How did I cut my uninstall rate in half? 🚨⚡️

A bit of context: two months ago, I launched Focus Mode, a Chrome extension that turns Chrome into a workspace to help you focus.

With a single keyboard shortcut, the extension hides your tabs, the address bar, and your bookmarks, leaving only your current page. Nothing to distract you. It’s a problem I personally had, because I have this annoying habit of opening more than 25 tabs and never closing them, haha.

After posting a lot on Reddit and spending a bit of money on ads, I managed to get over 600 users.

But while doing all that, I forgot one thing. Because if people can install your extension, they can also uninstall it.

And I hadn’t really thought about that.

I was thinking acquisition, not retention. 📊

So, as you can probably imagine, my 600 users turned into 200 users in less than a week.

Let’s just say that after all the effort I had put in to get them, I was completely drained. Lying on my cold tile floor, staring at the ceiling for an hour.

Then I got some negative reviews. 3 to be exact.

And that made it even worse.

At that point, all I wanted to do was throw my laptop out the window and move to the mountains to raise goats. 🐐 🤣

So I took a day to think. 🏞️

I wanted to understand why users were leaving, so I asked people here and some relatives to try the extension.

And that’s when I understood. 😶

The problem wasn’t how the extension worked. The extension itself worked very well, I was sure of that.

Everything was smooth, optimized, calculated. No bugs.

But when I watched my 57-year-old mom try it, I understood.

I understood that she didn’t understand anything. And it wasn’t her fault at all.

That was exactly the problem.

I had my own vision and logic in mind. 🧠

I was the one who had built the extension step by step, so of course everything felt logical and instinctive to me.

But in reality, it wasn’t.

The solution I found was to add explanations and tutorials.

At the onboarding stage, and when users activate features.

The result?

I cut Focus Mode’s uninstall rate in half. 🤩

Today, I’m still developing the extension, still talking about it, and still adding new features.

I recently added 40 languages.

But now, I do everything with one thing in mind:

I look at the uninstall curve more than the install curve.

I hope my experience helps you develop your own projects.

Have an excellent day, guys! ☀️

Alex