Building Traction with Mini Projects

As a young startup Grew faces the same challenge as many others: we don't have an existing audience, and we don't have loads of money for paid advertising. Also, building SEO reputation takes time and requires traffic.

So how to get early traction and start attracting potential customers?

Guerrilla marketing by building tools

Our most successful approach to this so far has been guerrilla marketing by building tools. Or as we call them: "mini projects". It means that whatever our target group is, we use our imagination to develop helpful tools that we ship fast to get engagement and awareness in our target group.

As an example, our current objective is to engage with developers to attract them to test our location tool pointNG. That's why we decided to start developing tools for developers and indie hackers like us.

So far, we've launched six small projects and are already gaining good traction with a zero budget:

• 14k unique visitors within one month

• ConsoleChat.io and Hacker-AI reached Hacker News main page

• Hacker-AI project reached the top 3# on Product Hunt

Console chat analytics You can check out all the projects here.

These figures compound in the best way: more and more people are becoming aware of us knowing that we can create cool and helpful stuff. We don’t always have to reach out to them, but instead they contact us.

Create your own acquisition channel

Creating a new user acquisition channel through building side-projects is great because it's based on creating value and trust. In the end, we believe that SaaS is about trust.

If your audience's trust you, it's a million times easier to get traction and feedback.

In the coming blogs, I'll describe what tools and tactics we use to build our mini-projects.