If you told me in 2020 I would have been interviewed by a French blogger and made $36,306.38 dollars in one month (or, over 80k on a Chrome Extension) during a global pandemic, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d say you’re bonkers. If you told me that now, I’d probably still call you bonkers and ask how you got in my apartment.
The beginning
At the tender age of 18 during the winter break of my second semester at university, I was sitting on my bed, itching to program something; I was in Computer Science, after all. “What should I make?” I asked my friend. “You should make Disney Plus Party,” they suggested. It was January 2020, Disney’s streaming platform released just three months ago, and Netflix Party had over a million users. Great! I was given an idea, the best timing possible, and I was about to make a lot of money because of it.
I immediately started writing my second ever Chrome extension: Disney Plus Party. A brilliantly inspired name, I know. The first version was written in less than a week, then published to the Chrome Web Store for a hefty install sum of $2.99 (Back when the Web Store had paid extensions). “I can’t wait to make $10 a month,” I thought as I pressed the publish button to let the world enjoy my shiny new extension. Meanwhile, there was a global pandemic around the corner.
(For the curious, my first extension is called Kijiji Reposter and it’s still active today!)
One of the first promotional images for Disney Plus Party. No need to complement my beautiful design skills.
The pandemic
There were daily emails about Covid-19 in April of 2020. Universities all over the country were closing their campuses and we were just waiting for our turn, making bets how soon it would be. On My 16th, 4:53 PM, it happened:
April 16, 2020 - At least they gave us a refund, huh?
Yes! No exams! I thought as I prepared to unknowingly live the next year of my life trapped in a room, working my first internship, and typing on my computer all day, all while begging to go back to university.
August 2019 - My freshly moved in dorm, my roommate, and some water spills
But at that point, I was just happy to go home. I was burnt out and ready to recover (Of course, it ended up being a much longer rest than anyone intended, but still). Meanwhile, I was passively racking up money from my two extensions and earned a grand total of $170.82 in January and a whopping $204.60 in February. It’s not much, but it was far beyond my expectations, and pretty great for an 18-year-old.
Professors were scrambling to keep their courses going. Some cancelled the rest of the semester, including the exam (Thanks Huajie), and others made a dash for sub-par online delivery. As for myself, I was too busy gawking at my dashboard while Disney Plus Party installs skyrocketed, and – in turn – my bank account. “Look at this,” I said as I showed my parents the deposit of seventeen-thousand-eighty-eight dollars and thirty-three cents.
I wish I still had access to the graphs from the Web Store to show you
My bank account skyrocketed from a measly 1k, which I clung to desperately, to a staggering 17k. Holy guacamole I (definitely) thought. I was in awe. Shocked. Amazed that my little extension was making an insane amount of money. I finished my classes late April, but I didn’t even care. I was too busy watching the graph perform exponential somersaults as tens of thousands of dollars were being shoved in my pocket. “Wa’s it ah now?” my parents asked daily in their Yorkshire vernacular. You can see the numbers yourself.
Frantically Remaking Disney Plus Party
For whatever reason, I thought the extension wasn’t good enough. Nevermind the bugs and my woefully unprepared servers (Well, server. This was well before I knew anything about load balancing or auto scaling). I thought my users needed something… more. So, I spent a week or two non-stop rewriting the extension.
I added features nobody asked for: a friends list, a chat both in-app and in the video player, publicly hosted rooms, and, probably the only feature people enjoyed, fun little exploding emojis over your screen for your friends to spam. I got some complaints, of course; “Account creation is annoying,” “The app is too confusing,” “It’s not working.” Silly stuff, yaknow?
I learned a valuable lesson: Don’t implement features your users don’t want. I think I would have had the same number of users if I never added all those fanciful features. Regardless, I was still proud I was able to do it, and I learned a lot about architecture while developing Disney Plus Party 2.0.
The snazzy new version of Disney Plus Party
How did it happen?
Now, you might be thinking “Sam, how was this possible?” “What color’s your Bugatti?” “What did you do with the money?” “Can I have your bank account login?” The answer to the last question is sure, but I don’t think you’ll find what you’re looking for. Some keen eyes probably noticed 50k disappeared from my account between May and June. Explaining where that went will answer your great questions.
On May 7th, I spoke with a financial advisor by the name of Kelly Nichols. He explained some boring investment jargon, how he makes money, and, more importantly, how I’ll have a million bucks by the time I’m 40. Was he about to take all my money and run with it? Maybe. I knew little about investing, but it sounded good enough to me. So, a few minutes later, 50k was out of my account and put in a high-risk mutual fund. It was actually a great decision, especially at that specific time. I watched my Fidelity account climb up to 80k in a few months. Just look at the chart!
I put it in at the near bottom!
While I was talking to Kelly, I of course explained how I got the money. It wasn’t anything cool like robbing a bank; I told him the same story you just read. I mentioned it was nothing but luck. Kelly laughed and confidently rebutted, “There’s no such thing as luck.” I tried to argue at first, but he insisted. By the the end, I still didn’t really believe him. I mean, I didn’t think I was anyone particularly talented, and I didn’t make some incredible new technological advancement. It was just a dumb little extension I thought.
I’ve thought a lot about what Kelly said to me that day and it’s helped shape how I think. I still don’t fully agree with him, but I understand what he was saying. Let me elaborate on Kelly’s wisdom: There’s no such thing as luck without hard work. I was programming for three years before I made any money, and five years before I made an abundance of money. Yes, I got lucky, there’s no doubt; it was the right product, the first on the market, and it was ridiculously perfect timing. But, I still put a lot of hard work into it. No, not into the extension that took me a week to make, but the years of practice that allowed me to make the extension in a week. It was an accumulation of countless keyboard strokes, lines of code, and practice. So again, there’s no luck without work. Do I deserve the money? Probably not. There’s a lot of people that put far more work into their craft for far less reward; that’s where the luck comes in. I also provided some value to tens of thousands of people, which is always going to make you money.
I still made money from Disney Plus Party for a while. By the end of 2020, I took around 26k out of the mutual fund to pay taxes. I’ve kept my base 30k invested and since then it’s nearly tripled. I’m very grateful and appreciative of what such a small extension has given me.
Selling the extension
You read that right! I sold the extension. The money didn’t flow forever. Quite the opposite, actually. The stream of income quickly evaporated as free extensions came and Disney released an official watch party feature. A few months later, a company approached me asking if I’d sell the extension (presumably because of its user count). I had a meeting with their CEO, and after some negotiation we settled on $5.5k. After nearly 100,000 users, this was a final hoorah for my dear baby.
I learned a lot with Disney Plus Party. It was a great experience, and I’m so thankful for it. I got lots of emails thanking me for the extension and I loved that I was able to connect people with their loved ones.
Oh, and the thing about the French blogger is true. It was very random, but very cool. You can read it at La Revue des Médias