10 Brilliant Examples of Side-Project Marketing
By: Jules Maregiano
Tags: Growth Hacking, Side Project, Marketing Automation, Saas Marketing, Marketing Strategies

Marketing has tens of subcategories. But one that really resonates with us at Phantombuster is side-project marketing. Why? ’Cause we love building stuff.

What‘s side-project marketing

Side-project marketing consists in building a totally stand-alone product or service that will fully solve a “gate-need” to potential customers have.

Free for the user

Your side-project has to be free. Otherwise it’s just another product in the catalogue. We could even argue that the right way to do side-project marketing is to not even ask for an email address. Have you ever been tricked into giving away your email address for some white book that you didn’t even read? Did it feel good? Likely not.

Targets would-be users

The ultimate purpose of a side-project is to bring people to your initial business. For that reason it must target potential users of your product. Find a “gateway pain” to your product and solve it.

Delivers real value

Side-project marketing is here to solve a need. It doesn’t have to be a huge one but it has to solve it fully.

Minor mention of the mother brand

The side-project should almost have its own branding. It can share common traits with the main brand for practical reasons (faster release) but it can’t be just a landing page on your website. For SaaS companies, a side-project will ideally have its own domain. Often it’ll just have its own sub-domain for ease of hosting purposes.

Easily build, easily marketed.

The success of a side-project marketing product is by no mean guaranteed. Like any marketing campaign, this one has to be budgeted in time and $$. It must also have some kind of KPI to track success.

You can read here how we built and failed our 1st side-project 😅

10 Examples of Great Side-Project Marketing

Pablo is great at creating inspiring quotes for social medias

Pablo is a great example of side-project marketing by Buffer. Buffer is targeting regular users of social medias and Pablo make it easier for people sharing on social media to create “inspirational quotes”-type content.

Game. Set and Match.

Hacker News is Y Combinator’s “news” section. Y Combinator is an incubator known for launching AirBnb, Stripe among others. How practical to be the news outlet when you intend to make the news yourself!

In a nutshell, Crew was a marketplace where designers could meet demand for pics. The business was not really getting traction and the team found itself with lots of pictures piling up on their servers. They decided to make a basic website with one simple promise: “10 free photos every 10 days”.

After putting a link on Hacker News, they got mad traffic and the side-project surpassed the main product! Today Crew got acquired by Dribbble but Unsplash is still a reference for free images.

Unsplash is another great example of side-project marketing: Free. Real Value. Targeting potential customers. Low investment. Easily-built, Easily-marketed.

Tons of board game aficionados dream of building their own. Cartamundi -a board game manufacturer- noticed that many people where asking Google “how much to make a board game” and bought that domain.

The website gives value to visitors by giving a clear answer to their question. It’s definitely helping potential customers. The investment is minimal and the marketing is embedded in the product (through the domain name).

This one is a bit sneaky though because it treats the question by an answer that’s obviously biased: Cartamundi would obviously not have made a product that advantages potentially cheaper competitors.

Full disclosure: Product War’s our first attempt at Side-project marketing.

Product Wars gives to team launching on Product Hunt a live graph of their position. Developed as an internal tool we released it for free. It’s fun on launch day and useful to Makers, people that are building and launching products and who could really have a strong interest in using Phantombuster’s tools.

Mailjet’s one of the leading email sending service and puts an emphasis on team collaboration. They took the concept of side-project marketing a step further by building a stand-alone app with its own login and account. Its purpose was to allow teams to easily plan and execute an email marketing campaign. The project was (too) ambitious and a great example of why you should make something easy to build.

Mailjet again. They’re one of our influences in starting side-project and kuddos to Nicolas Moinard for all his experimentation with it!

You win some, you lose some. In the case of Ultimate GDPR Quiz, it was a big win. When GDPR regulation came out, everyone had questions about it. Mailjet proud of being the first GDPR compliant email service answered many of those with its Ultimate GDPR Quiz.

They gave value by explaining clearly what was good and what had to be improved. And on a marketing stand-point they were positioning themselves as a figure of authority on that topic. Win-win.

Strategically published and shared on social media, it got used by tens of thousands of people and surely a portion of those signed up to Mailjet afterwards.

Battle of the Brands is Mention’s way of showcasing its brand monitoring technology. Users can have fun by comparing brands on how many times they got mentioned on the web in the last 30 days. Click “Game Rules” and you’ll have an explanation of what’s competitive analysis, why it’s important and how Mention is an expert at it.

Game of Hacks (Checkmarx)

How secure is your website? Game of Hacks is part of a pretty common type of side-project marketing product: It’s a quiz.

Whether you’re a newbie or a confirmed web developer, you’ll probably be wrong at some of these very technical questions. Yes, they use fear… and it works. At the bottom of the page, a link will redirect you to the mother website, Checkmarx, and offer you to try their software security platform.

Have you ever heard of extend holistic web-readiness ? And how about integrating out-of-the-box e-services ? Or exploiting vertical web-readiness ? Probably not. That’s because it’s bullshit.

This fun side-project by Webforge has clear viral potential. And is a great way to introduce people to what Webforge’s selling: Eloquent & strong branding.

Got other examples?

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