From 9-5 to a SaaS Product!
On a warm June evening in 2022, I was sitting with an old friend in a rooftop cafe alongside the Yamuna river, away from the chaotic hustle of the city with scattered clouds all over the sky. Having quit my job a few months earlier, I shared my dream of building something new — hoping to never return to a traditional 9-5.
We talked startups and ideas until the evening, but nothing clicked. That night at home, I had this simple thought: what if I built an all-in-one browser extension for developers and designers. Without really thinking it through, no market research, no fancy business plan – I just opened VS Code and started building. Weirdly enough, that’s how SuperDev Pro was born.
Why I Built SuperDev Pro
Back in 2021, I was that developer with too many browser extensions cluttering my Chrome. While each extension excelled at its core function, they were painfully limited - offering bare-bones features, outdated UI, and virtually no room for customization. While CSS Pro ↗ offered the features I needed, its recurring premium pricing put it out of reach for most developers and designers, so I decided to build it myself.
For the first 7 months of the building journey, SuperDev Pro was completely free. It felt like a long time, considering I had no other sources of income, and people started asking if SuperDev Pro would generate any revenue at all. I, too, after all, was unsure if things would work or not.
On the other hand, building this extension was also challenging, especially as a first-time browser extension developer, and that too while the Chrome API was undergoing significant changes. I spent months diving into MDN, Chrome API docs, and Stack Overflow to figure out how browsers work and learned intricate details of building a Chrome extension.
SuperDev Pro Goes Viral
After working on the extension for 3 straight months, 7 days a week, 14 hours a day 😬, I made it open-source and launched it on the Chrome Web Store ↗ in October 2022 and on ProductHunt ↗ in November 2022; no website yet. The response was incredible: 200+ upvotes, 45+ comments, and 300+ installs through ProductHunt that week.
Then in December, things got even more exciting — we trended in Japan due to a tweet ↗ (96k views) along with a blog ↗ by a prominent handle and gained traction in Korea thanks to another blog post by a well-known website. I believe both of them knew about SuperDev Pro from the ProductHunt launch. All this led to 1000s of installs!
SuperDev Pro Goes Paid
February 1, 2023 marked a significant milestone 🎉: the launch of SuperDev Pro’s paid version. From day one, free users began converting to the paid version.
I also launched SuperDev Pro on a few more platforms and built a fantastic website that improved our conversion rate by 4x. It’s been a year since launching the paid version, and the goal of avoiding a traditional 9-5 job has been achieved.
SuperDev Pro Gets Featured
Chrome Web Store featured us in July 2024. The extension that started as a personal tool has evolved into a robust solution that addresses the daily challenges developers and designers face. Seeing it used by 6000+ professionals around the world, with paid ones from 45+ countries and a 4.7-star rating on both the Chrome Web Store and ProductHunt, still blows my mind.
Sharing Do’s and Dont’s
Recently, Google Developer Student Clubs at Jamia Hamdard University invited me to speak. Standing there at GDSC LaunchPad, sharing my mistakes and lessons with students, felt surreal. Two years ago, I was the one searching for answers.
Building SuperDev Pro taught me more than just code. I learned how to build something people actually need, make it easy to use, and design it well. Along the way, I learned how to create a landing page ↗ that converts, write content that connects, implement marketing strategies ↗ that bring in sales, tell engaging stories, and, most importantly, keep going when nothing seems to be working.
