How we got featured in the Chrome App Store Frontpage

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I'll keep this short with specific steps. I hope this helps anyone with a startup or a project that wants attention. Before I start, this is what you will be achieving if you follow these steps specifically:

Link proof as of Wed Dec 17 2014

Stats after getting featured:

772k daily impressions!

Getting Started

1. Have a website. That’s all you need to post a chrome app in their webstore. It’s a simple manifest JSON that links to your URL. Follow these steps to get started, and your item should get published instantly after submission.
2. That’s it! Just make sure you have at least 4 screenshots, all 3 marquees set up, and published in the fitting category.

We posted ours a while back, and we thought you basically needed traction to get featured. Glad I was wrong. It’s time to leverage cold emailing tactics.

Cold emailing 101

Before I get started on this part, you need to realize that if your product hasn't reached PMF stage, then please improve your product before pitching the chrome team. It doesn't need to be perfect, just working enough that it serves its purpose.

1. Find out who you need to contact. I went through 30 pages of the chrome blog trying to figure out who I wanted to pitch to. The author of those posts differ from time to time, so you want to reach out to those that have blogged about the app store. That means create a list of potential people to contact later.
2. Once you got 2–3 people you want to email, figuring out their email is a piece of sponge cake. I used a tool called Email Address Checker. In this case, the authors work at Google, so naturally their email domain is “@google.com”. All you have to do now is to brute force with trial and error ☺

Here are some popular combination every business goes with:

• {firstName}@{domain}.com
• {lastName}@{domain}.com
• {firstName}{lastName}@{domain}.com

Once you got a valid email working, you proceed to writing him/her. This is exactly what I used to get featured, you can base off that template:

Make sure to include why your product is special. Then you wait until you get a response, and if there’s nothing, follow up with someone else in 2–3 days.

Hope this helps for any starving startups out there