Hey, have you ever used the power of side-projects to attract possible customers?
@harrydry once posted about it
Once created a collection of email templates to help you “say no”
• 35k visits in 24 hours
• 200 Pigeon signups
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
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
Have you ever made use of side marketing to attract more customers?
I extracted this post from my Twitter thread
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.
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.