Kiesha Allen

Also @CuriousRefuge and @promise_ai just low key launched the biggest AI animation competition ever! Check out the details: curiousrefuge.com/ai-animation-c…

8 lessons learned from vibecoding a high-growth chrome extension I built @supercharge_ext, a free plug-in for @boltdotnew. In 3 weeks I have 1.2k users and the reviews have been incredible. here’s what I learned - and what you need to know before building an extension 👇 1/ identify your audience first. make sure the Total Addressable Audience is meaningful enough to target. niche is good but a big and growing niche is better. I chose bolt users as there are 3 million, and I myself was a heavy user and early adopter - so the empathy and understanding for where to add value was implicit. I also wanted to avoid the cold-start problem where I would have to educate people about why they need this product. 2/ research before building to pre-validate. find where your audience is active and note down all the relevant posts. chuck them into chatgpt and identify painpoint categories, and narrow down the scope for your v1 I trawled reddit, X, discord and youtube and discovered some quick wins that would solve some painful issues people were having. 3/ study up on how chrome extensions are architected. I asked chatgpt for a breakdown, and started Supercharge using Bolt, and knowing the basic schema to use from the outset saved a lot of time. 4/ take the time to plan first, and upload those docs to Bolt etc. it honestly makes such a difference to get consistent results. you need a PRD, user flow, API docs, implementation guide at least. doing this at the start must have saved me 50+ hours in bug fixing or re-architecting as the codebase grew. especially important as this wasn’t a standard web (or mobile) app that Bolt is hard-wired to build. 5/ respect the mothership. by which I mean, if you’re building a permissionless project like mine, whereby your product is directly dependent on another, this impacts your strategy and roadmap. I call this “feature colinization”. be prepared to iterate super fast and spread your bets on how your adding value. The Bolt team is amazing at shipping high quality features and updates at speed, so I have to account for that. it means I don’t have complete control over my own roadmap, but it’s a trade off that pays off: as Bolt improves their product, this should bring in more users to Supercharge too - so long as I’m thinking ahead. 6/ think about monetisation from the beginning, even if you launch as a free product. I wanted Supercharge to always be free, as that’s how I can grow my customer base as quickly as possible in a fast-moving sector where anything can be copied. there are costs I’ve chosen to incur, with APIs and Bolt and now Windsurf tokens. but charging for features is tough when I don’t know which ones will still be exclusive to Supercharge and which ones will be shipped by Bolt. I had some ideas on how to monetise, but brainstorming with @jrdnmix and his Startup Empire community has made me realise I wasn’t thinking big enough. highly recommend joining (I can get you in if you DM me for a link) 7) community building is critical when you don’t have any email addresses with chrome extensions, you don’t get any access from Google as to the details of your customers. so I’ve made a deliberate effort here on X and in the Supercharge discord, to reach them that way it’s so much harder than a typical SaaS but at the same time I feel I can get even closer, and discover who the super fans are. 8) get your ‘user permission’ reasons from the AI coding tool you use the Chrome store requires every extension to submit reasons why they need particular data and access permissions. get these wrong and you might not get approved for weeks. I asked Bolt + Windsurf for mine as they knew the product best. Supercharge was approved on first submission after just 4 days. now I’m typically waiting 1 to 2 days for each new release to be approved. literally as a new version is released, I have the next one ready to submit.

Going to pause on the Bolt stuff for now. Hopefully the Expo office hours can resolve things. Anyway it's @framer time! I'll be joining the template building gang 😎.