My new favorite way to dodge marketing

Hello 👋🏼

I'm testing a growth approach I've heard about for years but never actually tried. No results yet, so treat this as a field note, not advice.

The idea is simple: you build a free tool related to your category that works as a lead generator for your main product.

Shopify does it with their free Business Name Generator. For Wallble, my first idea was a "What to gift?" quiz. Then I went simpler and built a "Free Event QR Code Generator" and I shipped it. Funny thing: earlier, I used to assume QR codes were proprietary software you had to pay companies for. Turns out anyone can generate one in the browser in minutes.

I knew search discovery would take months, but what caught me off guard was realizing the tool itself needs marketing too. QR generators are a crowded market, so I'm basically back to point zero: now I have to market the thing I built to market my product.

So why bother? Because it opens a whole new set of keywords I can be found for. The catch is relevance. The tool has to be genuinely adjacent to your main offering, or you pull in people who will never want what you actually sell.

Why a small builder can beat the big players here

The dominant tools in an adjacent market get bloated. With QR generators you'll often get routed through their own ad-filled page before you reach your link. They need that, because the tool is their business. For me it's a side door, so I can keep it clean and simple.

The pitfalls (the honest list)

• The relevance trap above: wrong tool, wrong-fit users.
• It eats your time and focus and pulls you off your main product.
• AI eats some of these tools, especially the ones whose whole value is an answer. People now ask a chatbot "what should I gift" instead of hunting for a quiz. A functional tool like a QR generator likely holds up better, though I won't pretend AI can't make one too. The real edge is being the simplest, most obvious option at the moment someone needs it, before they even think to ask an AI. (I still plan to build the gift quiz too, because I love the idea.)

How I'm marketing it

Pinterest is where my audience hangs out, so I made a pin targeting topics like wedding invites and QR codes. A QR code is an easier first step for someone than building a whole memory wall.

So after all, I didn't really avoid marketing... But the shiny new tool may have given me a push to continue the marketing grind.

In case you want to have a look, here is the event QR tool. Stay tuned for when I have results.