What 41 Users in 4 Days Taught Me with my First Browser Extension
I've launched Veelo, a browser extension which you can use to take notes within each tab, kind of like a minimalist Notion in your browser this Wednesday 13th in August.
By the day I'm writing this, in August 17th we've gotten:
41 people across 4 continents using Veelo
1 rating
That’s 10 people per continent! It's all been organic traffic, networking and reaching out to existing communities. I'm really proud of it so far.
The process sounds fun and it seems like I'm winning. Maybe I’m, but I've only ensured to follow a few key principles after several failed products and ideas of mine, hence why I believe things are actually working out this time.
It's not luck. It's engineering, psychology and sales. Similar to Dark Souls, I had to "die" a lot to get good at this game.
Let me share my lessons with you and what's working this time.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel
Let's start by clarifying something. Veelo is not a tool to highlight notes in a website primarily. It's used as a smaller version of Note which you can carry across different websites. Each website you visit can have their own notes, and you can also pin notes, making them show up in almost all websites you visit.
I'd also tested Note Anywhere, another good extension to work with sticky notes. But I found a few problems with the UX/UI. You cannot use markdown, you cannot highlight text, you cannot name notes and the UI feels intrusive sometimes.
It served as an inspiration to build Veelo, which combines the UX/UI of Notion with the capabilities of Note Anywhere, and beyond!
The lesson? Remix and take inspiration from others. 🚀
Build with and for actual users
One of the reasons why Veelo has been well received by the first users is because of how easy it's to use. But it wasn't always like this! While working with students in the development stage, I noticed important problems and limitations:
Everything was markdown based (A language used primarily by technical users)
No menu or guidance for the average user
No highlighters
Notes didn't even have titles
I regret making Veelo this technical at the beginning to be honest. Beta testers literally saved the product, I couldn’t be more grateful for that.
While it was brilliant, I was clearly missing basic functionalities to make it useful.
That’s when I learned the following: never build alone. Always ask for feedback and recommendations, even if it comes from friends. Otherwise you're just building for a void. And you actually want people to use your products.
Don't limit your target audience
Veelo initially was built only for developers, as I was trying to solve my own problem of multitasking between technical documentation from work, and my browser. This didn’t work out because:
My problem was almost non-existent given all tools available for developers
Students struggled the most with similar problems
There were better alternatives for developers. Yet the average user or student didn’t have much intuitive tools
Hence why I ended up pivoting the idea from a developers tool to one for students and non-technical users. Devs can also benefit from it, as well!
Launch is just the beginning
Sure, you launched your product and gathered your first users. But if you want to keep helping people with it and accomplish your goals, you actually need to have a long term plan.
It could be:
Reaching 762 users by December and 52 daily active users
Featuring in Dev.to or HackerNews
Monetizing one feature by January 2026
But Fran, why are you this strict? My friend, if you're really serious about your growth:
It forces you to find a way to accomplish those goals
It helps you think about the long term. Launching product is fun. But the process of networking, scaling and following long term strategies will required you to be disciplined and have a plan.
You might get far without a plan. But even a bad plan is better than no plan at all.
Next Plans
Next time, I’ll reveal the hardest engineering decisions I had to make (and how they almost killed the product) in a study case. I’ll keep focused on learning from user feedback, improving my skills at work and keep sharing my knowledge.
Thank you so much for reading! You can follow my journey on LinkedIn as well. Let’s keep fighting the abyss together.
