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Attract possible customers with side-projects

Hey, have you ever used the power of side-projects to attract possible customers?

@harrydry once posted about it

@patwalls

Once created a collection of email templates to help you “say no”

• 35k visits in 24 hours
• 200 Pigeon signups

patwalls

HubSpot

In 2007, Dharmesh, Hubspot’s co-founder, was looking for new ways to increase sales.

He then decided (not as simple as it sounds) to launch a Website Grader alongside his co-founder.

Results?

• Millions of potential new Hubspot's customers since then
• 73k+/monthly potential customers to Hubspot

hubspot

Unsplash

Mikael Cho once had some unused photos from his other company (Crew) and decided to make use of it.

He then quickly set up a Tumblr template. 10 photos added to Dropbox. Links to those photos on the template.

The results?

• #1 referral to Crew
• 5M+ potential new Crew customers

unsplash

Have you ever made use of side marketing to attract more customers?


I extracted this post from my Twitter thread

  1. 1

    I think @brettwill1025 did it with DesignJoy and scribbbles.design

    He had a post on IH saying that it was one of the ways people were finding our about design joy.

  2. 1

    This is the form of marketing I'm most excited about, although I haven't been successful with any form of marketing :-P

    The unsplash story stood out to me the first time I read about it. I might've first read about it in Traction:
    https://startuprunner.com/2015/06/12/engineering-marketing-traction-channel-10/

    My focus lately has been on backend-less apps. The browser has a full operating environment - you can store user data in localStorage, or indexedDB if you need more structure. This means, as long as sharing isn't a part of the app, you can build something that only requires bandwidth to serve static files :)

    PWAs are also interesting. Users can "install" your app, which makes it readily available on their phone or desktop to keep the tools you build top-of-mind.

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