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independence7 unconnected · 4 more authors in those circles
applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

12 claims · 12 articles · 4 receipts

window

2020-01-01 → 2025-09-20

7 builders who never spoke to each other

Give away a tool that pulls its own audience

A genuinely useful free utility aimed at the same people as the paid product builds an audience on its own schedule, whether that is a browser extension, a small toy tied to a real moment of use, or an aggregator for your niche. Treat it as a distribution asset rather than as a weekend side project.

The method

  1. 01

    Ship a genuinely free tool for your niche and let it be the thing that builds your audience, rather than treating it as a side project.

  2. 02

    Build a small free utility that maps onto a real moment in using your product, then let that utility carry the brand.

  3. 03

    Launch a link aggregator for your own niche as a side project, because it pulls traffic that your main product can borrow.

  4. 04

    Build a small free tool that shows people the problem on their own website, and let it do the arguing for your paid product.

  5. 05

    Give away free tools that let people inspect their own situation, alongside the content you publish.

What it returned

  • 450,000

    The Detailed SEO Extension passed 450,000 weekly Chrome users plus 7,000 on Firefox inside about five years. Glen Allsopp says he rarely checked the numbers and simply tried to build something people would want to use, and Ahrefs went on to acquire Detailed.

  • 2021

    Barilla built Spotify playlists whose running time matches the cooking time of each pasta shape, January 2021

  • An indie maker version of a Hacker News style aggregator was already generating a useful amount of traffic within weeks.

  • Phantom Analyzer, which scans a site for tracking pixels, took Fathom a few weeks to build and performed far beyond what they expected.

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 product

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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

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.