How I Got 95%+ Net Profit Margins on a Chrome Extension
I’m lazier than most of you.
I read all the articles here on Medium about people preaching content marketing, list building etc..
I didn’t want to spend ad dollars and do content marketing for years to build the list. Like you, I get distracted easy… have no time! So I tried to find a way to buy small companies that already had big lists and I ended up cold emailing a bunch of Chrome Extension owners:
This was process I ran:
— Search chrome web store
— See where the “Last Updated” date was more than 6 months old (good change creators didn’t care about, meaning I could acquire cheap)
— Hunt down creator email and reach out
I ended up buying SndLatr for $1000 and rebranded it to The Top Inbox. Was tons of fun (adrenaline!) No lawyers. This was our “official deal”:
So I spent $1000 to buy SndLatr which had 30,000 active users (according to chrome web store) with over 1000 five star reviews.
It was a completely free tool. My first priority was trying to figure out how to hack some revenue out of this without pissing off the user base.
So I thought… I only want 5% of the total free users to even see the paywall. And I only wanted to show the paywall to the “most active” users. I defined “most active” as how many times they sent an email using “SndLatr” button.
So after looking at usage metrics, if I only wanted 5% of the free users to see the paywall, it would show to anyone who had 15 or more uses in the past 7 days. This is the first paywall I launched:
I wanted to “protect the opportunity cost” of this paywall too. Meaning, I didn’t want to lose users because of it. (especially my most active ones!)
So I let people get around it, but they’d have to click “use one more time for free” every time (not productive, but at least they didn’t have to pay $5). This performed well.
I didn’t lose users, and over the first 2 years, here’s what happened. (May 2016 when I acquired to May 2018) Stripe account from first 2 years after I bought the tool for $1k:
$153,700 ain’t to shabby for something I acquired for $1,000, and added one paywall to.
(Growth was organic due to high position in Chrome Store, I never had to run promotions or content or anything to keep growing this outside of the rebrand and website code/dev at TheTopInbox.com)
Anyways, I don’t say all this to brag. I know most of us are ground level kind of folks. I just wanted you guys to see that sometimes, if you get super creative, you can save yourselves years of building by doing a fun deal with a Chrome developer :)
This story is 1 out of more than 36 in my new book “How To Be A Capitalist Without Any Capital”.
I hate the word capital, but Random House — my publishers — said it “tested well”, so we’re rolling with it haha.
Lastly….. I feel kinda guilty about posting something that’s “for sale” here on Medium…. So I set up CapitalistBook.com to give anyone who can’t afford to pay the $27 to buy the book a big free preview.
I’m sitting here in LA at Rose enjoying a coffee while I write this (btw $5 for basic coffee is ridiculous… LA thing?):
How meta meta meta :D Anyways, I think you guys will enjoy the stories in the last couple chapters (this one especially):
Talks about when you find a blog post ranked #1 for a keyword you want, how to convince the writer to go edit the old post and put your backlink at top…
The email script I had to test 100’s of times to get this to work turned out insane. Put finals in book for you guys :) Ok… gonna go top off this coffee. Getting cold.
Gonna chill here most of the day to engage with you guys! Hope everyone has fun weekend plans.
— Nathan Latka
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For a free preview of the full book (and 35 other short growth hack stories like this one) click here:
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Put your questions below so I don’t get bored. Ill reply right away.
