It has been just over a month or since TabMate, the browser-based research agent went live. I did what the rulebook says - work on SEO, submit to search directories, publish in forums where the target users live etc. Even went out of the rulebook to reach out to early supporters for free use in exchange for feedback and reviews.

The website traffic is okay - over 1k visitors in a month BUT - the main metrics - installs, active users, time spent on site, CTAs clicked, bounce rate - are sad. I spent a couple of weeks analyzing what is going wrong. And it should have been obvious from the start (though, I chose to build around it).

The Issues

  1. Privacy - For a browser extension, privacy is a big factor. TabMate has access to the current page, needs PII to support accounts and saves chats to maintain sessions. This means potentially sensitive data can be passed on to our servers and users are skeptical of sending data to unknown 3rd parties, no matter how good the privacy policy is.
  2. David vs Goliath - Big players already exist - Claude for Chrome, and with Gemini being integrated into Chrome, TabMate ends up competing with them. No way can this fight be won.
  3. Death by generalization - TabMate can serve many workflows, this advantage of it makes it very less sellable - people have other tools to do them.

After a discussion with Rupam and, careful consideration, decided to keep TabMate activities on a pause. Let it exist as is for now but no need to do further development or SEO or marketing work on it. Let Dib return from his exams, then we can see.

Meanwhile, before we start hardening work on TenWrite, I’ll be working on a skill to reduce token usage and extend coding sessions. Yeah, it’ll be opensource. Let’s see how it goes.