$53,000+ From His 1-Week Chrome Extension

Erwin LengkeekFounder of Tailscan $53,000+ revenue Published January 15, 2024 by Fardeen KhanReviewed and edited by Niall Doherty

Erwin Lengkeek is the founder of Tailscan, a Chrome extension that lets web developers design and debug websites built with the Tailwind CSS framework

In a recent interview, Erwin shares…

The recurring revenue has grown to almost $30k annually, with another $23k in one-off revenue, all with a 95% profit margin.

Pricing is a $79/year subscription or a $249 one-time fee.

The origin story…

Two years ago I started building a product called Base Styles as a side project, hoping to make it profitable. Unfortunately, it failed to gain traction after 10 months of building… I spent way too much time without validating the idea.

So for Erwin’s next try…

To decrease the risk and time spent I gave myself a challenge: build a very minimal first version of a new product within a week… I ended up rebuilding a personal tool that I had hacked together in the past. It was a simple browser extension to make live visual changes easier with Tailwind CSS.

To save time when building the first version…

I consciously left some [bugs] unresolved and chose to fix or polish things up in subsequent bug fixes.

He announced the project in October 2022…

After building and posting the video on Twitter, it ended up getting 570 likes, 22000 views on the video and 82000 impressions! It felt like the complete opposite of my previous product, all of a sudden there was lots of interest with minimum effort!

Unclear how many followers Erwin had on Twitter at that time, but he still had less than 1000 a few months later, so it’s not like he’d built up a huge audience already.

Launching…

During launch day, I launched both on Product Hunt and announced it on Twitter.

In the first week, I sold 40 yearly subscriptions… I decided to extend [the early-bird deal] for Black Friday (the week after) and it resulted in another 44 yearly subscriptions.

Lessons learned…

The most valuable lesson I learned from all of this is that it’s crucial to try and get people interested as early as possible, and use that momentum as much as you can.

And…

I’ve learned that consistency over a longer period of time is key to outperform competitors.

Summing up the approach that worked for Erwin

Give yourself a short amount of time to build somethingAnnounce it publicly ASAP to see if there’s much interestNo need to have it perfectly polished before launchLaunch with an early-bird dealExtend that deal if it’s workingKnuckle down and focus on improving the product over time



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