🗞 What's New: Promote your SaaS using AI wrappers

Try side project marketing with a twist!

• Code a small tool that does something useful. Tech influencers love to promote free tools, so lean on collabs to get it out there.
• We do two types of things: What we have to do, and what we want to do. Remove false obligations imposed by confusing the two.
• $1M+ ARR with a lead gen agency. Ryan Doyle wrote a haiku on X to OpenAI's CTO every day for early access to GPT, which kicked things off.

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from the Trendy Software Ideas newsletter

I was analyzing recent founder interviews from the Stories database, and I found an extremely interesting growth tactic.

In this interview, the founders of multiple products shared a unique take on side project marketing.

Side project what?

Side project marketing is a tactic for promoting your product where, instead of writing content, you code a small tool that does something useful. Some examples:

• If you have a project management tool, you could create a free Pomodoro timer to attract productivity-focused users.

• If you have a data analytics SaaS, you could create a free web-based tool to generate charts from CSV files.

• If your company is in the cybersecurity space, you could create an online password strength checker.

You get the idea!

Side project marketing with a twist

The founders that I mentioned above did side project marketing with a twist: They built free tools that were essentially AI wrappers.

Some examples of what they built:

• A value proposition generator: You enter your business and target audience, then get a value proposition in return.

• An idea validator: You enter your business idea and audience, then AI evaluates it and gives you feedback.

• A slogan generator: Enter your business and audience, and get 30 slogans.

These tools received hundreds of upvotes on Product Hunt. They all ended up in the top three Product of the Day.

Many of those tools also ended up getting featured by TikTok and Instagram influencers. Apparently, many influencers love talking about free tools!

There are also lots of AI directories that regularly feature new AI tools. These directories get quite a lot of traffic, too. There's An AI For That gets 4M visitors each month, according to SimilarWeb:

The AI wrappers that we mentioned above got hundreds of thousands of web visitors combined. As a result, many also started to rank on Google.

How to get started

Now that you've realized the power of this tactic, you might be wondering how to get started. Here are some tips:

• Choose a tool that provides a quick win: Generators are great tools for this. With a generator, you ask the user for something short (input), and provide something longer and more comprehensive in return.

• Promote it: Try Product Hunt, AI directories, and reaching out to tech influencers.

• Repeat: The nice thing with AI wrappers is that you can create as many of them as you want.

Finding an AI wrapper idea

Ask yourself: What jobs-to-be-done (JTBDs) are people in this niche looking to accomplish?

Solo founders are looking to create slogans, see if their idea is worth pursing, and create succinct value propositions for their products. All three tools above address those needs.

E-commerce founders might be looking to choose a product with potential, create an effective product description for the products they already promote, etc. Come up with a tool for that!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trendy Software Ideas for more.

from the Trendy Software Ideas newsletter

🤑 Here's how top brands are winning on TikTok.

💪 brand.dev offers logos, colors, address, industry, and more, from any domain via API. #ad

🔎 Reddit launches lead generation ads.

📟 Marketing is going back to the 20th century.

🤩 Buyers are willing to pay more for products that they know you actually enjoyed producing.

😈 The con man who sold the Eiffel Tower...twice.

Check out Trendy Software Ideas to discover more software ideas inspired by recent news.

by Kevin Bronander

We do two types of things: Things we want to do, and things we have to do. The balance between them indicates how we feel our lives are progressing.

Living intentionally is carefully controlling what those things are.

False obligations

The biggest mistake we can make when choosing where to invest our time is mistakenly identifying something as a "have-to-do."

We may think we have to work late, attend a friend's party, or follow a certain diet, but we should only label these as have-to-do's if they allow us to do more of the things we want to do.

We have to work because we need money to do the things we want to do. We have to exercise because we want to be physically capable of doing things we want to do. We have to attend certain social functions if we want to stay in the good graces of our loved ones.

Any obligation that doesn't result in doing more of what we want is a waste of our time and energy.

Contentment in clarity

For everything we want to do, there are things we have to do in order to get those opportunities.

Approaching everything through this lens easily identifies the wasteful false obligations that steal our time without giving us anything in return.

There are many things that we feel we have to do, but they are not serving us or moving us forward.

Living intentionally is identifying the difference between what we have to do to move ourselves forward, and hollow false obligations.

If we can ruthlessly focus on what will enable us to do more of what we want, we will always feel content with the way we spend our time.

Prompts

1. What are the things you have to do each week?

2. What are the most important things you want to do?

3. What false obligations are you letting into your life?

Further reading

Drive, by Daniel H. Pink, explores the surprising truth about what motivates us.

This post is part of Prompted, a series here on Indie Hackers. Subscribe to join 500+ ambitious, thoughtful folks who receive new insights and prompts each week!

Discuss this story.

by Rob Hope

Strengthen your landing page with these design, development, and conversion tips!

It’s tempting to start a landing page from scratch for a new launch, but why not consider reusing an older template that worked well?

Subscribe to Rob's One Page Love newsletter for his favorite UI, design, and development finds.

by Katie Hignett

Ryan Doyle spent the pandemic building SaaS projects that never really worked. Then, he met a business partner on X, and the pair launched what would become a $1M+ ARR lead generation agency: Sales.co. Ryan spent the next four years traveling the world, and is now fixing up an old van to tour America.

Taking the leap

I grew up on a farm in New York state, then went to business school in California. I started a couple of e-commerce projects there, then got a job in sales at a software company in New York City. During the pandemic, I was doing 80 hour weeks at that job, and teaching myself to code at night and over weekends.

During the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020, police would drive around my neighborhood at night, blaring sirens to tire people out and try to stop them from demonstrating. After two months, I decided to quit my job and trade some manual labor for rent on my family's farm.

Persistence and poetry

I built a few small products, and used the experiences to improve my coding skills.

The turning point was getting access to GPT in November 2020. At that time, no one was getting GPT access unless you were cool. I was not cool. So, I started writing a haiku to the CTO of OpenAI every day on X. And...it worked.

I used GPT to build a cold email writer called Magic Sales Bot. It was a bad product, but the hype of AI was unreal. I got funding from Calm Fund. I got press. I was taking a lot of calls. People were interested in this thing.

But, the way I went about the product was ultimately stupid. It got better over time, but it wasn't the SaaS I wanted to make.

Leveraging a bromance

Over a year went by, and I was sharing everything about Magic Sales Bot on X. I came across Jakob Greenfeld, and took one of his scraping courses.

One day, he DMed me. I replied. We talked on X for six months. Eventually, he suggested that we start a cold email business. I really didn't want to do it, but he persuaded me to try it.

We didn't actually meet IRL until four or five months later. By then, we'd already hit $10K MRR.

Using GPT for productivity

Sales.co is a lead generation agency. We've built a few of our own tools to scrape leads, we have tooling to personalize our outreach, and we also have tools for productivity. We use a lot of GPT, and run everything out of Airtable.

We have a process for everything, and we keep it simple. But it took work to get there. We only started categorizing responses with GPT once we'd processed several hundred thousand emails ourselves.

Jakob and I did every single piece of work on the business itself. He did all the lead lists, and I did the copy, sales calls, infrastructure, and initial hiring.

When we first started, we would get on the phone with anybody. We were also offering every money-back guarantee possible. We failed at several business models initially; a commission-only model, a smaller, per-meeting model, etc.

Now, we've laid down enough process that we know who we're meant to work with.

Growing the business

Jakob is the CEO, and runs the day-to-day. I'm out doing special projects, and taking sales calls when somebody wants to reach out to me personally.

One line of business we're exploring is going into a young startup and helping it get to product-market fit. I'm doing that with two companies right now. People will always need help getting more business.

The next thing I'm working on is Damn Good Leads. People have wanted to buy niche, contextual lead lists from us for a long time, and I want to turn that into a product.

Advice for indie hackers

Have a determined goal, and be flexible with how you approach it. You're always going to run into roadblocks. Be strong with where you want to go, but flexible in how you get there.

Build something you can sell, then make that selling event happen as early as possible. Better yet, go out and do something for free for people when you're scoping out your business.

Beyond that, I'd say relax. Also, don't do B2C.

Discuss this story.

by Tweetmaster Flex

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Darko, Kevin Bronander, Rob Hope, and Katie Hignett for contributing posts. —Channing