
Sideproject Marketing - pixelfeeder
https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6ztybx/how_i_attract_high_paying_clients_to_my_design/
======
0xfaded
I recently put a readme, not even the code, up for a github project. I just
never got around to tidying up the code.

It's an extremely niche, very fast ARM SIMD implementation of a particular
feature descriptor (ORB).

Anyway, someone, somehow, found this otherwise unpublicised github repo. Fast
forward, they were willing to license the code, so I figured the easiest way
to let them evaluate it was to release under GPL.

This lead to a few more people reaching out, and now I'm about to quit my job.
All this happened in a week.

Shameless plug
[https://github.com/0xfaded/pislam](https://github.com/0xfaded/pislam)

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gnicholas
I did this earlier this year and it went surprisingly well. About 20 percent
of the traffic into my side project site clicks through to my startup's site —
even though there's just one linked button. I was expecting low single digits.

Because the side project tapped into current events (filter bubbles and social
media), it got great press coverage, including a mention in a front-page
Sunday NYT story, and in top newspapers in France, Germany, and England. I've
even been invited to speak at two conferences based on my side project
(including international travel accommodations).

After an interview with a leading journalism foundation, I was approached by
the WSJ to do a partnership, and my side project's app now includes free
access to the WSJ (and is, to my knowledge, the only app that has this).

Best of all, I launched the side project on Kickstarter, and it was fully-
funded there. This is typically really hard to do with software (esp free
software), but I was able to tap into my startup's user base to get the ball
rolling.

Seeing how successful the side project was, I paid cash to get a Chrome
extension built (to complement the iOS app). We've got almost 1k users, with
over 10k app downloads. And we're the #1 search result for "read WSJ free" :)

My side project is here:
[http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com](http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com), and my
main startup is: [http://www.beelinereader.com](http://www.beelinereader.com).

edit: why the downvotes? This is a thread about marketing with side projects
and the potential benefits. I shared new information about things that might
come your way if you do what the author suggests. Did I also give links? Yes
because without them there's no way to know if this is true or made up. Is
there a better way to do this? Or did you go through and downvote all of the
comments that talked about experiences with side project marketing?

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DisruptiveDave
Ton of examples of this stuff from the last 6 or 7 years, some onsite and some
standalone, including:

\- Hubspot's website grader:
[https://website.grader.com/](https://website.grader.com/)

\- Leadpages' landing page grader: [https://www.leadpages.net/landing-page-
grader](https://www.leadpages.net/landing-page-grader)

\- Grammarly's plagiarism checker: [https://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism-
checker](https://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism-checker)

\- Coschedule's headline analyzer: [https://coschedule.com/headline-
analyzer](https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer)

\- UserTesting's "Peek":
[https://peek.usertesting.com/](https://peek.usertesting.com/)

\- Berklee's online guitar tuner: [https://online.berklee.edu/guitar-
tuner](https://online.berklee.edu/guitar-tuner)

~~~
hashmal
Oh boy, the shit marketers do to get our emails…

~~~
DisruptiveDave
"Oh boy, the shit consumers click on...."

At one of my old jobs we had this annoying offer that appeared all over the
site; it was confusing, convoluted, and presented in obnoxious ways. We all
(marketing folks) hated it. Every damn time we experimented with turning it
off, revenue went down.

"If only users would stop clicking the damn thing and stop handing money over
to us because of that click, we could finally turn it off!!"

(A bit of an oversimplification, as I know it did some damage to the brand.
But the point still stands: Most marketers today live and die by testing ->
measuring -> dumping money/effort into anything that catches fire. We're not
going to continue using tactics that don't produce, which means that in many
cases user behavior drives our decision making.)

~~~
hashmal
Testing and measuring are no surrogate for integrity.

~~~
DisruptiveDave
There live a whole lotta tactics and activities between "ah, we don't like
this promotion" and "this is not ethical."

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rayalez
Recently I've read about a similar tactic - a guy wrote an ebook, and just
shared it on forums and torrents. Because it was niche, valuable, and free, it
"went viral", people kept sharing it with each other and downloading it. The
book was(non-obnoxiously) sending people to his site, and he had a lot of
success with it.

It all comes down to the same fundamental principle - exchanging something of
value for attention. Most of the people do it with content marketing(articles
and videos), but there's an unlimited number of applications. As long as
there's something of value you can provide at a relatively low effort - you
can use it as a marketing channel.

If you are in a technical niche, open source projects do extremely well. It
doesn't even have to be a polished startup-like SaaS, it can just be a useful
python script, or a boilerplate project for some tech stack, or a guide on how
to install or deploy something.

Authors give away their books to bloggers before publishing, or share them
with influential people in the industry - same idea.

------
cronjobma
Loos like [http://logodust.com](http://logodust.com) is one of their side
projects that sends traffic to their core
[http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro) unlimited UI design service.
Love the strategy

------
wheresvic1
It seems a bit like a chicken and egg problem to me. How do you market the
side project?!

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mitchellshow
We often refer to this practice as engineering-as-marketing.

It works, for all sorts of obvious reasons.

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zschuessler
This post feels like a draft for what could be a killer article. I don't mean
this as disrespect, just that I'd be interested in reading a detailed post,
OP. Something beyond just introducing a concept.

Perhaps along the lines of what IndieHackers.com/businesses would publish.
They ask (and get answered) questions startups typically won't answer, post a
plethora of stats, and go into detail on both what did and didn't work. (Heck,
maybe even apply to get interviewed by them)

I think your business (and side business mentioned in the post) in particular
would be interesting to read in a detailed format.

Cheers!

~~~
tosser350
It's just a ripoff of this basically

[https://medium.com/swlh/side-product-marketing-is-the-new-
ki...](https://medium.com/swlh/side-product-marketing-is-the-new-
king-a75c4ed0c0c5)

------
vitomd
I was not aware of that tactic but I had some success with open source
projects. For instance I created a Javascript wrapper library for Google Drive
API v3
[https://github.com/vitogit/gDriveSync.js](https://github.com/vitogit/gDriveSync.js)
so the publico are developers that read the code, like the library and then
reach me to help them with some javascript project. I don´t create open source
project for marketing purposes but I think is a good side effect.

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gk1
Also known as "freemium." Give something away for free (even at a loss), and
convert some percentage into paying customers.

Only works if all of the below are true:

1\. You contain the costs (time + money) of the free product.

2\. Conversion (to paying customer) value or rate is high.

3\. The free product gets a large volume of users/visitors. The OP got a nice
boost from HN, which certainly helped. Not all projects will get as lucky.

~~~
brightball
Yea, the costs there seem to be contained because the entire "side project"
was basically giving away the discarded concepts.

The work had already been done, the primary result sold and this project was
basically just a way of recycling instead of trashing.

Good concept though.

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woogiewonka
Thanks for making jobs like mine even more relevant. When design turns into
commodity that's based on zero data, user feedback or user analysis - my job
just gets easier and easier.

