Hacktoberfest 2019-2020 project : Survol
A short introduction
Survol is a browser extension which uses meta-data and oEmbed APIs to preview any link you hover on the internet.
The idea being that by previewing links when you hover them, you have to open less tab which makes tab management easier.
The Idea
I got the idea while scrolling reddit comments, people were linking to tweets and I thought it was annoying to open each link in a new tab, hence the idea of being able to preview a link by hovering it.
Open-source at the core of the project
From the beginning this project has been developed in an open-source environment. It has been started a few days before Hacktoberfest 2019, which is a month-long event which encourages developers on Github to contribute to open-source projects.
In those few days I was able to build a prototype that worked with reddit, twitter, youtube and wikipedia. I then published everything on Github. It received a few contributions and we managed to make the extension more stable but it was still not ready to launch to a wide audience.
One of the biggest problem was with the way we were handling the preview window and positionning it.
After hacktoberfest I was a bit burnt out and paused the project to focus on school. The following year when Hacktoberfest 2020 came around, I tried to find the motivation to get back into this project with some friends.
We cleaned up a lot of things and added the support for meta-data previews, this is also when we fixed the positionning issue and totally reworked the way the preview window was handled. At that point I decided it was time to share the extension publicly.
After the launch the extension got decent traffic for a few days, I also opened a lot of issues asking for translations and thanks to Hacktoberfest in a week or two pretty much all translations were done.
Launching
To launch the project I used the following platforms :
- ProductHunt
- Subreddits : /r/SideProject & /r/InternetIsBeautiful
- IndieHackers
ProductHunt
I scheduled the ProductHunt post to appear 5 minutes after the daily reset, it was not a great idea and because of this the extension was stuck in the "new" section for an hour or so.
Also all the visuals used were home-made but in the end the app ended up in the 7th or 8th place, which I think is pretty decent for a first launch with no budget for a side project.
Both reddit posts were scheduled to appear a few hours before the daily ProductHunt reset, I heard it was not a good thing to link directly to ProductHunt, so ahead of time I added the "Featured on ProductHunt" badge to the project's landing page, and made sure it would start showing up as soon as the ProductHunt post was live. I have no idea how much ProductHunt traffic it generated though.
Both posts were well received and got around 150 upvotes and a few comments asking questions about the extension and how it worked.
IndieHackers
The post briefly described the origin of the extension and what it was supposed to do, it got around 100 views.
6 months after launch
I will focus on the Chrome statistics as the Firefox user base represents approximately ~2% of the total users.
Even though I published the extension in 2020, I had listed the extension on the chromestore in 2019 as an unlisted project, to share it with some friends.
This first graph shows the global amount of users, as of today the extension has around 3400+ users.
And here is the distribution of users across countries, during the first week the extension was mostly used in the USA, probably because the majority of Reddit & ProductHunt readers are from there.
But a strange thing happened, after a few weeks the extension started to receive a lot of users from China, and after a few month it also picked up in Russia & Ukraine whereas France & USA stayed the same or fell.
Future plans
Again after Hacktoberfest 2020 I paused the project again, a few people suggested that the extension would be great for avoiding phishing links, a feature which could be done with a few updates.
Another approach would be to include in-preview-window actions like liking a tweet, or adding a youtube video to the watch later playlist, all of this without having to open the page.
I have not yet decided of where I want to take this project next however there is one thing I'm sure of, it is that I would really like to improve it during the next Hacktoberfest (2021).