443 acquisitions. 110 installs. 15 days.
I launched Freebird AI on June 13. Two weeks later, I was staring at telemetry that didn't add up, until it did.
The word "acquisition" doesn't mean what you think
On the VS Code Marketplace, an acquisition is a click into your listing. Not an install.
Here's my actual funnel for the first 15 days:
92% of people who viewed the listing clicked in, and 24.8% of those installed.
Both numbers are strong. So why was I concerned?
Because only 481 people ever found the listing in 15 days.
The product wasn't the bottleneck. Discovery was.
The Marketplace doesn't surface new extensions
Here's what my publisher dashboard looked like:
During this same period, Freebird had:
29–45 daily active users
4,000+ commands executed per day
High activation rate and strong retention
The algorithm didn't care. New extensions are effectively invisible until you drive your own traffic. The Marketplace search is dominated by extensions with thousands of installs and years of reviews. If you launch quietly, you stay quiet.
The install vs. .vsix download split reveals a hidden channel
Look closely at the bar chart in the dashboard screenshot. There are two colours:
Purple - Install from VS Code (individual developers)
Blue - Download .vsix (offline installs)
The blue bars are disproportionately tall.
That tells me a different kind of user is finding this extension: enterprise teams, IT-managed machines, internal tooling pipelines, corporate firewalled environments. They can't install extensions directly from the Marketplace, so they download the .vsix and deploy it manually.
This is a distribution channel almost nobody talks about when building dev tools. And it's a signal worth watching: a high .vsix download rate means you have enterprise adoption you're not actively courting.
What the funnel tells you to fix
Strong conversion + low page views = a traffic problem, not a product problem.
That's actually good news. It means the listing works. The pitch works. The extension works. The only thing broken is how many people see it.
Here's my next 30 days of distribution work:
Listing optimisation
Better keyword tags for Marketplace search ranking
GIFs showing the core AI workflow
Before/after screenshots
Community distribution
r/vscode, r/programming, r/webdev
Dev.to posts like this one
Show HN
Milestone launches
Product Hunt (timed to a feature drop)
None of this requires changing the product. It requires showing the product to more people.
The real lesson
Most VS Code extensions don't fail because they're bad. They fail because the Marketplace algorithm doesn't know they exist, and neither does anyone else.
Instrument your funnel. Page views → acquisitions → installs → DAU → command volume. Each ratio tells you exactly which lever to pull next.
If your conversion is strong, you don't need a better product. You need better distribution.
Built this while analysing data for Freebird AI - an AI coding assistant for VS Code with Gemini 2.5 Flash as the default backend, 20 free edits/day, no setup required.
What's your install conversion rate? Drop it in the comments, curious how this compares across extension categories.
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