Side project as marketing - 1,600 subs

Hey, I just wanted to share this with you guys if anyone finds it useful.

A while back I created a product called SaaS Blocks. It's basically a premium theme for Tailwind CSS. I thought it might be a good idea to launch a side project and use that as a means of attracting visitors to my main product.

At one point, I realized I wanted to add more color and gradients to my product, but could not find any that I truly liked. So I decided to create a handful.

When I made a few gradients, I fell into this sort of addiction of making new gradients and ended up making 100 in total (plus a few, but deleted the crappy ones).

I launched this as MeshGradients.Design on PH and got a pretty good response.

I also listed it in the Figma directory and maybe a few other places.

On this website, I added 3 links to SaaS Blocks, and to date get a decent amount of visitors from this site. Sadly, I did not have tracking implemented on Gumroad side of things for a while so I don't know how many sales it generated. Regardless, I feel that it is good exposure.

The site has collected over 1,600 emails to date. I left the individual gradients free to download and suspect many people get them individually instead of the entire pack. But if you get the entire pack, it asks for an email address and a free, but pay what you want model. So far this product has also generated $150 because some people decide to pay.

Anyway, if you are building something that may benefit from side project marketing or engineering-as-marketing as they call it (I think), it could be worthwhile!

I have a few other project ideas like this in mind. Of course, this is far from an original concept - people like Jim Raptis have been doing this for ages!