!

3. Offer free beta & build in public

It almost feels wrong to consider this as marketing, but it actually helped me a lot during the 2 months of running the beta program!

The beta was not actually “free”, it was an invite-only beta. I ask people to reply to my tweets to get an invitation.

So you could say I traded the beta memberships for some Twitter engagements, which translates to more visibility to the product, which translates to marketing!

Here is an example:

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3ePywtN