u/vickyburnwal

Happy Sunday everyone!

I've used up my weekly Claude quota, so I have a few hours to kill on this Sunday morning. Honestly that's a good thing. I'm going to spend them on marketing my own product and seeing what everyone here is building.

I'll go first. I'm building Smart Blur - Smart Build Labs, a Chrome extension with power of OpenAI local model that blurs personal info on web pages before anyone else sees it. It turns on by itself when you start sharing your screen from the browser. Everything runs locally, with no account and nothing sent to a server. It's a small utility for live streamers, remote workers, online teachers and anyone who shares their screen or screenshots a lot.

Your turn. Drop what you're working on in the comments and I'll check it out and give you an honest opinion. For context, I've spent 15 years designing and building enterprise software, so I'm comfortable on the product and UX side. Marketing and running a SaaS are new to me, so take my advice there with a pinch of salt.

I am not promising signup or downloading apps, but if I find something useful for my personal or profession life, I am open.

I shared this in r/passive_income a few days ago, and it ended up as the top post there for a couple of days, with a great discussion in the comments. It seemed useful for this community too, so I'm sharing it here along with a few answers to the most common questions.

I spent a long time thinking of right product that solves a real problem with apps or fancy websites. The thing is you can take tiny problem to solve at a time and people are ready to pay for that.

I discovered Chrome extension is the perfect example. It doesn't have massive annual or developer fee like Apple's. One-time $5 and you are good to publish your work.

And I kept it free from cloud and server and marketed this as privacy friendly. So, running cost is close to $0.

This is my stripe screenshot. I understand it is NOT huge but more than what I expected and better than the mobile apps that started but never completed/published.

https://preview.redd.it/z2g7qcywrqsh1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=7b21d2d50310582fa39a6f88b4b8698fcde0d3cc

Edit: Btw, the screenshot has been blurred and taken by the same extension. Smart Blur - Smart Build Labs.

What resonated most in the comments:

Dogfooding. A lot of people noticed I used my own extension to blur the customer details in the Stripe screenshot. If your product solves a problem you have yourself, you'll use it every day, and you'll notice what's missing and broken.
Going serverless. This got the most agreement. No servers means no hosting bill, no database to secure. Maintenance is mostly updates when Chrome changes something. For a side project you run after work, that matters more than anything. Even integration with Stripe can be done without writing any server code.
The $5 fee. Many people didn't know publishing on the Chrome Web Store is a one-time $5. The barrier to shipping your first product is basically your time.

Out of AI tokens for the week, so I'll market and review SaaS today. What are you building?

Why I stopped chasing app ideas and built a tiny Chrome extension instead