How One Developer Built a $20K/Month Chrome Extension on Top of ChatGPT

Saeed Ezari built a browser extension called Superpower ChatGPT that adds extra features to OpenAI's ChatGPT interface. Within a year and a half, it reached $20,000 to $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue. He is the only person working on it. The extension has been downloaded roughly 270,000 times, with about 150,000 weekly active users. He spent zero dollars on advertising.

The Platform Strategy: Building on Someone Else's User Base

Saeed's core strategic insight is that competing with everyone on the internet is much harder than competing within a limited marketplace. He recommends two approaches. The first is building for an existing giant platform like Gmail, YouTube, Twitter, or Roblox. These platforms already have hundreds of millions of users. Even if only a tiny fraction want your feature, that can be enough to live on. The second approach is targeting platforms with smaller user bases but even smaller numbers of developers building for them—Zoom and Salesforce are examples. Competition is thinner, and discovery is easier.