u/Cautious-Gap-3660

I finally added a demo video to my extension's store listing yesterday.

The Web Store doesn't exactly give you great data on what drives installs, so I have no idea if a video moves the needle or if it's just something we do because it feels professional.

For those of you who added a video to your listing: did you notice any change in installs or conversion after? Or did the numbers stay flat?

Curious to hear real experiences before I decide whether to invest more time in polishing it.

I build Highlite, a screenshot annotation extension.

A few weeks ago I added the ability to copy the annotated screenshot straight to the clipboard, so people could paste it into ChatGPT or Claude without saving a file first.

What I didn't think through: it needed the clipboardWrite permission. Turns out that when you add a permission, Chrome silently disables your extension for every existing user until they re-accept it. Most users never notice the prompt. Some open it, read a warning about clipboard access, and uninstall.

140 weekly users gone in 10 days. For an extension of this size, that really hurts.

The thing is, the feature works. People who re-enabled actually use it. So I keep going back and forth. I could have shipped it with optional_permissions and requested access on first use, which is obviously what I'd do today (I didn't know about it). Or not shipped it at all. Instead I pushed it as a required permission and ate the churn.

Do you treat new permissions as a breaking change? Would you have shipped it anyway?

Until now I haven't really done any marketing for my extension. I just talked about it here and there on Reddit, in posts that were more or less clumsy, on subreddits that were more or less ok with that kind of thing.

Now I want to put a bit more effort into the marketing side. So I started by looking at what I already have. And the result is kind of blunt: Reddit is miles ahead of everything else. 45% of my impressions come from here. Thanks Reddit!

As it is not scalable, I need to find new source of leads.

I've been told SEO works great for extensions. Has it actually worked for any of you?

Here is my extension if you wanna have a look https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/bceogecjdhnhfcjpimfepbgklmmmcekc

Solo dev here. I build Highlite, a browser extension that turns any page into a whiteboard — highlights, sticky notes, drawings, screenshots, all client-side, no account.

I keep reading that permissions are the #1 thing that scares users off, and that adding a new one can cost you installs. I believed it in theory. I was not ready for the chart.

Timeline:

1. Monday : 3 uninstalls. Shipped a "copy screenshot to clipboard" feature and added the clipboardWrite permission for it.
2. Tuesday : 21 uninstalls
3. Wednesday : 38 uninstalls
4. Thursday : ??

My theory: most of these are people who installed it once, never really used it, forgot it was there, and the forced re-permission prompt was just the nudge to finally hit remove. Active users probably clicked accept without thinking. Or so I hope.

Anyone seen a similar spike after adding a permission?

Giving feedback on a live website usually means: screenshot, paste it somewhere, circle something in another tool, then type "the button, third one down" and hope it lands.

Highlite, on the other hand, lets you draw, highlight, drop notes and shapes straight on any page. No account, free, and everything stays in your browser.

If you do web feedback daily, is the screenshot-and-annotate dance everyone's reality, or just mine?

I'm a dev, and for years getting feedback on a staging site went like this: a client sends an email saying "the button feels off" with zero context, or a Slack message with a blurry screenshot, or a Google Doc with 40 vague bullet points. Then I spend an hour guessing what they actually meant.

So I built a thing for myself. It's a browser extension that lets you annotate any webpage directly, highlight stuff, drop sticky notes, draw, point arrows at things. Then the person tells you exactly what they mean, on the actual page, instead of describing it from memory.

It's called Highlite. Free, no account, no signup. Everything stays client-side which mattered to me because I didn't want to ask clients to create yet another account or send their staging URLs to some server.

Honestly the funny part is that I built it as a feedback tool, but a bunch of users started embedding it on their own landing pages as an interactive demo, which I never planned for. People keep finding uses I didn't think of.

I'm not trying to sell anything (it's free), I'm mostly curious whether other devs here hit the same feedback problem and how you solved it.

How do you currently collect visual feedback from non-technical stakeholders? Annotated screenshots, Loom, some SaaS, or do you just suffer through the vague emails like I did?

Here the link if you want to give it a try https://get-highlite.app - It's free, no account required

I started building a Chrome extension to turn any website into an interactive whiteboard. The original pitch was simple: make it easier to leave feedback on websites. Annotate, comment, share with a teammate.

Almost 1000 installs later, here's the part I didn't see coming: a real chunk of my users aren't using it for feedback at all. They're embedding it on their own sites as interactive demos. That wasn't a use case I had in mind. It just emerged.

For a while I tried to nudge them back toward "the real" use case. Then I gave up and started listening.

A few other things that have stuck:

• Shipping small features from direct user requests is the highest-trust thing I do. I just shipped a cropped screenshot option this week because enough people asked. It took less time than I spent debating whether to do it.
• Uninstall emails are gold. I read them all manually. They sting but they're the single most concentrated source of "what's actually broken." (Trying to systematize the pipeline now because manual scales badly.)
• I had a strong opinion about what my product was for. My users had a different one. Theirs was better.

I'm about to do my first Product Hunt launch in a few weeks. Trying to make a video that doesn't suck. Pretty sure half of you have been there.

If you've shipped a side project and your users surfaced a use case you didn't see coming, how did you handle it? Lean in, ignore it, or try to bridge both?

Here is my extension : https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/bceogecjdhnhfcjpimfepbgklmmmcekc

Quick update on the browser extension I've been building (turns any website into a kind of virtual whiteboard for feedback and demos).

Until now you could screenshot the whole viewport in one click. Useful, but a lot of users kept asking for the same thing — the ability to grab just part of the screen without having to crop it manually afterwards.

So that's live now. Drag a rectangle, get your crop. That's it.

It's a small feature, but one of those that I probably should've built earlier. The kind of thing where you realize the "obvious" addition is obvious because enough people asked for it.

Anyone else find that the most requested features are often the ones you almost didn't bother building?

It's a great exercise to try and describe an idea, a business or anything in a single sentence.

I'll go first:

Highlite — a cross browser extension that turns any website into a virtual whiteboard.