Chrome extension started as an Indie Hacking project while working at GoJek | Grew to $3k MRR | Shut Down
Growpad, a chrome extension was an Instagram Automation tool to increase IG followers & engagement using Like-for-like / follow-for-follow techniques.
Facts & Stats 🧮
ICP: Sole Proprietors, 1-2 member business teams, Music Producers.
PLG growth: Grew to 2000+ Chrome users in a year
Major bump in revenue: Using youtube influencer (affiliate)
Overall earnings: $38000 | ~30% paid to affiliate marketers
Idea Germination 💡
Idea germinated when I was working at GoJek and wanted FIRE ~ July 2019. I wanted to create niche accounts on instagram & grow them on autopilot. This growing on autopilot was validated with follow-for-follow & like-for-like strategy. Abhishek (my co-founder) created a page & did it manually. He could grow a page to 1000 followers in under 5 days.
Idea was to build a chrome extension & automated this process - find perfect target accounts and call the follow/like/unfollow APIs like how I was doing in my scraping extension - Profilebud.
Build Phase 👷🏻
I wanted a better product than all existing players in the niche and honestly I was loving the build part of my journey. All I was doing was having fun building features. Working 40 hours / week for GoJek & another 40 hours working on this.
For 6 months, I built the product with so many features & DIDN'T LAUNCH IT.
After launch, I had to make 2 products - Growpad (this one) & Profilebud as the market for both of them are very different. Also I made 10+ small tools which weren't really used by anyone.
Lesson learnt: Ship the product fast & get it in the hands of users
Initial Validation Phase & Growth ✅
Abhishek tested this method already manually so we knew this works!
Rob's magic - We met an influencer via Profilebud's Support Chat - Rob Level. Complete accident & pure luck. He's a rapper who sells courses on how to rap. A lot of music producers buy his courses.
Music Producers need to grow their IG. Perfect fit!
He made a video & a course for us. Our deal = 50% affiliate commission for anyone who comes via his site & code.
2 more IG affiliates started making videos & getting organic high intent traffic that just converted
We got to ~$220 MRR in 1st month (Nov 2020), $600 in Dec 2020, $3000 by Mar 2021 & ~$4000 by July 2021.
So so many features! 🌟
Growpad is perhaps the only tool I've built with so so many features which I thought would be perfect fit. IG Story watcher, 10+ editor tools, calculate brats & fans, etc. I really loved solving this problem myself. This is what I guess passion looks like!
Result is majority of features were not used and the ones that were being used were not fully working after a few actions due to IG bans.
Blocks from IG & Automouse 🚫
After just 7 months into launch, tool started getting blocks from Instagram. People would get message saying "Bot automation detected. Your account is at risk".
Calling simple API of Like & Follow is starting to get detected. People would put this tool on at night and sleep but without mouse being moved and likes happening is just botic behaviour.
Cat & mouse game detected. Okay, one more try.
To fix that, we made another mac & windows software called automouse. This would be controlled by the browser extension & would behave like how a human likes a post, follows someone.
Extension would tell the mouse to go to a certain co-ordinate and perform an action - Click the left button, double click, etc
This seemed to work much better but after a month of testing, the botic behaviour message started to come.
Subscribers leaving, churn & Cease-Desist 📉
Majority of the people would not use the software fully as you have to remember to put it on every night & it's a little hassle process
The ones who do would get block message and would not dare to do it again
We got a cease & desist from Meta in July 2021 for Growpad & Profilebud to shut it down as they say it violates their Terms
We were ~$4200 MRR. We decided to call it off and stopped accepting new users. The old users churned to 50% in next 3 months & by Dec 2021 MRR was $1500. By May 2022 it went down to ~$550 MRR and went dead later.
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