u/Cute-Kiwi9063

A few months back I started building Fenly, a Chrome extension that handles translation in the browser while you're chatting, reading, scrolling social feeds, and so on. There's also a separate flow for translating documents. The main problem I built Fenly to solve was getting rid of the copy paste loop most people go through dozens of times a day. Open a translator tab, paste the source text, copy the result, paste it back, lose your place in the conversation.

Shipped the first version to the Chrome Web Store at the end of April. After 4 days, my first real user showed up and told me Chatgpt was faster than my extension. My instinct was to defend. Chatgpt has API latency too. Different use case. But the defense missed the point. The reason a translation extension should exist at all is to be faster than copying and pasting into Chatgpt. If it isn't faster than that, the product has no reason to exist.

Spent the next week rewriting the translation engine and shipped a 2x speed improvement. That feedback was worth more than a hundred silent installs.

What's the harshest piece of user feedback that turned into a build sprint?

I'm going to build a new feature for my Chrome extension: real-time AI subtitles for any video, in 100+ languages, with captions you can copy.

If anyone needs such a feature, drop your email on this website. I will give you free early access when it launches. Also there you can read more about the feature.

https://fenly.me/video-subtitles