Grow a side-project to boost your main product... Thoughts on this?
Has anyone ever done any (real) side-product marketing?
In the sense of creating a brand new (related) product/project and releasing it with branding attached to it in efforts to build up your main product?
Examples can be seen as:
HackerNews for Ycombinator
Pablo for Buffer
Moz Google chrome extension for Moz
These simple, free, and useful side projects actually generate a huge number of customers for the main product.
So I'm giving it a go...
My main project is spread which is a (semi-auto) content repurposing tool for marketers and makers. Spread enables you to turn youtube videos into podcasts, podcasts into blogs, and blogs into twitter threads.
To boost up the number of users once we fully relaunch, I am creating a content marketing stack, named - TheContentShack.
I'll be posting it on Product Hunt and on here so watch out for it.
Two things:
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Please link me to anything that is worthy of being in a content marketing stack.
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Please give me advice on side-product marketing.
Thank you for reading... :)
It's a good idea and I'm planning on creating a free tool to compliment my paid product, hoping it will bring relevant leads
Here's an example of someone that did the same by creating the "100+ No-Code Resources ": https://www.softr.io/blog/producthunt-launch
I've seen plenty of good examples in various IndieHackers interviews while doing my research for https://zerotousers.com. For example, (Kapwig's interview) :
To get links: We built irrelevant cool stuff: Even though they had nothing to do with meme > making, we built a couple of things that were newsworthy enough to get some initial links from bloggers or media sites. When fires threatened Eric's parents' home in Santa Rosa, he made an interactive firemap that helped evacuees get information about their property, and the tool got featured in a couple of local news outlets. (my note: nice way to get links from local, make a small tool about the local community)
Also take a look at the interviews from Snappa (they built a free stock photo site), Designhill (they created an interactive guide to famous logos and a bunch of other stuff they describe in the interview). Btw, I think that taking existing static content and using your programming prowess to make it more interactive is a low effort, high effective engineering-as-marketing tactic.
In LabelGrid's interview the founder basically created a "tracker" to track the top music charts. You can imagine this doesn't take much skills, take an API, connect to it, put a pretty interface around it, and boom. Also take a look Daily Coding Problem (where they created a cover letter generator).
Hope this helped :)