Building a profitable Chrome extension | Lessons from Pretty Prompt

[00:00] We are yet to understand why they choose an annual versus a monthly plan, and it's really interesting data for us. But again, we are still learning from our users. [00:15] Hello and welcome back to Developer Mode. [00:17] Today I'm joined by Charlie and Eli, two co-founders who are earning money from their Chrome extension. [00:23] How to successfully monetize an extension is something a lot of developers ask about. [00:27] And so today I really want to focus on everything they've learned about how to build something users will actually pay for. [00:33] Welcome both to the show. How are you doing? [00:35] We're very good. Thanks for inviting us. Awesome. I would love to just hear a little bit about sort of what your product is and how it's going so far. Yeah, so we build PrettyPrompt, which is a Chrome extension that sits on top of your AI providers, things sort of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and we help you improve your prompt as you write it. Nice. And it's really, really easy to get started. Once you install the Chrome extension, people just press this ImprovePrompt button and they get [01:03] this small prompt that they wrote into a whole enhanced piece of text that hopefully gets them better results and it's been really an interesting journey and sort of how's it going where you at the [01:15] What's your journey been like so far and what milestones have you hit recently? So we recently passed 15,000 users, which is really amazing. Congratulations. Thank you. I remember when we started this a few months ago. And yeah, we've only been live as a product for a few months, to be honest. So it's been pretty fast. So I think we started around about early June. Yeah. And we've been going since then. And yeah, we started off as a sort of internal tool we were both using.

[01:45] just launch this out and release it. And the reason was because Charlie, who is actually the main technical co-founder from both of us, I deal mainly with customers. Charlie deals mainly with the product and the building. And I think that the good thing is we were building a separate product before. Yeah. And internally, we were constantly prompting and changing things. We took up all our time. It's super hard. Should we just build something to solve this problem for us? Which I think is a great learning. You know, if you have a problem, just solve it yourself first. Yeah. Yeah. [02:13] Yeah, and we released it and it had such a good response. We decided to sort of burn the boats and go completely onto this. And I think it was a good decision since then. 100%. So since June, within the first week I remember of launching, we had about 3,000 users. Yeah. Which is a pretty good milestone. That's already, yeah. A lot of progress in the short amount of time, yeah. But again, we didn't launch trying to make money. Again, it was an internal tool. Yep. [02:43] we wanted to almost like validate if people would first of all use it. Yeah. And second of all, want to pay for it because there's no point to build something. No one wants. It's like, you know, everybody talks about like the main reason why products fails are not because of the problem are because customers don't, [02:58] need or want maybe they don't get it which is completely fine it doesn't find the product market fit exactly yeah so did you find that users were actually willing to pay for your extension uh yeah so in the uh when we first launched it it was completely free to use but within about a week uh we launched it around about the start of four days about four days based on email four days based on the email we got an email from a user saying um yeah we really want to pay for this yeah and that was kind of like the gold standard for saying okay we should really implement a

[03:28] And again, it was part of validation. It's like level zero, level one, level two. Like we were still in level zero and, you know, we are now in level one or two. No more than that. You know, it gets harder and harder and harder. But the fact that someone emails you and say, hello, I was trying to subscribe and potentially pay for the service is like... [03:47] we should have a paywall. You know, we should get on this like as a priority. [03:52] And we talk about sort of adding a paywall as something [03:55] you just sort of decide to do and then it's done. But I know, realistically, like, there's a lot of work and a lot of complexity to handling chargebacks and [04:03] maybe refunds or upgrades even how do you handle all of this [04:09] So yeah, I think we started off [04:12] okay, what's the most basic way we can do this? And that's really taking a payment from a user, sending them to a checkout. So we just integrated with payment provider Stripe, and then we linked that to our database, and then that would update the user just as a flag, which says is paid. Okay. Really super basic. There was no way to, you know, refunds. We did that all manually. Upgrades, we did that all manually. When they would pay, I would send them a message [04:42] and I would see someone paid, I would go manually to send them an email. There was no automated email in the beginning. I was like, "Welcome to Pretty Prompt Pro." No, there was no that. I was like, "Hey, I'm Eli, I'm one of the co-founders. I'm super excited to welcome you, and thank you so much for paying. If you have any issues, let me know." So if you got an email in the first weeks or months of Pretty Prompt, then maybe it was directly from you. And it's still from me, because I messaged people directly, and funnily enough,

[05:12] even technical founders should... [05:16] And not that this is for everybody But like [05:19] should [05:20] feel that sometimes part of building a [05:22] product is not building, but it's actually [05:25] talking to the people and like charlie does support yeah i i mean i think that's a big thing uh i think all engineers should do support they should get on a call with the customer and they should really feel like okay if the customer is asking for a certain feature why um yeah why are they asking why are they asking for it dig a little bit deeper don't just build it but understand okay what is the underlying principle as to why they want feature x yeah and can this be solved in a [05:51] maybe not even an automation way. Is this something that isn't even a problem to start with? Yeah. [05:56] and [05:57] going back to kind of like the payment flow [05:59] we put together this early on to understand how we would do it. And we came up with literally kind of like this fourth step which is from the extension... [06:08] you have this button that says upgrade. [06:10] Yeah. [06:11] which you can click anytime, but it would kind of like. [06:14] it can [06:16] to the front once you hit the limit that we are testing what is the limit that user wants to upgrade and that will take you directly to a checkout in the very beginning yeah so it'll take you to a checkout and then you'd have like a webhook that would call sort of your super base back end and then update the uh update the tier on the uh it's actually on the chrome extension it wasn't even on the back end right we only logged when you get paid okay um so we sort of capture the customer

[06:46] had some kind of indication of who they are. Something interesting with Chrome extensions specifically is when they would come back from that payment into the Chrome extension, we would reopen the pop-up. [06:56] which is kind of like on the top right corner of your browser to refetch... [07:01] you know, and make sure that that is updated and make sure that now they appear as pro. To get, like, the latest payment data from your server or wherever you need to check. Exactly. Yeah. So every time that you kind of, like, upgrade and change your tier... [07:16] That gets reopened. Yeah. I think making sure that flow works quite well is important. Because there's nothing worse. You've paid. You've given over your debit card details. You've paid for something. And then nothing happened. Nothing happened. So you have to then email them. And it's like, so we really tried to test that to make sure it really does work flawlessly. So there's no kind of break in what they're doing. Yeah. I think that's where customer support becomes really important. [07:43] I think if you... [07:44] have an issue and you get back to someone really quickly and say something went wrong with our system and we're going to fix it. [07:49] then all is good. The longer you leave it, the more users start to think, [07:52] maybe they did just take my money and something is not right. Exactly, exactly. You want to keep that kind of almost sort of asynchronous communication as opposed to just synchronous. And I think that's... [08:04] that's maybe worked quite well for us. Yeah, and we've spoken in the past, and I think something we all agreed was... [08:10] there just isn't much data for developers to aspire to around sort of what's possible with extensions and what size of an audience can you reach, how willing are users to pay for extensions. So I'm curious, are there sort of any numbers you can share, any insight into sort of what you found is possible and what you think is realistic?

[08:27] Yeah. So over 15,000 users right now and within the first 60 days, so we got a user, we launched. That was kind of like first stage. [08:40] Second one was what Charlie said, which is... Getting someone to ask to actually pay for it. Exactly. So, like... [08:48] Ask to pay. Great. Tick. So very quickly. And then afterwards, we actually got some sort of [08:56] it was like TikTok organic growth from just people building videos, whether it be on YouTube, TikTok or wherever. And that was also an amazing kind of validation for us because we didn't ask these people to do it. They were just like, this is such an interesting product. We really like to do it. And that sort of drove even more growth with it. Yeah. It's a nice cycle where maybe a creator feels like if I share this and this is useful to my audience and of course it's useful to you because it brings you an audience. [09:26] we all [09:28] us builders are trying to think about what the market wants and like what is the big opportunity and i think that is that is a great way of looking at it yeah but we took almost like the counter intuitive way of doing it and i and it's easy to say now you know when you're in the moment you don't think about i'm doing the opposite no yeah but right now looking back we built something that we wanted [09:50] there was no like big audience. Yeah. We actually launched on Charlie's birthday. Yes. It was that Saturday. I was actually in Greenwich, Greenwich Park. Oh, nice. Having a pizza. And then suddenly, Slack, Slack notifications started going off.

[10:05] Funnily enough, later that day, we actually got kicked out of Slack, which has never happened before in any other company I've been in. So we had to switch very quickly. But why did we get kicked out of Slack? So we got kicked out because we had two high rate limits on our analytics channel. And you were posting every time there was a new user? So given that it was a... [10:25] new product, you never know what to track, so you just try and track everything. And we're getting the notifications on Slack essentially. Like every single [10:33] you know, second you were getting like 10, 20 notifications. - Like for example, sorry, but like we just got like a customer [10:40] like upgrading and sending some feedback so like it's really really useful because you get it real real time really tapped into sort of what's happening and yeah how things are doing yeah but then we got rate limited we got rate limited and then we had to get kicked off of slack so uh it was only for about 24 hours but um it was a lesson to be like okay uh this is something you know people want they want to pay for um and yeah yeah so within the in terms of a little bit [11:10] And we started without the paywall. Within the first week, people sent kind of like these emails and messages with a lot of requests, lots of questions, a lot of stuff that is like fluff. Oh, I love this. No one cares about that. What you want is actually what is not working and why they like it. Not that they like it. Tell me why you like it. What is the single most important feature or capability or unlock that this product does for you? If you tell me that, then we know where to double down.

[11:40] And if you tell me what doesn't work for you, [11:42] we also know what we need to work on. So it's kind of like the good and the bad, not the neutral that normally cares. - I mean, it's nice to get that neutral feedback, but it's just not very useful for building a product. - Yeah, but for other developers, [11:54] Like don't seek approval Seek approval [11:58] So [11:59] Seek for want to pay. I think that is very different from like, I love this, but... [12:04] yeah you know yeah yeah no no i completely agree i think it's um you you can have a lot of reviews saying giving you such positive yeah positive things but ultimately reviews reviews are great yeah but if you want to monetize a product um the only hard evidence is are people willing to pay for this yes we're putting the credit card money were your mouth were people willing to pay what did you find [12:27] They were. So yeah, they were. They were really willing to play. It immediately solved their problem. I think one of the [12:34] big things we did which worked out quite well we didn't think was [12:38] super, super big at the start was the onboarding was really seamless. Like it takes about 10, 20 seconds. No onboarding. Yes, add to Chrome. It takes about 10, 20 seconds to get any kind of value. Yeah. So they can immediately see where it is. And what was quite interesting is then we started adding an annual plan to this. Yeah. [12:59] And we just threw that out. We thought, oh, we'll see what happens. What happens if we can give them a discount for like as usually SaaS tools are doing? For say, you get two months free over the whole year. And then suddenly loads of people were signing up because they were like, we want to take advantage of this. I learned my metrics as a founder. So I want to say this. 25% of users today pay for annual subscription, which is huge. That's amazing. 25%. That's a quarter of our user base, which pays.

[13:29] Pays for Unload [13:30] Now, we are yet to understand why they choose an annual versus a monthly plan, and it's really interesting data for us. But again, we are still learning from our users. [13:40] We definitely know that it works [13:43] because we didn't have it [13:44] Like Charlie said, we added it. Now, 25% of users are choosing annual versus the other one. And as a startup, as a small company, this is huge to be able to take this because you don't just take the money. You take their trust for you. So it's a lot. And yeah, I imagine the user then feels more invested to continue using the product for a year and sort of see it through while they have the premium access. Absolutely. I think one of the other big things is getting users who are engaged and willing to give feedback [14:14] solving my problem. And if they are invested for the entire year, that's really, really helpful. And we try to do, like yesterday we did three calls with different users, we try to do every week since that beginning of June calls with customers to understand [14:34] exactly what's working, what's not working, what they like, they don't like. And not only it helps to create a cycle back to the product, but actually... [14:43] it makes them [14:45] be more invested in the product themselves, which means it drives more word of mouth, which means you have more probabilities of charging more money eventually, because they became your biggest advocates. So we've actually haven't spent a pound, a dollar on marketing so far. That's amazing. Which is amazing. Yeah. And I think a lot of developers will be watching this and will be thinking,

[15:07] I would be more than happy to do the customer calls. I would love as much feedback as I can get. [15:11] but I just don't know how to even get in touch with the customers who could give me that feedback. So... [15:16] Do you have any advice for sort of how to [15:17] initiate that sort of thing so i so yeah i think um so for your existing customers make it very easy to contact you yeah so uh sorry and when they say you it's you it's not like oh yeah yeah like a team no put your name put your face make sure people talk to a human yeah and uh yeah make it very easy for them to contact you yeah and uh reply quickly uh i mean i think that's a really underappreciated uh [15:46] thing, you know, sometimes you take [15:48] 24 hours to reply if you can reply within 10-15 minutes and 60 seconds yeah 60 seconds realistically and if you can consistently do that and you can solve a bug for them within a minute. [16:02] let's say 30 minutes, suddenly they're like, "Oh, this is fantastic." Because they're not used to that kind of customer support, because whether it's a big company, there's so many layers that has to go through, but it's almost like very refreshing when you have some kind of very, very quick customer service and is to the direct founders. They have to go to management to ask, "Can we add this?" They can just go, "Okay, I can commit this straight to the GitHub repo, test it." [16:28] and it's already live in production. And you can test it with them and say, is this fixed for you? And they say yes. And they give you a fantastic review. That's really cool. And I think...

[16:38] Don't be... [16:39] ashamed of asking them for a review, because especially for [16:45] Chrome extensions reviews are extremely powerful because they are first and foremost [16:50] center in your page of your application. So if... [16:55] It worked out [16:57] Ask them for a review. It's like, hey, thank you so much. I'm glad that it's working now. [17:01] Would you mind leaving a review for us, you know, and, you know, five star review or not. But ask them for an honest review because they also will say what they like or they don't like. And that is really, really powerful because people are willing to share their experience, whether it's good or bad, usually. They are willing to share their experience. And I think this is an important clarification because I sort of... [17:22] Seen some misunderstanding here. [17:24] We have Chrome Web Store policies against sort of manipulating reviews or asking for dishonest reviews. [17:29] but reviews are really important. And if you have a customer who's had a good experience encouraging them, please just leave an honest review of how you found the product like [17:37] That's completely fine and you should absolutely do that. And I think you ask it exactly like that. Please leave an honest review of your experience. [17:43] that's it there's nothing more to ask or to say there and you know that's the best way to get people back into the truth yeah [17:52] And I think given that it's almost getting harder to trust [17:56] what people say [17:58] on their landing page. And just on the internet in general. The fantastic thing about Google reviews is it's linked to someone's name. It's linked to the date they did it and it is on the Chrome Web Store website. So we actually link it directly there. These aren't just reviews someone has given us in an email, they're actual reviews that exist on the web store.

[18:22] touching a little bit of monetization and what Charlie just said. So we call that social proof. So social proof are reviews, what people say, all the logos and all the nice smiley faces and all these five stars in the Chrome Web Store. [18:36] what we actually learned [18:38] is we originally had this button that said upgrade for paying customers once they hit a limit. So the way that PrettyProm works is like you have [18:46] you can try it without even logging in, which is an amazing idea that Charlie had and it works [18:53] amazingly because you add to Chrome, you try it, you like it, only after if you want, you go to our free plan, which you get a limit per week. Great. If people need more, you [19:04] and I want to unlock all these amazing features, which are amazing on PrettyPrompt, they can click the upgrade button. Originally, we would take them directly to the payment page, which is just to check out. [19:17] And we realized through our analytics that people were clicking but not upgrading. So we were like, what is happening there? Yeah, so how do we kind of fix this or get some kind of information? So we added kind of like intermediate page between there. So we could actually, you know, see, okay, if we give a load of features, what features do people want? We have those on the pricing plans. Yeah. And the advantage of social proof. [19:47] using this, you know you're not the first guinea pig. No one wants to be the first one. It's maybe worth explaining that in more detail, like what is encompassed when you say social proof? What does that mean in practice? So I like to call it

[19:59] I like to divide this in quantitative and qualitative. [20:02] So quantitative is literally number of people who have left a review, number of good reviews, your star rating, you know, essentially out one to five, how many five star reviews you have. So we actually have over 95 star reviews. And so that's anything you see on some sort of landing page or interstitial that says, you know, this extension is trusted by this many X number of people, you know, a 4.9 over five. [20:25] on the Chrome Web Store. All those things are quantitative. Qualitative is actually the words people use to describe that review. [20:35] you need both because sometimes people don't trust just like you know you know great reviews this is amazing yeah they want something specific they want to know what they like yeah so specific yeah so yeah yeah the best reviews are not just uh i really love this it's i really love this particular functionality so yeah so funny enough like someone else the other day left a review actually yesterday on the chrome web store saying it used to take me 20 to 30 minutes yes now you're right now we know [21:05] So that's so nice. This is the problem I have. This is the solution. I read that and I was like, wow. I sent Charlie the screenshot and I was like, this is awesome because... [21:16] it shows that someone else find the value that we find from our tool. Yes. Without us knowing who this person is. Yeah. Like, I don't know. And they give actual numbers and time to it. So it's more quantifiable. So that's the qualitative part of the social proof. Yeah. So when you are adding this, put it first, you know, on the front of your website. Also, don't just rely on the Chrome Web Store because you can control it. Yeah. They can put it also on your website. And what Charlie was saying, which is the upgrade page. Yes. Yes.

[21:45] Yeah, so, yeah, and I suppose the other advantage of having like an in-between upgrade page is we all know with sort of Chrome extensions, it can take some time to make any update because, you know, you guys have a fantastic review process. Which makes you really secure, which is a good thing for customers. We try our best. Yeah, we love it. It's good. But sometimes you want to test some pricing things very quickly. Yes. Just to be like, okay, I have an idea. Can I just very quickly test this? Or we've got suddenly an influx of users. [22:15] this pricing structure work and having an intermediate webpage where you kind of control updating it very quickly. I think it's benefited us quite a lot and helped us kind of get into [22:26] good maybe pricing structure. I mean, we're not there yet. We're still learning. We're always experimenting, but I'm, [22:33] There is no... [22:34] Ugh. [22:35] I-I-sorry. [22:36] I don't think that... [22:38] there is a... [22:39] and [22:40] linear path to your pricing and monetization strategy. I think that there is what works for you, what works for them, what works for the other person. Each app will have its own story. Yes. But we learned that there is nothing better than just putting out there something and seeing what happens. It's better than strategy, it's better than research, it's better than talking to customers. The best thing is to have your own page where you can control what happens. You put it out there and seeing that actually people are [23:09] pay [23:10] That is like Charlie said The ultimate validation Of making something that people want So we recently also tested a medium plan

[23:18] So you have your free, you have your pro, and then we added like a capped one every month, which is a little bit cheaper to see what happens. So you're giving options to the people. We have the annual seeing what happens. People convert. Great. Let's not touch it. [23:32] Yeah, that's kind of like has been really interesting. I wanted to ask you about internationalization. I think it's easy to build something that just works in English. But what have you found? Do you have users that are trying to use your extension in other languages? And are there interesting challenges you had to face there? I think so, yeah. So when we first started, majority of our users were sort of English speaking. Yeah. But as we sort of grew, as we sort of got organic growth, we started getting people from all different places in the world. Yeah. [24:02] And then suddenly we had to support all different kinds of languages. And we've got maybe some numbers on the sort of language. That would be really interesting. Yeah, and it's interesting because the numbers follow usually when you get like a spike of users from, say, like Korea. You know, usually it's followed by someone, a creator or some newsletter or a TikTok video that someone created on this. And it's really interesting to understand how the audience follows. [24:32] the world we have 20% of users that are in middle east which is really interesting because it's a completely different language and we are an ai based product so we also had to figure out all the difficulties to kind of like translate these languages so they make sense to the user also i think i think so that's really important like certain languages obviously are not

[24:52] easier to um process than other languages okay so the sort of the quality of the ai output is different depending on the language exactly and we are all about improving the pro you know the output so we need to validate this yeah regardless of your language you should be able to use it and then the majority of users are still english speaking speaking like no the us uk however europe is huge like we had some users from the netherlands the other day and germany actually [25:22] for a lot of these. And I don't think there's a correlation where they come from to what they use the tool for. But I think it's always interesting. [25:31] when you build the tool and you start to see all these different... [25:34] people coming from all the world and [25:36] Yeah, it's a really interesting journey. Nice. And then I'm curious to ask a very technical question, but this is something that [25:43] I've heard developers ask us before, and I'm curious for your perspective on [25:47] Everything in a Chrome extension is running client-side, so sometimes developers are worried that users might [25:54] find a way to circumvent the paywall that they have and get access to features that they shouldn't [25:58] Is that a problem that you have? Is that a problem that you've solved or that you think about? Yeah, that's a great question. So when we started... [26:05] I know what you're going to say. So when we started, we integrated with Stripe and that basically updated the user to basically say, [26:15] we have a flag which says is paid true. Now when you first started using us if you jumped into the dev tools you could switch that over. It's how we tested. We were testing that. Yeah, and we were like, okay, it doesn't need to be super complicated. But as we grew, as we got more users, we needed to be a bit more sophisticated. So the way we kind of do it is, and it's the standard way you do it on web apps, which is the database is the source of truth. Yeah, right. So they could,

[26:45] Technically, you could jump into the dev tools and you could change it, but the moment you reload, it will revert back to your correct plan. And I think one really interesting thing, certainly with monetization, is you have different tiers of users. And that's always a hard thing. And I've never seen a sort of internal company really solve this fantastically, because really, it's just a matrix of your tiers and the features people have access to. But I think... [27:13] Starting off really basic and accepting that it's not super secure in the sense users can get free stuff. Yeah. And then validating that and then going over to being like, okay, now we're going to spend a week making this a bit more secure because we've got more users and there's more chance of this happening. Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like it's very much just sort of picking your battles. Like to begin with, we just want users. And so we don't even need, as you said, to necessarily... [27:42] have the monetization working and then [27:44] we get the monetization working, but maybe it's possible to circumvent. And then kind of the last hurdle once everything else is working is [27:51] Maybe we can add some more checks and balances here. Exactly. I like to think about, as a founder, or as a builder, as a developer, [27:59] you need to earn the right to have that problem. [28:03] So your first challenge is just building. The second challenge is to get people to pay. If you earn the right because someone paid, [28:12] Now you can worry about the next problem. [28:14] If no one is paying yet,

[28:17] then why would you worry about even the problem that is not there yet? So it's almost like earn the right, [28:22] first to to you know to unlock your problem yeah it's like playing like mario games you know when yeah so you you have your level and then you win against the big guy in the end of the level but then you know the princess goes to the next castle so you need to go to the next castle so we think about building a product or company in the same way you have like levels and each level gets harder yeah because the problem problems get harder yeah but don't no point to jump to [28:52] I also think if a developer can circumvent your systems. That's lovely. I'm impressed. You can have it for free. I respect your curiosity of diving into those dev tours. Yeah. [29:05] I think it's usually the minority, right? Most users who are using your extension aren't going to have that technical ability and aren't going to try and do that. Which also shows... [29:14] And we are balanced because we are like, you know, the black and white of the two sides of the coin. [29:20] Developers sometimes think in developer terms. Customers are not always developers, especially for a lot of Chrome extensions. So don't think what is good for you as a developer might be good or the same way as a customer is thinking. [29:36] Yeah, yeah. Right? You know, it's like... I think, yeah. We were in a call with someone that we got them to open the dev tools, and they were like... Yeah, it's like opening, you know, going into Narnia. Suddenly this entire world, and it's completely normal to us, but...

[29:51] Yeah, quite a lot of the time. [29:54] I think, yeah, you do have to consider there are things you know that a lot of other people may not know. And you can't assume that. So if you just ask them to, especially if you're in like a customer support ticket or something, you've got to be like very kind of basic and assume almost knows. Zero knowledge, I suppose. I was just thinking about monetization. So in the first 60 days, so in... [30:19] In under three months, we actually hit the 10,000 users. Yeah. Right now we are in 15K, something like this. [30:26] within [30:27] the first 60 days, we actually managed to get a conversion rate because not every user is paying, which is also something to understand about, you know, the way we build our tool and many other Chrome extensions out there. It's a freemium model, they call it. It's majority free users. Yeah. And then it's almost like you use those free users to make the product amazing. Exactly. And justify why would you pay for this? Yeah. Do you have any sort of numbers for like what's a reasonable expectation for free users versus paid users? [30:56] I've been researching a lot of this from other tools out there beyond extensions, like mass market tools. And I think anything above a 3% conversion rate is so incredible. And of course, this is just big numbers. It doesn't mean that it's right for every tool. So please don't quote me. But... [31:17] It is really good if you get a tool that converts between 3% to 5%. We are actually just about 2%.

[31:25] So not far, but also not there. So we are still working on this and that's why you need to test your pricing, your annual, your middle plan, your social proof. It's just a big kind of experiment you're doing. Constantly experimenting and see, okay, what dials and knobs work when you tweak them. [31:44] And I think also something really important is... [31:47] the non-scalable part of making your product monetized, to be able to make money from your product. Yeah. Sorry, I mamble my words. We are live here, by the way. And I think that [32:00] the good thing is [32:02] If you see an email of someone from that sign up... Yeah. [32:06] Send them a message. [32:08] Send them an email. Send them a Reddit message. [32:13] LinkedIn message, wherever your audience is. Hang out where your audience is. And I think this is kind of like a really underappreciated thing. But if you send them a message and you make sure that they know it's you and not like, you know, we don't have any automations in messages yet. We are small enough to be able to do it. [32:32] important point in the sense [32:34] probably you probably don't want to rely too much on automation or a reply not at all be yourself yeah simply from from the user's side they could probably um they could probably recognize an ai email but also from your side yeah that you start to like we know users almost from their emails i know exactly what a specific user will ask for because they've been seeing you know their messages beforehand you've already seen like the comment they left on reddit and the web store review they

[33:04] A week ago, I saw that someone hit the free limit, and I sent a message to Charlie, he's like... [33:10] Upgrade is coming. Oh, nice. Upgrade, yeah. It actually did come. It was a bit, yeah, it was almost like magic. But yeah, having that kind of almost first name basis, you understand your users, I think is really important. And also it gives you an idea of what different type of users want from your product and which ones you should focus on. You don't build everything for everybody. Yeah. And that's actually the super hard thing is not how to add features. Like we can add features every day all day, apart from when we're doing a podcast. [33:40] to know what not to build. - Yeah, that is quite hard. When to say no is really important. - But be honest to your customers. That's also part of making money from you. - Yeah, yeah. - Telling them, we're not working on this right now, but I really appreciate what you're saying. And I'll let you know if we build it and when. - Yeah, I guess the roadmap can always change. It might not be a priority now, but it might be a priority six or 12 months down the line. - Exactly, yes. - And I think, [34:05] We originally saw a lot of kind of like ad gmail posts [34:08] emails that were signing up and then lately in the last two months we started to see a lot more kind of like at [34:13] company [34:14] something.com kind of like joining and signing up and trying the tool a lot of them are on [34:22] easy to find because they're real people it's not some you know and [34:27] whatever email so [34:29] you also start to learn what different requirements different again type of users need so do these people at companies need the same that

[34:38] me myself at home. [34:39] What do they use the app for? Do they need something for us to add so that they can use it as a team in a company? And that unlocks a whole new way of looking at a Chrome extension. And how do you think about that opportunity space between consumer and enterprise? Because I think the wants are very different. [34:57] Does one feel like a bigger opportunity? Is that product dependent and like [35:01] do you just pick one and focus on it or do you try and split yourself between the two [35:05] Yeah, so I think maybe starting off going, oh, we're going to go to B2C or A2B, I think maybe that might be a mistake in the sense, okay, have you built something useful first? Yeah. And then find out where... [35:18] Where does it fit? Yeah, where does it fit? So right now, like, you could class us maybe as a consumer app, but really they're using it for business purposes. So it's what we call a prosumer. Yeah, yeah, prosumer. And yeah, and then the idea is if they really like it and they find it's really useful for their business. [35:38] they should expand to the rest of their team, to the rest of their business, because then that would make them all more productive. [35:45] And I think at least internally, we always think about growing this exponentially. And that's what we want to do with Preprone. Because we see where at least the opportunity is going internally. [35:58] But I think even though we want to get every company, every organization and every enterprise with a B2B deal with pretty prompt. [36:07] It takes time

[36:08] things are not magical [36:10] It's a lot of unscalable things. And I think we will never unlock that as a company, as a product, not just us, but anybody out there also. [36:20] until you unlock the user for a [36:23] Single user Yeah Unlock it for a person Before you unlock it for A brand Because a brand is a bunch of people together So like [36:32] I really like Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. He says, like, it's much better to have 100 people that love you. [36:40] than a million people that sort of like you. And that's always stuck with us. And it's always in our mind. Get 100 people that really love what you build. It's extremely difficult to do. [36:52] If you do that, [36:53] Then you can scale to the millions and to everything else. But first make it... And we didn't talk about paying. We talked about loving. If you make someone love what you do, it's much easier. The payment is just like a small step. [37:06] I don't think we could have wrapped that up more perfectly. That's such a poetic way to end the episode. [37:11] Thank you so much. [37:12] I'm curious if users want to sort of give your extension a try and to learn more, where should they go? So they can go to prettyprompt.com. That's pretty-prompt.com. [37:23] direct to the Chrome Web Store, and you can install it. And like I said, you don't even need to sign up to use it. Once you click on it, it will take you directly to one of your AI providers, and you can start using it. And any questions or any ideas, any thoughts, just hit us up online. We'll talk with us. We'll reply in 15 minutes. That's a guarantee. 60 seconds.

[37:45] This was kind of a different style of episode, asking the team here some questions. [37:53] you know. [37:53] If you have further questions or other ideas of what you want to see, then feel free to leave them [37:58] as a comment below. [37:59] Otherwise, thanks for watching. Thank you both so much for joining us, and we'll see you next time.