How To Create A Plugin That Will Make Millions In Revenue

Sam Parr

Chrome plugins... I'm thinking about them, and here's my approach: 1. Look at successful companies that already do over $100 million in sales and ask, "How can I create this in the form of a Google plugin?" For example, Duolingo is a very successful company, valued at about $5 billion. 2. Identify behaviors people want but don't do because there's a little bit of friction. Then, consider how I can use a plugin to alleviate that friction. These are the two main strategies I'm considering for Chrome plugin ideas.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

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. What I wanted to bring up was some Google plugin stuff. Basically, I don't know if this is how she did it, but the way that I look at it is you just look at what behaviors people are already doing. For example, learning a language. People already want to 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. One that I use all the time is SimilarWeb. It tells me the traffic of someone's website. Passwords—you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?

Shaan Puri

oh yeah my my buddy was with the guy who started it

Sam Parr

isn't that worth like $1,000,000,000

Shaan Puri

not yet but getting close it's several 100,000,000 I think it was the last round

Sam Parr

and all it does is screen recordings recordings

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

$8,000,000,000

Shaan Puri

So, Honey had, I think, 17,000,000 users when they sold. What Honey does is, if you're about to check out on some website, Honey will go in the background. It's looking for deals, coupons, or sales for that item somewhere else, or a coupon you can use right now. It surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don't have to take any action or remember to look for a coupon; it's just going to do it. The Honey sign glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another, and I think that shocks people because Grammarly does over $100,000,000 a year.

Sam Parr

So, the Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon. He's an engineer, a very by-the-book, straight-shooter type. He's really cool; his name's Max. I was shooting the breeze with him, and I said, "Dude, a freaking plug-in? Who would have thought?" He kind of had a funny, shit-eating grin on, and I asked, "How big are you guys?" He replied, "We do over $100,000,000 a year in sales." I was like, "Would you ever believe it?" He said, "Yeah, I thought it could be done." Then I asked, "You just raised money?" He responded, "Yeah, we raised $100,000,000 the other day." I inquired, "Why?" He said, "Because it was at a valuation north of $1,000,000,000." I was like, "Oh my God, you cleared it off!"

Shaan Puri

Yeah, they did it exactly. So those are like the big successes, but there are some other ones, right? For example, Pinterest was started as, I believe, a Chrome extension. It was the "Pin" button that basically allowed 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. Then there are others. 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. 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 plugin." Definitely, there are a lot of people—like my mom—who doesn't know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn't know there's a Chrome extension store, and she doesn't really know how to install them. 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 exchange is a big deal.

Sam Parr

I actually want to change your opinion on that. I went and looked at the numbers. There are **1,600,000,000** iPhone users. Okay, **1,600,000,000** users and **2,000,000** iPhone apps in the store right now. For Chrome users, there are **3,000,000,000** Chrome users and **200,000** plugins. There's a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that your mom doesn't know how to do this, but if she saw a commercial on TV for Grammarly, I bet she would know what to do. You just go to **grammarly.com**.

Shaan Puri

Actually, she does have Grammarly because of that. She saw it and she's self-conscious about her English because she learned English later in life. She doesn't want to write something stupid, so she downloaded Grammarly for that reason actually.

Sam Parr

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." The plug-in... the reason why the plug-ins are interesting to me is the churn is so low. Churn on plug-ins are so low compared to iPhone apps or...

Shaan Puri

And we both have plugins. You have a plugin for *The Hustle*, and I have a plugin for my *One Big Thing* framework.

Sam Parr

what do you want

Shaan Puri

There's like no churn on it. Do we have thousands of users now? The engagement's not super high - like they don't always use the thing, but they leave it installed. And 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, 5-10,000 people.

Sam Parr

It's interesting, and I think that people discount it. I think that it's far more interesting than most people realize. So I actually had Abreu pull some of the biggest plugins: - AdBlock - AdBlock Plus - Adobe Acrobat What do you use Adobe Acrobat for?

Shaan Puri

I don't know probably like flash or something I don't know

Sam Parr

Safe price, which is a deal thing. Video conferencing from Cisco. Google Translate, which is kind of an indicator about Toucan, which is interesting. Honey, Pinterest save button, Skype. What's Tampermonkey?

Shaan Puri

I don't know it looks like it's trying to keep you safe

Sam Parr

dave there

Shaan Puri

There was a cool little extension called Ghostery back in the day that would just show you who's trying to track you on every website you go to. That was kind of cool, and we'll try to shut that down. There's also these paid ones. So, was there anything interesting in the paid group?

Sam Parr

No, but tell me about the ones that you've invested in because they're actually similar. In this document that we have, I said screenshots would be great. You said, "Oh, I invested in this thing called Bubbles," which I remember you telling me about. But what is that?

Shaan Puri

Bubbles is a lot like Loom, which we talked about earlier. The idea is: how do you easily share what's on your screen with your coworker who wants to see it? So, how do you do that? Some people just take a screenshot. They use the hotkey on their keyboard, take a screenshot, and it goes into their desktop file. Then they have to go grab that, drag and drop it to their friend, and then the friend has to comment on it. But they can't comment on it; they have to send it back as another file. It's kind of annoying, right? So, what Bubbles does is much simpler. 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," or "I want to take a screenshot." My favorite one is a scroll screenshot. You know when you're on a website that is long and you want to take screenshots of the website? You have to take like eight screenshots and then send them as separate files to somebody.

Sam Parr

it's a pain there

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

and what's dashworks

Shaan Puri

So, Dashworks is a company I have. It's like the homepage for your company. This is a Chrome extension that's sold to companies. Let's say somebody joins The Hustle. You give them their laptop, and if they work with Dashworks, when they open up Google Chrome for the first time to use the internet, they would not just see the generic Google "new tab" page. They would see The Hustle's branded page. That page can do three things: 1. **Search Bar**: There's a search bar where you can type in anything, and it will find the file inside your company. Most companies now use Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, Asana, GitHub, and all these different tools that are in the cloud. If you've ever been on your MacBook and you want to find a file, you just use the little Spotlight search finder. You type it into Spotlight, and it finds the file on your computer. The thing is, 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. It helps any employee find any file that's in your network without knowing where to go to find it. It's just like search networking. 2. **Search for People**: The second thing you can do is search anyone's name. For example, I could be like, "Oh, what does Steph Smith do with The Hustle?" I type "Steph," and it will show me her profile, what she does, who she reports to, and that sort of thing. 3. **Announcements**: The last thing is that you, as the CEO or your admin as a company, can post announcements or updates that will show up in their Chrome "new tab" bar. You can say things like, "Welcome these new employees," or "Happy birthday to this person," or "Hey, remember this Friday we're all doing happy hour," or whatever. So, it's kind of a communication pipe as well. I thought that was cool—they're taking the Chrome extension to deliver critical internal company information: a search for people, a search for files, and internal announcements.

Sam Parr

So, this is interesting. There's another one that I actually don't know how to say the name of this company, but you wrote it in here.

Shaan Puri

how do

Sam Parr

you pronounce that

Shaan Puri

luster

Sam Parr

Jack, our friend Jack, was one of the early users and I think invested in it. He says that it's awesome. Basically, they look at Wirecutter, Amazon, and dozens of other sources. Anytime you have a product in front of you, it tells you the average review. Kind of interesting, I...

Shaan Puri

don't know how I think it's a little better than that I think what they do is you say your yeah

Sam Parr

my description was about a year ago

Shaan Puri

You know, I think what it does is you go on Amazon or whatever and you search for a flat-screen TV. There are so many products out there, and all of them have great ratings, like 4 stars. What do I make of that? So, what Luster does is try to make the buying process simpler. It basically says, "Here's the recommended option for what you searched for." Our AI has searched all the reviews and different websites, gathering all this data to tell us that this is the most popular result for what you're looking for. Then, it provides you with the high-end version of it and maybe the low-end version as well. I don't know if the product has evolved too much since then, but that's what it kind of did at that time. It helped you figure out which product you should actually buy using data. And again, you didn't have to remember to go to Luster; it was a Chrome extension. So, while you were shopping on any website—whether it was Walmart, Amazon, or BestBuy.com—Luster would pop up and say, "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.

Sam Parr

I think that 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." I understand though; I actually think I was wrong about it. It's really cool. Yeah, so.

Shaan Puri

The founder of Stewart is really smart. For this one, he showed me a chart, a graph that was doing pretty well. So here are some other ideas of things. Those are ideas that we've either invested in or seen. I have a couple more for you. Let's use your framework: take a popular app like Duolingo. That shows that there's a need or a demand; people want to learn a language. You could make it a Chrome extension as the user experience instead of a mobile app.

Sam Parr

so or at least one of the main widgets or main points of distribution

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

Oh yeah, like time... something. I don't, I don't know. What do you use that? I never use that stuff. No, do you?

Sam Parr

I mean I have it installed

Shaan Puri

screen time I think is what it's called

Sam Parr

Screen time... I used to have this Chrome plug-in 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. You could not go to certain websites, so you could only access Google Docs and email, and that was it. I loved it! So, similar to meditation, I would 100% try to create more of these... what do you call this? Change your "stop using stuff" app.

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

okay

Shaan Puri

smart one or the gimmick one

Sam Parr

smart one first

Shaan Puri

Alright, smart one first. Okay, we had the founder of... You mentioned the founder of Superhuman. He's the guy who built Rapportive before that. We both loved Rapportive. It doesn't exist now, so some people might not know what it is, but what Rapportive 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 - Their name - The last few tweets

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

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 and get a little more information. It kind of served it up, like you had an amazing executive assistant who was like, "By the way, sir, you need to know this about this person." So, I think you could take Rapportive all around the web. You could make it where anytime it sees a name on a web page, it just highlights it yellow. Then, if you hover over that, it'll just tell you something about that person. I think you could bring this idea of anytime you see a name, tell me a little bit more about that person. I could see you turning that into a Chrome extension rather than something that was just for email.

Sam Parr

how would you make money off of it

Shaan Puri

Ads! Boom! That's my easy answer. I don't know... Oh, alright, okay. But here's my gimmick one, which definitely needs ads. I think there should be a Chrome extension. Let me take this back. I don't think this should exist, but I think it would be funny if somebody tried to do this. So, if you ever remember the "$1,000,000 homepage," it was kind of this cool idea: here's a website with a million pixels on the page, and you could buy a pixel and sponsor it. Okay, that's cool. I've always thought about similar ideas. How could you make a million dollars off something simple and goofy? 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 sometimes there's, think about it like a spout, and sometimes free Bitcoin comes out. A bunch of people like to go to these. Some projects use these to say, "Go collect your coin with my new coin. Go there and get some." You would go to the website, 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.

Sam Parr

It's like... what do they call this? They call it a... There's this company that did this with candles. We talked about them. It was called 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—it's like... cool candles. That's fucking... the only way I'd want to use fucking candles is when I'm sitting in the bath.

Shaan Puri

I like to start dropping f-bombs to get masculine real quick while talking about bathtub candles. You're like, "I don't fuck you, bro."

Sam Parr

I I use my my bath bombs or what are they called

Shaan Puri

yeah bath bombs

Sam Parr

Anyway, I've got all of them. I'm a sensitive guy, man. And anyway, they say that like 1 in 10,000 candles probably has a $1,000 diamond.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

the rest have like nothing

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

Something like a Cracker Jack ring, and 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 - one out of x - does get a Bitcoin, right?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so something like that. 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, or you get 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 little satoshis, basically. It would just become this little hamster game where every time you open a new tab, are you really going to not click the thing? 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. You could give away little shit coins, you could give away micro amounts of Bitcoin, and you can give away little puzzle pieces. 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. Sometimes what comes out of the box is just an ad. I think that's how you make money off of my gimmick Chrome extension.

Sam Parr

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