How Remco grew his Chrome extension to 238 users in 1 month

Meet Remco Nieuwenhuizen.

36 year old Remco is from the Netherlands. He used to work in the army and in the police force, but since 2018 he started his online entrepreneurship journey. First as a webdesigner, then he started his website support company WPsupporters.

Currently Remco is focused on WPoptic, a Chrome extension which detects every theme and WordPress plugin used on a website. Remco is the founder but has a developer helping him on the technical side of the project.

The story told by Remco Nieuwenhuizen

What is WPoptic?

WPoptic is a free Chrome extension which detects WordPress plugins and themes instantaneously in your browser.

It is a similar tools as Wappalyzer or Buildwith, but fully focussed on WordPress. Right now it detects over 500 WordPress plugins where for example Wappalyzer only detects 196.

The Idea popped into my head when I saw that big tools like Wappalyzer wasn't targeting WordPress. With my company WPsupporters I often got questions from my client about how did this competitor build this or that.

We always had to dig through the inspector tool to find names of the plugin that was being used. So that’s the reason why I started to build WPoptic.

I think I’m on the right track 🙂

Below you can see a quick demo of WPoptic.

Building and launching

I started to build in the summer of 2024.

Launch was November 18th, 2024, the day the Google Chrome store approved the extension.

The first 100 users

Before launching the extension I got 76 email subscribers on a waiting list who were interested in the extension. I got those subscribers to signup when I first shared my idea online on eg. Facebook groups and X (example below).

On the 6th of December, 2024 I welcomed the 100th user. So it took about 2 working weeks to get to the first 100. I thought it would be easier to get them. Because my waiting list grew to 76 subscribers after 4 hours of marketing.

Marketing

I’m bootstrapping so the budget for marketing is close to zero.

So far I’ve been posting video’s on Tiktok and YouTube about the tool - examples below.

@wpoptic

Check out WPoptic.com to detect WordPress plug-ins and themes #wordpress #webdeveloper #webdesign #website #developer

I’ve ben building in public on X and Bluesky and shared my learnings and progress - example below.

I’ve emailed WordPress blogs trying to get their attention and get them to write about my plugin - example below.

Additionally I’ve launched on Product Hunt and send out DM’s to relevant people in the WordPress space (example of wording below).

In terms of marketing I’m tracking all numbers to try to figure out which ideas work and which don’t. Right now it’s to early for me to really conclude anything.

For example I thought DMing on X was not working for me, but just recently a guy featured WPoptic to his 4000 followers. So I’m curious to see how many reactions I’ll get from that post.

Current status

Right now (December 16th, 2024) I have 238 users. So since the 6th of December WPoptic grew around 140 users. The extension is used to detect plugins on over 4000 websites in this period.

Contact information for Remco Nieuwenhuizen.

• Email

• X

See you next time,
Jakob Jelling

I’m on Bluesky. Come out and play.