I have made 4 extensions in the last 1 year, with over 1000 users.
- 1 over 100,000
- 1 over 10,000
- 1 over 5,000
- 1 over 1000
Only marketing was a single post on Reddit for each.
Getting a featured badge is a must for organic growth on the chrome store. Without it, you're screwed.
I have other extensions hovering around ~100 users that don't grow as they don't have a featured badge.
For your Reddit posts, did you target a subreddit that might have interest in the extension or did you use one meant specifically for extension development/promotion? If the latter, which one?
I used mainly r/webdev showoff saturdays
r/chromeextensions is too small to get any traction, and only has other extension developers