The storyHow they got there
Ronan Quirke launched Easy Folders in 2023 with a simple observation: ChatGPT power-users had hundreds of conversations with no way to organize them. Every knowledge worker using AI daily was living with the same clutter. The solution — folders, search, a prompt manager — was obvious in retrospect, but nobody had shipped it cleanly.
The first ten customers came from releasing the Chrome extension free and then upselling a paid tier once users were hooked. The first hundred came from optimizing the Chrome Web Store listing for "ChatGPT folders" — a keyword with essentially zero competition at launch.
At maturity, the channel mix: Chrome Web Store organic search (~50%), Twitter/X build-in-public MRR posts (~25%), Reddit communities r/ChatGPT and r/OpenAI (~15%), and word-of-mouth from heavy users (~10%). Paid ads were unnecessary. Extension store SEO and Twitter narrative were doubled down on.
Unit economics: CAC around $5–15 (mostly organic), ARPU around $5–10/month, LTV around $60–150, and free-to-paid conversion around 2–4%. The extension is sticky because users open ChatGPT daily — the daily active use habit creates natural retention. Chrome Web Store SEO is a massively underrated acquisition channel: it's app store discoverability but for the web, with almost no competition for most queries.
Channel MixWhere the growth actually came from
Most case studies hand-wave channels. Here's the rough allocation — not in dollars spent, but in users acquired — across the routes that actually mattered.