Sam and Shaan explore the chrome extension business model, walking through Honey ($4B acquisition), Grammarly ($100M+ revenue), and the massive size of the Chrome ecosystem. They discuss investments in Bubbles and Dashworks, brainstorm new plugin ideas including a meditation extension and a bitcoin scratch-off gimmick, and make the case that people dramatically underestimate the size and stickiness of the plugin market.
Speakers: Sam Parr (co-host), Shaan Puri (co-host)
The Chrome Extension Opportunity [00:00:00]
Sam: I’ve been thinking about chrome plugins. Duolingo is a very successful $5 billion company. And I think there are basically two approaches: one, look at successful companies that already do over $100 million in sales and ask, how can I create this as a Google plugin? Or two, which behaviors do people want but don’t do because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use a plugin to alleviate that friction?
There’s a ton of downside with Google plugins — you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly interesting to me.
The way I look at it is you just look at what behaviors people are already doing. Learning a language — people already want to learn a language, so you just change the text of an article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar: you just fix it as you write. Similar Web tells me the traffic of a website. Password managers insert passwords as you browse. Loom does screen recordings.
Honey and Grammarly: The Big Success Stories [00:01:30]
Sam: The two famous ones everyone’s heard of are Honey and Grammarly.
Honey sold to PayPal for $4 billion. They had 17 million users when they sold. What Honey does is, if you’re about to check out on some website, Honey goes in the background looking for a deal or a coupon — is there a sale somewhere, a coupon you can use right now? It surfaces a discount. That makes total sense — I don’t have to take any action, I don’t have to remember to go look for a coupon. It just does it. The Honey icon glows whenever it has a discount available.
Grammarly is the other one that shocks people, because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon, and he’s an engineer — very by-the-book, straight-shooter kind of guy. His name is Max. I was shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin — who would have thought?” He had this funny grin on his face. I was like, “How big are you guys?” He said, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He said, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” Then I said, “Did you just raise money?” He said, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because it was at north of a billion dollar valuation.” I was like, oh my god, they did it.
The Scale Argument: 3 Billion Chrome Users [00:03:30]
Shaan: I actually want to change your opinion on the market size. You said your mom doesn’t know what chrome extensions are.
Sam: She doesn’t. She knows apps but she doesn’t know chrome extension stuff.
Shaan: But does your mom — if she saw a commercial on TV for Grammarly — do you think she’d know what to do?
Sam: Actually, she downloaded Grammarly because of that. She saw it on TV and she’s self-conscious about her English because she learned it later in life, and she didn’t want to write something stupid. So she downloaded it for that reason.
Shaan: Exactly. So when I saw this Toucan thing — it’s a language learning plugin — I was like, you guys just run a commercial for this on TV. You’re going to get so many users.
And here’s the market size argument: 1.6 billion iPhone users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome has 3 billion users and only 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here.
Sam: The reason chrome plugins are interesting to me is the churn is so low. Churn on plugins is so low compared to iPhone apps. We’ve both built plugins — I have one for The Hustle, you have one for your “One Big Thing” framework. What’s the churn on ours?
Shaan: There’s basically no churn. Engagement isn’t always super high — they don’t always use the thing — but they leave it installed.
Sam: So we’ve both dabbled in this. Neither of us took it super seriously, but we were interested enough to build a chrome extension and get it out to five or ten thousand people. And I think people discount it way more than they should.
The Biggest Plugins by Install Count [00:05:30]
Sam: I had Claude pull some of the biggest plugins: AdBlock Plus, Adobe Acrobat, Safe Price — which is a deal-finding thing — video conferencing from Cisco, Google Translate, Honey, Pinterest save button, Skype, Tamper Monkey.
There was a cool one called Ghostery that would show you who’s trying to track you on every website you go to.
Bubbles: The Screenshot Collaboration Tool [00:06:30]
Shaan: So in this document we have, I said screenshots would be great and you mentioned you’d invested in something called Bubbles. What is that?
Sam: Bubbles is a lot like Loom — the idea is how do you easily share what’s on your screen with a coworker. Some people just use the hotkey, take a screenshot, it goes to their desktop, they have to grab it, drag and drop it to someone, then that person can’t easily comment on it. It’s kind of annoying.
What Bubbles does is simpler. It’s a little chrome extension and on any page you can record a screen recording, take a screenshot, or — my favorite — a scroll screenshot. You know when you’re on a website that’s really long and you want to screenshot the whole thing? You’d normally take eight separate screenshots. With Bubbles it takes one long screenshot and sends it as a single file.
You can then comment on it — “bubbles” — like speech bubbles. You click anywhere on the screen where you want to point something out and leave a note. Then the whole thing is a link, you share it with somebody, and they can comment back like a Google Doc.
It’s doing well, specifically with agencies. Creative agencies are always sending mockups and concepts back and forth between team members and clients. There’s a lot of showing-screen stuff and commenting, and that’s where they’re getting their initial foothold.
Dashworks: The Company Intranet as a Chrome Extension [00:08:30]
Sam: What’s Dashworks?
Shaan: Dashworks is a company I invested in — it’s like a homepage for your company as a chrome extension. So let’s say somebody joins The Hustle. You give them their laptop. If you work with Dashworks, when they open up their Google Chrome for the first time, they don’t see the generic Google new tab page. They see The Hustle’s branded page.
That page does three things. One: there’s a search bar and you type in anything, and it finds the file inside your company’s tools. Most companies now use Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, Asana, GitHub — all these cloud tools. On your MacBook, if you want to find a file you use Spotlight. But now with the cloud, none of the files you need are actually on your computer. This is basically Spotlight for all your cloud apps.
Two: you can search anyone’s name. I type in “Steph” and it shows me Steph Smith’s profile — what she does, who she reports to.
Three: you as the CEO or admin can post announcements that show up in their new tab bar. Welcome new employees, announce happy hour, that sort of thing.
Sam: So it’s a search for files, search for people, and internal communications — all delivered through the chrome extension.
Luster: Smarter Shopping Recommendations [00:10:30]
Shaan: There’s another one I don’t know how to pronounce — you wrote it in the doc.
Sam: Luster. Our friend Jack was one of the early users and he says it’s awesome.
Shaan: So you go on Amazon and search for a flat screen TV. There are so many products, all with four-star reviews, and you don’t know what to make of it. What Luster does is simplify the buying decision. It says, “Here’s the recommended option for what you searched for — this AI has searched all the reviews across all the different websites and determined this is the most popular result for what you’re looking for. Here’s the high-end version. Here’s the budget version.”
And you didn’t have to remember to go to Luster — it’s a chrome extension. You’re on Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, wherever, and Luster just shows up and says, “Here’s the product we recommend and here’s why.”
Sam: When the founder pitched it to me, I was like, “This is stupid, I’m not in.” But I actually think I was wrong. It’s really cool. The founder was really smart.
New Plugin Ideas: Meditation and Screen Time [00:12:30]
Sam: Let me use your framework: take a popular app like Headspace or Calm that shows there’s a need — people want to meditate — and make it a chrome extension.
You’ve been browsing for two hours straight, you have 85 tabs open, and the extension pops up: “You’ve been at this a while. Would you like to earn some mindfulness points and take a one-minute quick meditation?” You tap it, a clock appears, and there’s a guided voice doing a one-minute meditation. Meditation delivered through a chrome extension. On mobile you have to remember to open the app. This could just pause you as you go.
Shaan: That has legs. Keep going.
Sam: Do you know that thing on your iPhone where it blocks you from using a website after a certain amount of time?
Shaan: Screen Time?
Sam: Yeah. I used to have this chrome plugin called Nuke — where after a certain amount of time, you’d nuke your websites and you could only go to Google Docs and email. I loved it. So similar to meditation — I would 100% try to create more of these “defend yourself against yourself” apps.
The Gimmick Idea: Bitcoin Scratch-Off New Tab [00:14:00]
Sam: Okay I have a smart idea and a gimmick idea. Which one do you want?
Shaan: Smart one first.
Sam: Smart one first. We had the founder of Superhuman on — he’s the guy who built Rapportive before that. We both loved Rapportive. What Rapportive did was, when you were emailing somebody, as soon as you typed in their name or email, a little sidebar would pop out and show you their face, their name, their last few tweets. At the time it was like magic — it made you a more thoughtful person because you could see who you were talking to.
I think you could take Rapportive all around the web. Anytime it sees a name on a web page, it highlights it yellow, and if you hover over it, it tells you something about that person. I think you could turn “anytime you see a name, tell me a little bit about them” into a chrome extension. How would you make money?
Shaan: Ads. Easy.
Sam: Okay. Now the gimmick one — I don’t think this should exist, I just think it would be funny if somebody tried it.
You remember Million Dollar Homepage — a website with a million pixels, buy a pixel and sponsor it? I’ve always thought about similar ideas — how do you make a million bucks off something simple and goofy.
In the Bitcoin world, there’s this concept called a faucet — a website where you go and sometimes free bitcoin comes out. People like to go to these to collect a new coin, or it’s just a game of chance. And there was this company called Diamond Candles. Every single candle — we’re talking a wax candle you burn — at the bottom, one in ten thousand has a $1,000 diamond. The rest have basically nothing, like a cracker jack ring.
So here’s the chrome extension version: every time you open a new tab, there’s a little package in the middle of the screen. Give it a quick click. You’re either going to get nothing, get a tiny little something like a puzzle piece, or actually get some bitcoin. Every time you open a new tab it’s like a mini scratch-off lottery ticket.
You could give away small amounts of bitcoin, give away puzzle pieces — if you collect all the pieces, you win a whole bitcoin, like the Monopoly game at McDonald’s. And the rest of the screen you plaster with ads, or sometimes what comes out of the box is just an ad.
Shaan: I hope someone tries this because I think it would be hilarious.
Sam: I feel like I can rule the world.