My Chrome extension got 5,000 users in a week. 4,700 uninstalled within a month.

💻 Tech & Softwareby chromekid_22 · 5w ago

▸ What I did

I'm a CS sophomore and built TabSweep — a Chrome extension that auto-groups and suspends inactive tabs. Posted a demo GIF on r/chrome and r/productivity. It blew up. 5,000 installs in 7 days. I thought I was gonna be rich.

▸ What I expected

Steady growth. Maybe 10K users by month 2. Start thinking about a Pro tier. Tell my parents I'm dropping out (kidding... mostly).

▸ What actually happened

The install graph looked like a cliff after day 7. 95% uninstall rate within a month. I checked the reviews — people said it "messes with my pinned tabs," "conflicts with OneTab," "slowed down my browser." I only had 300 users left and half of those were probably inactive.

▸ What I've tried so far

Pushed 3 updates fixing the pinned tabs issue. Added a "gentle mode" that only suspends after 2 hours. Sent a changelog notification. Made a Google Form survey — 4 responses, 3 said "I already switched to Arc." Trying to figure out if this is saveable or if I should move on.

Progress Updates (2)

Talked to 2 of the remaining power users over email. Both said the same thing: they don't care about tab grouping, they care about MEMORY savings. One guy runs 80+ tabs because of work and his laptop was dying. He stays because TabSweep actually frees up RAM. Maybe I've been marketing the wrong feature? The flashy thing (auto-grouping) vs the useful thing (memory savings). Thinking about repositioning entirely.

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