Easy Folders

01The Full Story: From Scratching His Own Itch to a Five-Figure Sale

Easy Folders started from an engineer's utterly ordinary annoyance. Edmund Yong was himself a heavy ChatGPT user, and that long left-hand column of chat history — piling up messier and messier, with old conversations impossible to find — tormented him daily. In the coding world, folders are the self-evident way to organize things, so a thought naturally surfaced: why can't ChatGPT put conversations into folders like a file system? He didn't launch a project or do research — he just used his spare time (still employed at the time) to build a browser extension that jammed a folder/subfolder structure into the ChatGPT interface. Notably, he started with zero extension experience, looking things up as he went; AI coding tools back then were nowhere near as strong as today's, so it was basically self-taught brute force. Someone paid on day one — the single most important frame of the whole story, because it meant the itch wasn't his alone. From there he kept rolling with "ship fast + talk to users directly + iterate fast." Cumulative revenue passed $100K, and he eventually sold the entire product to a buyer for a five-figure sum. A note on evidence level: both the $100K+ revenue and the five-figure sale are Edmund's own account with no receipts shown, so this is founder-reported. What's genuinely learnable is the shortest path from itch to payment.