Growing My Main Product with Side Projects
My Growth Secret: Engineering as Marketing
Hi friends, hope you are doing well. This week, I’ve been working the multi-line feature for Typogram. I also have been sharing Typogram’s growth on platforms like IndieHackers. The post on my growth tactic was surprisingly popular, so I also want to share this post with everyone here.
As you know, Typogram is 100% bootstrapped. We are a tiny, two-person team doing everything on our own. Hitting over 1,000 registered users was a significant milestone – I want to share one good growth tactic that works for growing our product.
Engineering as Marketing.
As someone who identifies as an introvert, this was a comfortable way to market my product. We create small side projects in addition to our primary logo design tool. The most successful one is codingfont.com. Because many potential users were web devs and people who spent a lot of time in IDE, we wanted to create a fun little website where they could find their dream coding font.
When we released it, it got on the front page of Hackernews and featured on top blogs like BoingBoing (more details on this launch). We got newsletter sign-ups and sales from this project and continuous referral traffic. An unexpected benefit was also SEO. When coding font got picked up on several prominent sites, its Domain authority/ SEO improved. I utilize this to improve the traffic and SEO of my main project. I’m currently planning a CodingFont 2.0- more on this soon.
However, there are some downsides: this way of marketing costs more time/concentration over a short block of time, and it may be difficult to predict success. There are more cost-effective strategies than this. Creating extra projects costs time( from my experience, it helps a lot if you know no code tools). At least in my experience, several projects have returned success. So, if you are a shy builder like me and need help marketing your product, consider this strategy.
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