🔦 4 Examples of Side Project Led Growth

Side Project Led growth is a developer’s way of doing marketing!

Jokes aside, side projects are a solid growth strategies deployed by small indie hackers to large companies.

The idea is to build small, free and useful products that solve a specific problem in your user’s journey.

There are 3 main benefits of such side projects -

Free products get a lot of love, support and back links!
They give you a great opportunity to spread word about your main product and build a solid brand.
They are a good “lead magnet” to attract potential customers into your funnel.

In many cases, giving away free side projects can be better than having a free plan.

Let’s look at 4 companies that have used this strategy well with examples of their side projects -

1. Tweet Hunter

The Tweet Hunter team is a master at launching side projects.

Their main product is a Tweet scheduling software which charge a premium for. But to promote it they launch small free products almost every month.

They build and launch side projects on Product Hunt and Twitter and get plenty of love and support from their audience.

Some of their most successful side projects include:

Read the full Tweet Hunter story -

🏹 How Tweet Hunter Became a Million Dollar Juggernaut

“The Future belongs to Creators” That’s the quote on Tibo’s Twitter banner. Tibo and his friend Tom are founders of TweetHunter - A Twitter audience growth tool. Back in May 2021, they were just getting started, looking for their first users. They were analyzing and indexing viral tweets

Listen Up IH· Ayush Chaturvedi

2. Veed

Veed is a web based video editing platform. Their ideal customers are YouTubers and content creators who want to create, edit and publish high quality videos fas

There 40+ free tools listed on Veed’s website.

All of them boosting their SEO and bringing new users into their funnel every day.

Some of their most successful side projects include:

Read their full story -

Rock Bottom To Rocket Ship🚀 | How Veed Grew To $5M+ ARR

Listen Up! IH – Episode 24 “Keep pushing, and make something people search for”That’s Sabba Keynejad’s message to Indie Hackers. Sabba [https://twitter.com/sab8a] is the Co-founder of Veed.io [http://veed.io/] – a browser-based video editing tool. Sabba and his co-founder Tim grew the company f…

Listen Up IH· Ayush Chaturvedi

3. Bannerbear

Bannerbear is a an automatic image generation API and NoCode tool.

Marketing teams use it to generate social media images for their ads, e-commerce stores and social media posts.

They don’t have a free plan, but recently started building side projects for SEO growth.

Automated image generation tools -

Recent tweet from Bannerbear founder Jon Yongfook shows some great SEO benefits of these tools -

Jon Yongfook
@yongfook
90 day traffic growth for Bannerbear’s “free X generator” pages (eg certificates). Free tools is definitely working well for us as a traffic driver. (Don’t ask me conversion rate, I don’t track) pic.twitter.com/uX5ZJCGcIj
View on X →

Read the full Bannerbear story -

Living The Indie Hacker Dream | Jon Yongfook

Listen Up! IH – Episode 19 “If you want to go from 0 to $10K MRR you should divide your time 50:50 betweencoding and marketing”That’s Jon Yongfook’s advice for Indie Hackers. Jon [https://twitter.com/yongfook] is the founder of Bannerbear[https://www.bannerbear.com/]. Bannerbear

Listen Up IH· Ayush Chaturvedi

4. Founder’s Book

Founder’s Book is a platform of tools and resources for first-time founders and early stage startups.

It’s mainly a content business and they have found great traction via newsletter partnerships and also worked with accelerators and incubators.

But their side projects have brought in plenty of high domain authority backlinks to their main site.

2 side projects that got great success on Product Hunt -

Read their full story -

📈 How Founder’s Book reached $34000 revenue in 7 months

“Go from Idea to MVP, and beyond. Now!” That’s the tagline of Founder’s Book - A platform of tools and resources for first-time founders and early stage startups. Goutham is the founder of Founder’s Book and is a first time founder himself. He recently crossed $34000 in

Listen Up IH· Ayush Chaturvedi

More Examples

This is such an effective strategy among indie hackers as well as large companies.

Some more examples in brief -

Llama Life

Main Product - Llama Life

Side Projects -

Transistor FM

Main Product - Transistor

Side Project -

Free Podcast Websites

SaaS Blocks

Main Product - SaaS Blocks

Side Project -

Mesh Gradient Collection

Calm

Main Product - Calm

Side Project -

Do Nothing for 2 Minutes

Thank you for reading 🙏

Hope this gives you some ideas for your own side projects.

If you know of more such examples, please share in the comments below.

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Cheers,

Ayush