3 builders who never spoke to each other

Release a free tool as the launch itself

Give away something usable and let the attention it earns carry the paid product, rather than announcing the paid product on its own. Jakob Greenfeld's free tool had nothing to do with anything he sells, took about ninety minutes to put together, and lifted his profile enough to sell the paid products. Paul Jarvis open sourced Fathom first and Cory Zue opened his content site with a library people could install.

The method

1. 01

   Launch a small free tool unrelated to your paid products purely as a marketing vehicle, and let the attention it earns spill over into sales of the real thing.

2. 02

   Release a free open-source version first as the proof that the paid product has an audience.

3. 03

   Launch a developer content site with an open-source utility release as its first piece, so the launch carries something people can use rather than only an announcement.

What it returned

• 12

  The first Fathom shipped on 12 June 2018 as open source, collected thousands of GitHub stars quickly and passed a million downloads.

• The What to Tweet launch lifted his personal profile and produced a handful of sales for products entirely unconnected to it.

• Zue open-sourced a compact progress bar library for Django and Celery as the first post for Build With Django and built a demo page for it

Sources

• ⭐️ How I created a #2 Product of the Day in 90 minutes – Jakob GreenfeldJakob Greenfeld · jakobgreenfeld.com · ⭐️ How I created a #2 Product of the Day in 90 minutes · 2020-12-15
• SaaS lessons shared on the Framework podcast - Fathom AnalyticsPaul Jarvis · usefathom.com · Starting Fathom Analytics as the first simple, privacy-focused web analytics company · 2020-07-20
• Week 44 RetrospectiveCory Zue · coryzue.com · Time · 2018-01-22