How I leveraged social media and built in public to hit $4k/mo with my browser extension

After two failed projects, Erwin Lengkeek knew he had to do something differently to make his next SaaS work. 

So, he got over his social media nerves and shared his building journey in real-time online.

By growing an audience for his product — and listening to its feedback — he's built design tool Tailscan into a sustainable business.

He took me through his journey so far 👇.

Learning the ropes

My sister introduced me to coding when I was about 12. She showed me PHP forums and asked if I wanted to learn how to code myself. I tried, but pretty much failed.

When I was a teenager, I started making Minecraft plugins using Java. That was a hype.

Then when I was 14, I made a website to sell ringtones. I’m pretty sure I made like $5. My mom was my only customer, and I didn’t even get her money in the end. 

I’d somehow used someone else's code for payment integration so it probably went to their account. Good times.

I learned more about computing at university and got an internship at a consulting company. They hired me permanently after I graduated. Here's a car, here's the keys, here's your customer, go write software.

That’s when I started to consider building my own products. I’d make small little plugins or browser extensions just to make my life easier.

After a while, I started freelancing and moved to Bali. I met some crazy people at a co-working space called Tropical Nomad. Some guy called Levelsio or something. 

Speaking to these people, I thought going full-time on indie hacking sounded great.

The actual journey was rocky, let’s put it that way.

Two failed startups

My very first product was a Slack integration called Sparkly. It would match people working at a company with similar interests. 

I started it in 2019, then Covid-19 hit. It should have been great for big companies working remotely to help their employees feel more connected.

It went pretty well at first and got to around $300 MRR. One of my big customers was Walmart, who used it as a fun extra during staff training. But they churned and Sparkly just never really went anywhere after that.

My second product was a branding platform called Base Styles. I don’t even want to talk about it. I worked on it for 10 months and I never got any real customers. Only 100 trial users. 

I supported myself by freelancing for 3 or 4 months at a time while building these products. A block of indie hacking, then a block of freelancing.

Build fast, build in public

I got the idea for Tailscan — a browser overlay that helps you build, design and debug Tailwind websites — while I was making Base Styles.

I’m not good at visualizing how changes will look while I code and switching between my integrated development environment and browser was frustrating. So, I built a little JavaScript browser extension to help.

When it was clear Base Styles was going nowhere, I gave myself the challenge of building and releasing something in four weeks.

I was confident in Tailscan because I thought, if it's useful to me it's probably going to be useful to others. So, I improved the way the extension looked over and then shared a demo on Twitter four weeks later.

It got like 70,000 impressions and 500 likes. At the time I had maybe 300 followers, so that was pretty amazing.

I built it out into an actual product over the next two weeks and launched it on Product Hunt.

Market before you launch

I started a newsletter while working on Tailscan. I posted multiple demos on Twitter every week up until the launch, and I’d link to these in every mailing.

People would click through to see the demo video.  That would boost the algorithm and make it visible for more people, who would then sign up for the newsletter.

I did this maybe four times and that got the newsletter to 300 people.

That gave me a big boost for upvotes when I launched on Product Hunt. I think I got maybe 40 customers or so on yearly licenses at $39 each.  

After making a product that literally didn't work and nobody wanted to buy, this was crazy.

Listen to your customers

Since launching back in November 2022, I’ve improved Tailscan mostly according to user feedback. Developers are extremely nice and have given me really good feedback.

The first really important update was a CSS to Tailwind option that allows you to go to any website and convert any part of it into a Tailwind component.

I worked on that for about five months and launched it on the first anniversary of Tailscan.

Another big change was a dev tool integration. Tailscan started as an overlay on a website, but now you can open it in your Chrome inspector. If you’re working on mobile, for example, and your screen is small, you don’t want to have a big overlay.

Next, I’ll release a Firefox version. That’s something maybe 20 people have requested. 

Tweaking the pricing

Tailscan started out with just a yearly license. At some point, I realized that works out at about $3 a month and you’d need a thousand users just for a decent personal income.

So, after about six months I added a monthly plan and a perpetual license that will work forever, even if I stop working on the product.

That went really well and my MRR shot up from about $600 to $2000.

At first, most growth was in the monthly plans. But after changing the landing page to emphasize the perpetual license, it started selling much better and the monthly slowed down.

There was quite a bit of churn and that was quite painful. But lifetime sales went up at the same time. They’ve been averaging about $4,000 to $6,000 a month for the last six months.

I lowered the monthly pricing a little recently to see if it would improve the recurring revenue. It seems like there’s more customers now than before, but it takes a while to see what’s really happening.

Marketing hacks and fails

Some marketing strategies really haven’t worked. I sponsored a couple of newsletters in my niche, but the click-through rate was low and the conversion even lower. I broke even at best.

I tried working with influencers. Some of them were a good call. But others — especially those on Tiktok — just didn’t really result in any profit.

Posting on Twitter has worked far better. I had some viral moments that really helped.

I also launch consistently. You can do product launches every six months or so on Product Hunt if you have a big update. That brings a lot of traffic.

But SEO has been the most successful marketing tool for me. I was surprised at how long it took to take off, but now it’s responsible for 70 to 80 percent of my traffic.

Part of this comes from having lots of pages on the site with technical help like info about Tailwind classes. Individually, these pages don’t bring in that many visitors, but together, they result in decent traffic.

Be curious and make a noise

If you want to be an indie hacker, you need to always be curious. Stay positive and treat it like a never-ending puzzle. Have fun.

Most people look at development from a technical standpoint. Other people are more like salespeople and focus on how to market a product.

But there’s also a third way, which I learned from Danny Postma. Look at your business through the lens of conversion. You have to try and see how people view your product. If I build a landing page, where do people look first?

It’s also helpful to be present online. You need to write. There’s no excuse. The people who make it in indie hacking write. Articles, tweets, blogs. There’s no other way for people to find out what you’re doing — and people really do want to know.

I really wish I’d known this earlier. When I started Tailscan, growing my online following made so much difference.

If you find writing hard, try getting words down somewhere without publishing first. Write a journal. Write down your thoughts.

Incredible freedom

For me, indie hacking has been life-changing.

I was used to having a job and this comfortable bubble. When I actually started to make money bootstrapping, the sense of freedom and self-reliance was incredible. Until you have that, you don’t really know what it’s like.

This confidence has given me the ability to take bigger risks outside of work too. It’s improved every aspect of my life.

Success, it turns out, is compounding.