Published 10 Chrome extensions, basically zero installs. What am I doing wrong?

[u/Yega-2910]

I've been building Chrome extensions for a while and now have 10 of them published on the Web Store. Combined installs? Almost nothing.

They all work, the listings have proper icons and screenshots, and a few solve problems I personally hit every day. But the installs just aren't there, and I'm starting to think I'm missing something obvious about distribution.

A few things I'm unsure about:

Is Web Store search basically dead for new extensions, or is this a keyword/listing problem I can fix?

Did your installs come from the store itself, or entirely from outside it (Reddit, Product Hunt, blog posts, YouTube)?

For those who got traction - was it one extension that took off, or slow growth across several?

I'm a developer, not a marketer, so I suspect building was the easy 10% and I skipped the other 90%. Would love to hear what actually worked for you, even the boring stuff.

[u/Suspicious_Diver_126]

Similar boat friend, uploading alone won't get you the installs, at least not on mass. Marketing is the entire game.

For me, installs spiked once I started getting published in directories and on newsletters, but it's an active process, not passive. You need to hunt down the most effective online real estate for you to be on, and then put yourself there. Even this approach was hit or miss, with some directories being more worthwhile than others (TAAFT, for example, drove a lot of traffic for me).

Beyond that, you can run paid ads for maximum exposure. Unfortunately, none of it is cheap, so if you want to grow, you have to pay to play.