Art Rose

🎉 Time for a small micro-celebration! 47 days (!!!) after being publicly listed on Chrome Web Store, my extension finally got its first organic user. I don't have any analytics for churn, so in my head they will stick around forever. And ever. #buildinpublic

If you read this far, just maybe, consider installing my extension? Even if you're not going to use it, it would probably help with Chrome Web Store listing my extension higher.

What now? I still have one feature I want to build out (for myself) - a cross AI-assistant chat organizer. After that I will do some more active promoting & chrome web store listing tweaks. But then I'll be done with this project and move on to something else.

I did get into this with the objective of learning about marketing and user acquisition. Even though I have no users, I have gotten some good tips & tricks from the community. I've edited my first videos. I've ran some paid ads. All firsts for me. A luke-warm success if you will.

My main learnings: solving own problems (or in my case my partner one) is no where near a good indicator of having something others would care about. Hell, even having similar extensions with 10k+ users isn't a reliable signal of (current) demand on the market.

Here's my #buildInPublic journey thus far:

- 66 days ago started my project
- 45 days ago my extension was listed on the Chrome Web Store
- 3 additional version updates since the then
- 0 installs outside of friends-family ones

Total revenue: negative 70 EUR

Using cloud based LLMs with real-time billing is giving me more anxiety than dropping 2k on a mini-PC capable of running local models.

Looking at how much RAM prices have gone up past few years it's crazy. Better ROI than stocks!

What's the monthly spend of cloud-AIs before it becomes more economical to get 2k hardware to run local LLMs?

Got $18USD of AI credits left in my Zed trial that expires in a few days. Time to vibe code the my next project and see how far I get with it.

Screenshot of the Chatbot Chronicles extension listing page showing the new Featured badge.

My Chrome extension received the Featured badge yesterday. Let's see if will have any positive impact on organic impressions & installs. At the very least now two screenshots are displayed side-by-side, so there's more things to try with the store listing itself. #buildinpublic

Screenshot of work-in-progress settings page for Chatbot Chronicles (dark mode)

There's also dark mode variant for it... but I'm not super stoked about it. There's something disturbing me about the colors/contrasts, but it's good enough for now to not spend any further time on it.

Screenshot of work-in-progress settings page for Chatbot Chronicles (light mode)

Started working on the settings page for Chatbot Chronicles to allow managing the auto-detected assistant connections. Still need to implement all the actions & modals, but I'm pretty satisfied with how it's looking. #buildinpublic

I tend to use different LLMs for different tasks, so getting a cross-platform overview of projects would be useful. Less need to copy-paste everything out of useful chats.

Mock-up UI for the new direction of Chatbot Chronicles

Would you use this to organize & find all your AI chats across ChatGPT, Claude & Perplexity? #buildinpublic

Via the API that powers the AI assistants own frontends. As a browser extension it's easy to hook into the existing user session and call the relevant endpoints.

For most of them it's just markdown packaged in JSON that differs slightly (but not much) between providers. I have the data sync working for ChatGPT, Claude & Perplexity to power my current "just search" version of the extension, and it's not too bad.

Thinking of changing my extension focus from pure search, into more search-powered organization. Think smart folders, but for LLM chats across providers. #buildInPublic

In this episode, we sat down with Addy Osmani from Google's Chrome Developer Experience team to explore what he calls the "70% problem" in AI coding: the gap between what AI can generate quickly and what it takes to ship production-ready code. We covered: - The 70% problem: why AI gets you most of AI's 70% problem w/ Addy Osmani

Another great talk from the Zed's AI engineering series -

Claude now supported in Chatbot Chronicles

I know... I promised to not write a single line of code. But I couldn't resist adding Claude support to Chatbot Chronicles. So now I need to pretend, I did it for "marketing" reasons. #buildinpublic

Get the extension for Chrome: chromewebstore.googl...
or Firefox: addons.mozilla.org/e...

Developers: I have this problem so I'll spend 3 months building something instead of Googling for an already existing solution.

Also developers: I built this awesome thing, but nobody seems to want it? Why is that!?

#buildinpublic

When selling B2B software via LinkedIn, how important it is to have a "professional"-looking profile? Anyone got any data points? #buildinpublic

As a techy, I'm pretty oblivious to normal people pain-points, and whatever problems I personally have seem to be exclusive to me. So the advice - build something to solve your own problems - is utterly useless. #buildinpublic

Best tools for managing outreach for solobuilders? #buildinpublic

For me - generating sufficient revenue to be able to pay myself a livable wage already seems next to impossible, let alone for multiple people.

To all the solo-builders out there: Why you doing it solo? #buildinpublic

I've seen people claim they use LLMs for trading. How does that even work? Y'all just letting the AI roll the dice or what?

Anyone done anything cool with Claude Skills yet? #buildinpublic

Part of me hopes that my extension will remain userless - it'll be that much easier to just nuke it all once the experiment is over. If there's even a few users, it'll be so much harder to pull the plug. #buildinpublic

Good search is surprisingly hard to do...