How To Create A Plugin That Will Make Millions In Revenue

Chrome plugins. And I'm like, well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It's a $5 billion company, I think. Um, I, I've been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over $100 million in sales and just say, well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin? Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don't do it because there's a little bit of friction and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right now there's a ton of downside with Google plugins. You know, you're a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you, but it's incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that's what I wanted to bring up was some Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this— I don't know if this is how she did it, but she basically, um, uh, or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is, what behaviors are people already doing? So for example, learning a language. People already wanna learn a language. You just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb. So it tells me the traffic of someone's website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis. So a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?

Oh yeah. My, my buddy was with the guy who started it.

Isn't that worth like a billion dollars?

Uh, not yet, but getting close. It's, several hundred millions. I think it was the last round.

And all it does is, uh, screen recording recordings.

Yeah. So they basically say, oh, you want to show something on your screen? Here's a click, boom, record, share. Um, so the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several—

$4 billion.

$4 billion. So Honey had, I think, 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you're about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background. It's looking for, is there a, is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay. That makes total sense. I don't have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It's just going to do it. And it's the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year.

So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he's an engineer. He's like a very, um, by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He's really cool. His name's Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, dude, a freaking plugin. Who would've thought? And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on. And I was like, how big are you guys? He was like, we do over $100 million a year in sales. And I was like, would you ever believe it? He was like, yeah, I thought it could be done. And then, and then I go, you You just raised money? He goes, yeah, we raised $100 million the other day. I go, why? He goes, because it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation. Yeah, I was like, oh my God, you pulled it off.

Yeah, they did it. Exactly. So those are like the big successors. But there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as, I believe, a Chrome extension. So it was the pin, the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. You needed a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there's others that, like, for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have Adblock or, you know, uBlock Origin or whatever. That's definitely one of them. And so I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It's like, dude, you're just making this, like, plugin. And definitely there's a lot of people, like my mom doesn't know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn't know there's a Chrome extension store. She doesn't really know how to install them. Like, she knows apps, but she doesn't know Chrome extensions. So you're going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it's a smaller market overall, but the friction is kind of a big deal.

I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the numbers. There's 1.6 billion iPhone users. Okay, 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There's a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn't know how to do this, but does your mom, if you, she saw a commercial on TV for Grammarly, I bet you she would know what to do. You just go to grammarly.com.

Actually, she does Grammarly because of that. Um, she saw it and she's self-conscious about her English cuz she learned English later in life and she like doesn't wanna write something stupid. So she downloaded Grammarly for that reason. Actually.

And so that's why when I saw this Toucan thing, I was like, oh, you guys just run a commercial for this on TV. That's easy. You're gonna get so many users. And the, the plugin, the reason why the plugins are interesting to me is the churn is so low. Churn on plugins are so low compared to iPhone apps or—

and we both, we both have plugins. You have a plugin for The Hustle. I have a plugin for my, my One Big Thing framework of just like—

what's the churn on it?

There's like no churn on it. Do we have like thousands of users now? The engagement's not super high. Like they don't always use the thing. But they leave it installed. And it's like, you know, so we've both dabbled in this, not seriously, I would say neither of us took it super seriously. But we were interested enough for both of us to build a Chrome extension and get it out there to, you know, 5,000-10,000 people.

It's interesting. And I think that I just think that people discount it. And I think that it's far more It's far more interesting than most people realize. And so I actually had a Brave pull some of the biggest, uh, plugins. So it's, uh, Adblock, Adblock Plus, Adobe Acrobat. What do you use Adobe Acrobat for?

I don't know, probably like Flash or something. I don't know.

Um, SafePrice, which is a deal thing, video conferencing from, uh, Cisco, Google Translate, which is kind of an indicator about for Toucan, which is interesting, Honey, Pinterest Save Button, Skype. What's, uh, TamperMonkey?

Uh, I don't know. It looks like it's trying to keep you safe. There was a cool one called Ghostery back in the day that would just show you who, who's trying to track you on every website you go to. That was kind of cool and try to shut that down. Uh, there's also these paid ones. So are there— was there anything interesting in the paid group?

No, but tell me about the ones that you've invested in because they're actually similar. Because I— and so in this document that we have, I said screenshots would be great. And you said, oh, I invested in this thing called Bubbles, which I remember you telling me about it. But what is that?

Bubbles is a lot like Loom, which we talked about earlier. So the idea is how do you easily share what's on your screen with your coworker who wants to see it and be able to— and so how do you do that? Some people just take a screenshot, right? They use the hotkey on their keyboard, they take a screenshot and it goes into their desktop file. Then they have to go grab that. Then they drag and drop that to their friend and then the friend has to comment on it. But they can't comment on it. They have to like Send it back as another file. It's kind of annoying, right? So what Bubbles does is much simpler. It says it's a little Chrome extension, and on any page you go to, you can say, I want to record a screen recording, like a video. I want to take a screenshot, or my favorite one is a scroll screenshot. So like, you know, when you're on a website that like is long and you want to take screenshots of the website, you have to take like 8 screenshots and then send them as separate files to somebody.

Yeah, it's a pain in the ass.

With this, it just takes one long screenshot and sends it to the person. So It's, it's easy to capture the, what's on your screen. You can then comment like bubbles. So it's like a speech bubble. So you just click anywhere where you want to point something out on the screen. Like let's say for The Hustle, you want to make the trends website better. You would click bubbles. You would record a screenshot. You would tap on the part of the screen where you're like, this thing is stupid. We need to change this. And you would write, this thing is stupid. We need to change this. And then that's a, the whole file is a link that you just share a link with somebody else and they can comment back like a Google Doc. And so is it doing well? Yeah, it's doing well. It's doing well specifically, actually, the niche, initial niche that they've done well with is agencies. And so agencies like creative agencies, there's always creative people within the team that are sending ideas, mockups, concepts back and forth with each other, and then they have to share with the client also, and the client has to give feedback. So there's a lot of showing screen stuff and commenting back and forth on it. And so that's where they're getting initial foothold. And I think it'll kind of break out from there. So it's like Loom, but it does more than what Loom does.

And what's Dashworks?

So Dashworks is a company I invest in that is, um, it's like the homepage for your company. So this is, this is a Chrome extension that's sold to companies. So let's say, um, somebody joins The Hustle, you give them their laptop. If you work with Dashworks, when they, when they open up their Google Chrome for the first time to use the internet, they would not just see like the generic, the Google, like, new tab page, they would see, like, The Hustle's branded page. And that page can do 3 things. One, there's a search bar, and you could type in anything into that search bar, and it'll find the file inside your company. So, like, most companies now use Slack and Google Drive and Dropbox and Asana and GitHub and, like, all these different tools that are all in the cloud. So, like, if you've ever been on your MacBook and you want to find a file, you just use, like, the little Spotlight search finder, right? You just type it into Spotlight, it finds the file on your computer. But the thing is now with the cloud, none of the files you need are on your computer, they're all in the cloud. So this is basically that search bar for all your cloud apps. So now, so what it does is it helps any employee find any file that's in your network without knowing where to go to find it, right? It's just like search.

Is this working?

Yeah, this is cool. So then the second thing you could do is you could search anyone's name. So I could be like, oh, what does Steph Smith do at The Hustle? I type Steph, It'll show me her profile, show me what she does, who she reports to, and that sort of thing. And then the last thing is that you as the kind of CEO or your kind of your, your admin at the company can post announcements or updates that will show up in their Chrome like new tab bar. So you can be like, oh, welcome these new employees or like happy birthday to this person or hey, remember this Friday we're all doing, you know, happy hour or whatever. And so it's a kind of a communication pipe also. So that, that I thought was cool. They're taking the Chrome extension to deliver critical internal company stuff, a search for people, search for files, and internal announcements.

So this is interesting. And another one, I actually don't know how to say this company, but you wrote it in here. How do you pronounce that?

Luster.

Jack, our friend Jack was one of the early users and I think invested in it. And he says that it's awesome. But basically, they look at Wirecutter, Amazon, and dozens and dozens of other sources. And anytime you have a product in front of you, it tells you the average review. Um, kind of interesting. Uh, I don't know how—

I think it's a little better than that. I think what they do is you say yourself—

yeah, my description was about a year ago.

You— I think what it does is you go on Amazon or whatever and you search for flat-screen TV. And, uh, you know, it's— there's so many products out there and all of them, you know, great, it's 4 stars. What, what do I make of that? Um, and so what Luster does is try to make the buying process simpler. So it'll basically say, here's the recommended option for what you searched for. Is the mo— this— our, our AI has searched all the reviews, all the different websites, has all this data to tell us that this is the most popular result for what you're looking for. And then here's the high-end version of it, and here's maybe the low-end version of it. Um, and so I don't know if the product's evolved too much since then, but that's what it kind of did at that time, was it would help you figure out which product should you actually buy using data. And again, you didn't have to remember to go to Luster. It was a Chrome extension. So you're just on any website shopping. You can go to Walmart, you go to Amazon, you go bestbuy.com, wherever you're searching. And Luster will be like, hey, here's the product we recommend and here's why. Here's what the reviews say about it, summarized automatically for you, which I thought was pretty cool.

I think that that's a— this could be a good product. When he pitched it to me and when Jack told me about it, I was like, this is stupid. I'm not in. Uh, I understand though. I actually, I think I, I was wrong about it. It's really cool.

Um, so the founder Stuart's really smart and, and, um, for this one he showed me a chart, a graph that, that was doing pretty well. So here's some other ideas of things. So those are ideas that we've either invested in or seen. I have a couple more for you. So let's use your framework of take a popular app like Duolingo that shows that there's a need or a demand. People want to learn a language and you make it a Chrome extension as the user experience instead of a mobile app.

So at least one of the main widgets or main points of distribution, right?

So let's take meditation, right? You have Headspace, you have Calm. Why don't you have a Chrome extension, a Chrome plugin that will basically say it'll see, you know, you've been on, you've been browsing for 2 hours straight, you've had, you have 85 tabs open. Hey, let's take a minute. Would you like to earn some, earn some mindfulness points and take a 1-minute quick meditation? And it just, you tap the thing, it turns on because there's a clock and there's like a guided voice that's doing a guided meditation for you. I think so. I think a Chrome, I think meditation delivered through a Chrome extension could work because it's so popular as a mobile app. But again, for mobile app, you have to remember to go do it. Whereas this could just kind of like, as you go, it could pause you and, and help you out.

That's great. I think that has, that has legs. I'll, I'll, I'll keep going with this game. Do you know the, you know how do you on your iPhone, what's that thing called where it blocks you from using a website after a certain amount of time?

Oh yeah, like time something. I don't know. I don't know. Do you use that? I never use that shit. No. Do you?

Uh, yeah, I mean, I have it installed.

Screen time. I think this is what it's called.

Screen time. Um, I used to have this Chrome plugin called Nukem. I think it was called Nukem or the option was called Nukem where after a certain amount of time you would nuke your website and you cannot go to certain websites. So you can only go to like Google Docs, email, and that was it. Uh, I loved it. So similar to meditation, I would 100% try to create more of a, of, of these, uh, what do you call this? Uh, change your, uh, stop using stuff app.

Right, right, right. Yes. Defend yourself against yourself. Okay. I have a, I have a, a smart idea and I have a gimmick idea. Which one do you want?

Okay.

The smart one or the gimmick one?

Smart one first.

All right. Smart one first. Okay. We had the founder of, you, you mentioned the founder of Superhuman. He's the guy who built Reportive before that. We both loved Reportive. It doesn't exist now, so some people might not know what it is, but what Reportive was doing was when you were emailing somebody, as soon as you typed in their name or their email, a little sidebar would pop out of your email that would just show you their face, show you their name, show you the last few tweets.

It was like at the time it was like magic. We were like, how on earth do they know all this? It was crazy.

It just makes you a more thoughtful person because you can see the person, you can see what they're up to, you can click their LinkedIn, get a little more information. And it kind of did the, like, it served it up. It was like you had an amazing assistant, executive assistant who was like, you know, by the way, sir, you need to know this about this person. So I think you could take Reportive all around the web. So I think you could make it where anytime it sees a name on a webpage, it just highlights it yellow. And then if you just hover over that, it'll just tell you something about that person. So I think you could bring this idea of like, anytime you see a name, tell me a little bit more about that person. I could think you could turn that into a Chrome extension rather than something that was just for email.

How would you make money off of it?

Ads. Boom. That's my easy answer. I don't know. All right. Okay, but here's my gimmick one, which definitely needs ads. So I think there should be a Chrome extension. Let me take that back. I don't think this should exist. I think this would be funny if somebody tried to do this. So if you ever remember Million Dollar Homepage, it was kind of this cool idea of like, here's a website, There's a million pixels on the page. Buy a pixel and sponsor it. Okay, that's cool. I've always thought about similar ideas. How could you make a million bucks off something simple and goofy? And there's this concept in the Bitcoin world of, I think it's called a fountain or a tap. It's basically a website where you go to and then sometimes there's like, think about like a spout, like a fountain. And sometimes Bitcoin, free Bitcoin comes out. And so a bunch of people like to go to these to, so some projects use these to say like, go collect your coin, my new coin, go there and get some. And you like go to the website, you like collect some of the new coin that you can get. And then other people have done this to be like, hey, sometimes something comes out, sometimes it doesn't. It's a game of chance.

It's like a, um, what do they call this? They call it a, um, there's this company that did this with candles. We talked about them. It was called like Diamond Candles, I think. And at the bottom of every single candle, we're talking candles like a wax candle that you burn in your bathtub or whatever, like, like cool candles. That's fucking the only way I know how to use fucking candles is when I'm sitting in the bath.

I like when you start dropping F-bombs to like get masculine real quick while talking about bathtub candles. Like, I don't fucking care.

I use my bath bombs or what are they called?

Yeah, bath bombs.

Anyway, I've got all of them. I'm a sensitive guy, man. And anyway, they at like 1 in 10,000 candles probably has a $1,000 diamond. The rest have nothing, something, but like a Cracker Jack ring. What you could do with this is you could always have coupons or discounts off of something. If you redeem them, the Chrome extension gets a kickback. But every once in a while, 1 out of X does get a Bitcoin.

Right. Yeah. Something like that where basically every time you open a new tab, there's a little package in the middle of the screen. You give it a quick click and then you're either going to get nothing, you get air, you get, you know, a tiny little something. It's like a puzzle piece or, you know, maybe like a little something, I don't know, something. Or you can actually get some Bitcoin. You can get, you can get little satoshis basically. And so it would just become this little, like the little hamster game where every time you open a new tab, are you really going to not click the thing? And, and so I think you could get a lot of people to install this to try to get free Bitcoin while they just browse the internet. Every time they open a new tab, it's like a little mini scratch-off lotto ticket that they get to scratch off that might have some crypto inside. And you could give away little shitcoins, you could give away micro amounts of Bitcoin, you can give away little puzzle pieces. And if you get it right, it's like the Monopoly game at McDonald's where you actually earn the Bitcoin if you get all the pieces. You can make a game out of it basically. And then the rest of the screen you just plaster with ads, or sometimes what comes out of the box is just an ad. And I think that's how you make money off of my gimmick. Chrome extension.

Well, I hope someone tries this because I think it would be hilarious that they create a product out of your joke.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.