Side Project Marketing: What Is It & How to Do It (+10 Examples)

Hey — It's Nico.

This is the issue #2 of this 4-email series covering Unconventional Customer Acquisition Channels. This week I wrote about Side Project Marketing.

In 2021, 153,047 users were active on Hacker News, a tech community built by Y Combinator.

In only 24 hours, 35,000 people visited How to Say No, Starter Story’s collection of email templates to say “no” in different situations.

In less than 2 weeks, 106 high-authority websites provided a backlink to Kapwing, featuring Cartoonify, their free AI-powered tool that turns photos into cartoon drawings.

What do these numbers have in common?

They were all the results of a customer acquisition strategy called “Side Project Marketing” (also known as “Engineering as Marketing”). Today I published a 3,000-word guide about it.​

What is Side Project Marketing? Side-project marketing consists of building a stand-alone product or service to attract potential customers to your business.

They generally are tools, quizzes, calculators, directories, aggregators, games, templates, checklists, converters, and physical products.

This newsletter is brought to you by Tappollo:

​In this article, I go over my 3-step process to create Engineering as Marketing projects, covering topics like:

1. The 2 frameworks to come up with a side-project marketing idea: Product-oriented vs. Audience-oriented.
2. How you can build a project that generates the necessity for your product (and how Hubspot is doing it).
3. How you can use no-code tools, like Calconic, Outgrow, and Bubble to build your Engineering as Marketing project.
4. The 3 components of a viral traffic strategy: Controversy, Fun, and Timing.
5. The MUST do if you want your side project to get organic traffic: Satisfy user’s search intent, hassle-free.
6. How Gusto has combined Side Project Marketing with Programmatic SEO to build 100+ ranking pages.

All of this, while analyzing +15 examples of startups using Side Project Marketing (and linking to websites where you can find other 250+ examples).

​Here’s my Engineering as Marketing Guide.​

If you decide to test the Side Project Marketing acquisition channel after reading the article, please reply back that I’d love to help you get the best out of it.

That was all for the 2nd issue.

In case you missed last week’s issue, here's the link to the article. It’s a 3,000-word guide about Programmatic SEO.

As you may have realized, this week’s newsletter format is different than the previous week’s. I think sharing the main points of the article and its link, instead of sending the whole article as I did last week, makes more sense. But I'd love to hear your feedback:

• ​Send the article's main points and the link.​
• ​Send the whole article.​

Here are my top 3 readings of the week:

• ​What to Watch in Crypto in 2022: A beginners-friendly round-up article collecting 22 tech people’s thoughts about the crypto “projects, trends, and assets worth paying attention to this year.”
• ​How to Create a SaaS Content Strategy: An actionable article on how to create a SEO strategy for SaaS not focused on bringing a big amount of traffic, but instead on driving trials and customers.
• ​The Rise of the One-Person Unicorn: An article analyzing how the way we build startups is changing and the rise of “hyper-specific, profitable, company-building.”

That was all for this week. I hope you enjoyed today’s guide and three curated resources.

Cheers,

Nico