About 5 months ago I posted here about Focus Spoofer, an extension that stops websites from knowing you’ve switched tabs or apps. It had just hit 200 installs with no marketing, and a lot of you were kind to me about it. Then life got in the way. I was in university, building a startup and doing a hundred other things. I checked the dashboard now and then, saw it pass 500 users and was happy about it. Last week it was close to 900 weekly users, so I finally opened the full analytics. That’s when it stopped looking good. The numbers (last 180 days): 98.8k impressions on the Chrome Web Store 3.26k listing page views 2.23k installs 1.34k uninstalls (this number hurt) So about 3 out of every 5 people who installed it left again. The uninstall graph is close to flat until early June, then it jumps to around 10 a day and stays there. That lines up with version 1.6, which had a bug. I fixed it in 1.7 on my machine. Then I never pushed 1.7 to the store. For months, every new user got the broken version, and a lot of them understandably left. Here is what i would say to myself younger self: You can’t find out why people leave if you never ask. I had no uninstall page, so 1,300 people left without telling me why. The new version has an optional, anonymous “why are you leaving” page. Lesson: set this up before you need it A fix that isn’t shipped doesn’t exist. Users don’t care what’s sitting on your laptop. I had the fix the whole time. Lesson: if it’s fixed, publish it the same day. People wanted this more than I thought. I built it for myself. Then I read the reviews. One person runs a browser app with a lot of real-time audio and said it’s “the only extension that works, period.” Another uses it to stop sites pausing every time they switch tabs. Reading those while knowing I’d left a bug live for months honestly made me feel worse and better at the same time. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/focus-spoofer/ejgeaphjlcnmjgadkcljhchgbaiioihh   submitted by   /u/Ill-Equipment8296 [link]   [comments]