Dastyar extension

Dastyar started with a simple observation.
The new tab is the first thing you see when you sit down to work. Every single day. And somehow, almost no one had done anything interesting with it.

Over 500K users later, across mobile and extension, I think we were onto something.

But here's what made it hard: a new tab is almost nothing.

It's a blank page. The challenge wasn't adding things to it. It was figuring out what belongs there, and making it feel inevitable once it arrived.

What started as a new tab with a few features quietly became something bigger.

A platform. Tabs you actually want to open, bookmarks that think like you do, a finance tab that brings your portfolio and market data into the one screen you already have open, a mobile app that carries the whole thing with you.

The blank page. People fill it. That was always the idea.

When AI broke into everything, we didn't want to just add a chatbox and call it a day.

We trained our model on Gemma (one of Google's most efficient models) so we could keep it free for our users.
No paywalls on the thing that should feel most personal.

The result: an assistant that already knows your calendar, your tasks, your bookmarks. You don't brief it. It's already there, good evening and all.

Information overload is a design problem. We treated it like one.

We built a news tab that pulls from trusted sources, summarizes each story, and generates a unique image for it.
No walls of text, No rabbit holes. Just what happened, why it matters, and what it looks like, tailored to what you actually care about.

You can read it. Or hear it. We covered both.

Weather shouldn't be boring, right?

We scrapped the numbers-first approach and replaced it with a single sentence. The kind a friend texts you.

Heavenly warm. Alpine time. It changes with the season, the city, the degree, the conditions outside your window right now.

A small widget. But users felt it more than almost anything else we shipped.

Search was always going to be part of this. The new tab and the search bar have been glued together since browsers were invented.

But we wanted something different. Users could go to Google, DuckDuckGo, or stay in our own SERP! built to cut the steps between a question and an answer.
No ten blue links sending you somewhere else. Just what you were looking for, faster.

It was also a real opportunity for both contextual suggestions and ad placements, without making either feel cheap.

This wasn't all.

Two years in, we shipped Dastyar Plus. We didn't have an enormous feature list behind it. What we had was a clear sense of the value it created, and we made sure users felt that before we asked for anything.

6% conversion. 10K subscribers a month. Not bad for a new tab.

Six months later came the referral program. Lower acquisition costs, a stronger paid community, and users who brought in people they actually wanted to be in the same space as.

Apple introduced the Dynamic Island and we couldn't stop thinking about it.

So we built our own version. a toast-like spot sitting at the top of the page. Quiet when you don't need it. Present when you do.

Countdowns, reminders, upcoming meetings, trial nudges. And on your birthday, it knows. It tells you how many people share it, who else was born today, and lets you pick a gift.

It's a small thing. But small things are what make a product feel alive.

The last big idea we shipped was treating calendar as a platform, not just a feature.

We called them calendarletters — like newsletters, but for events. You could create your own or subscribe to existing ones.

A forex calendar backed by real data. A local events feed. A pizza baking workshop someone in your city is hosting.

The calendar was already there. We just opened it up.