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independence6 unconnected · 2 more authors in those circles
standing

contested · 12 claims against 2

applies to

b2b, no audience needed

outcome not stated

confidence

high

evidence

14 claims · 11 articles · 4 receipts

window

2021-01-14 → 2024-05-05

6 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Give away the tool that ranks for the problem

Build a small free thing that solves one task your buyer already searches for, host it on your own domain, and let it collect both the rankings and the links. It works on four counts at once: nobody hesitates at free, it fixes a real annoyance, other sites link to it, and people search that annoyance directly. The failure rate is high and the payoff is not always traffic to the paid product.

Where this splits

Several founders credit free tools with lifting rankings and links, while Luca Restagno reports a well received free tool that sent almost no traffic to the paid product and Glen Allsopp puts the failures at roughly ten for every one that works.

  1. side 01 · 12 claims

    Ship free tools to earn rankings and links

    Chris Frantz · Harry Dry · Jakob Greenfeld · Justin Jackson · Kyle Poyar · Luca Restagno · Nick Sawinyh

    1. 1Find something your users struggle to remember and ship a tiny free tool that does it for them, as a side project alongside the paid product.
    2. 2Build a free standalone tool whose only job is to rank in search and hand its visitors to your paid product.
    3. 3Build small free tools aimed at your product's own audience and host them on the product's domain, which lifts organic traffic and attracts links.
    4. 4Draw each free tool from a task your actual buyer performs, not from a generic list, and group them in a free tools section on the product site.
    5. 5Give away a genuinely useful tool to people who aren't customers as an acquisition asset, not just a feature for subscribers.

  2. side 02 · 2 claims

    Most free tools fail and send no traffic

    Glen Allsopp · Luca Restagno

    1. 1A free niche tool on the homepage attracts links that then lift the articles you publish behind it, though the failures outnumber the successes by a wide margin.
    2. 2Accept that a well received free tool may still send very little traffic to the paid product; the payoff, if any, is long term.

What it returned

  • Cronitor built Crontab, a helper for the scheduling syntax developers can never recall.

  • Snyk runs an open source vulnerability database that refreshes as new issues surface, invites visitors to submit disclosures, and pitches automated scanning of their own code. Comparable plays include a backlink checker given away by Ahrefs, a grader for your website from HubSpot, a ranking of top sites from Similarweb, and a generator for cold emails from Copy.ai.

  • Three examples shipped for one product: a password generator, a meeting timezone checker and a blog image resizer.

  • Three tools built for a developer buyer: a secret and password generator, a timezone checker for distributed meetings, and a resizer that outputs blog cover images at every platform's dimensions.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in seo

all seo plays

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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