How this free react tool helped me crack a $3000 deal?

I keep thinking of ways to get more users for my main product. I read that many companies use free tools to attract new users, so I thought I'd give that a try.

The plan was simple - create a free tool using React and JavaScript, languages I already know.

But to be clear, I didn't wanted this free tool to be my acquisition channel. Instead, I saw it as a supplementary tool that could show the value of my product without users having to commit.

Creating a dedicated acquisition tool would require extra marketing efforts, which I didn't have time for. I wanted to keep things easy and quickly validate my idea. If the free tool worked well, I could then consider creating a separate acquisition tool.

So in 2 days, I tried and got this playground ready. Appinbox Playground

It was easier because my main product was behind this playground, so I didn't need to reinvent the wheel of creating all backend integrations. My product is behind this, it's just a new and clear face.

I would recommend you all to try it out.

I launched this on 30th Jan. Went to GSC, and got this indexed manually. In around 7 days, it got indexed. Cool, now was the part to test it out outside.

I tried some distribution channels for my case, Medium was one of those. So if you get yourself a proper followership on Medium, it would act as a very lovely distribution channel.

I published out some blogs around app inboxes and put my Playground link on there. On GA4, I could see some referral users directly going in to the playground. Which article drove that, I don't know how to check those, though GA4 did show the referrer name, Medium.

A user from Malaysia did sign-up eventually after that. Our product provides a sandbox for 30 days, he tried those. The outbound guy reached out to him, cofounder went on to show demo. Happy to tell all that, that guy converted, would start with us from April. ARR from that would be around 3k.

So should I count this free tool as having generated a $3k starting annual recurring revenue (ARR), or was it me just being present at the right time and place? I'll know eventually as I gather more data over time.