How we built viral side projects as marketing stunts

Hi indies!

Our team at Banana has been experimenting with this concept of building side projects for virality to gain marketing exposure.

The premise is to build projects that drive attention within your customer niche mostly to entertain them with something cool. Then somewhere on the landing page of said project you put a "made by Banana" banner or "how it's made" section that links back to your core business. This subtle link can drive substantial traffic and lead generation in some cases.

Here is how its been going so far.

Today we launched on Product Hunt our newest side project. The basic pitch for it is:

Shoot Your Shot - AI Edition
Get your Twitter roasted by an AI

Inspired by the “NYU Girls Roast Tech Guys” Clubhouse room that went viral, we built our own AI-powered version. Connect your Twitter bio and our AI will generate a personalized roast for you.

So far, virality hasn't happened with this project. We soft launched it on Twitter earlier this week and the folks who have tried it found it to be funny and surprisingly good at comedic roasts. Some people are sharing screenshots of the roasts on Twitter too which is a good sign.

It feels like we're close to having this one pop off but it might require a tweak or two within the product experience to lean into virality. For example, having to connect your Twitter account so the AI can read your bio to roast you might be a step that slows down potential for virality. But we felt it was important to prevent bullying with this project where anybody could put a Twitter account in and get them roasted without consent. Clearly some trade offs here!

Launching Payless to AWS
Another side project we launched a couple months ago was Paylesstoaws.com. It was an obvious dig at Amazon's AWS and how expensive cloud compute can be for startups and teams building on it. Every founder I know has a story with AWS or GCP where they woke up to find a cloud bill in the thousands of dollars that they didn't see coming and had to eat the cost.

We made a cost calculator with some funny branding to show how much cheaper it is to use cloud GPU compute on Banana than on AWS. This is possible because we offer serverless GPU hosting, which has been a game changer on cost savings for our customers.

This project surprisingly did quite well for virality. It was specific to the AI + machine learning niche, because GPU compute being super expensive is a problem that AI companies experience the more than other niches. But it crushed it on Twitter, and drove measurable brand awareness and leads from this launch.

Launching Paint WTF
We launched this project over 1 year ago and this was the spark that gave us inspiration to do more side projects as marketing. Paint.wtf was a game where you had to convince an AI that you are a good artist. You would be given a prompt to draw, you then draw it and the AI judges your work.

This was our most viral project so far. Over 1 year later we still get referral traffic and leads to Banana from this. Meaning people still use paint.wtf over a year removed from the launch. I think this goes to show that some of these side projects can sustain for many months after launching. It's not just a quick launch, get traffic, and forget about the project. In some instances like paint.wtf you can keep it running and driving referral traffic long after the initial launch.

Question: Have you tried this approach of side projects as marketing? How did it go? What helped you get virality/traction on these projects?

Thanks!

P.S. - I'll pull some actual metrics + numbers for each of these launches and update the post with them.