Back in September, I saw a blog post about Mozilla's Promoted Add-ons Pilot, a new program to help developers mark their extension as trusted as make their extensions more discoverable.

I applied, and surprisingly, they accepted Intention!

As a result, Intention now has a nifty "Verified" badge since it's more thoroughly reviewed by Mozilla's Add-ons team:

I also noticed yesterday that it's featured on the addons.mozilla.org homepage:

While the absolute numbers are still pretty small, it's made a dramatic difference to the number of people discovering and downloading Intention:

Thanks to this program, Intention on Firefox is getting 3-5x the number of daily downloads that Intention on Chrome receives.

I posted a Twitter thread this morning talking about the program, thanking the Mozilla Add-ons team, and soliciting suggestions for a better tagline. Later on during the day though, I noticed that Intention went from being first in that list to last:

I thought maybe they were cycling the order, but most of the other extensions stayed in place so that got me wondering whether my tweet earlier had anything to do with it. I'm probably overthinking it? Still weird though.

This boost has been great, and it's making me want to go work on Intention because I have a ton of things I'd like to do to improve it. But! I first need to launch Browserflow's paid beta program before I go off and get sucked into Intention for months.

The pilot program ends on November 30th, which means that I have a month and a half more of free publicity. After that, I'll have to work on building more marketing channels because this experience is making me realize that there is absolutely no way for people to find out about Intention except through word-of-mouth. But I should first add a paid plan to Intention before marketing it more so that I actually get closer to making Intention a sustainable business.

I feel like I squandered a great opportunity when I launched Intention on HN and Product Hunt and got a ton of momentum after launch by not having a paid plan available. I'd guess that people are probably most excited about a new tool when it's new, so it would've been great to prompt people to purchase a monthly/annual/lifetime plan after two weeks or something like that. For all the hundreds of hours that I've poured into building Intention and the hundreds of hours that I've spent writing about turning it into a business, I've made $0. Several people have offered to pay along the way and asked about how they can support the extension so I know there's potential here, but I just haven't prioritized it because building something great is way more fun and fulfilling for me than thinking about marketing, sales, paid plans — basically everything involved in turning a product into a business.

Still, I'm quite thankful that so many people have found Intention to be valuable and I just hope that when I eventually add paid options, that many of them would be down to support me in building Intention and other tools in a way where I'm not just burning through my savings. 🤞🏽