Side project marketing (aka building a free tool to drive traffic to your main thing) works.

Here's Dan Kulkov's playbook

Your free tool needs to be divided into 2:

• Free value delivery (your free tool's promise). This needs to provide REAL value and be useful as a standalone product.

• Email capture, where you promise 2x the results of the free tool if they leave their email.

Once they leave their email, they should enter a short email sequence in which you upsell your paid product.

This playbook has generated over $100,000 for their FounderPal and Makerbox projects.

🕵️‍♂️ How to Steal it?

• Find one big pain point your audience has (for example, coming up with content ideas)

• Create a free tool that solves it (like an idea generator)

• Create an email capture that promises to deliver 2x the content ideas if they leave their email

• Once in the email sequence, keep giving value while upselling your paid product (which needs to be linked to the initial mission of the free tool)

Source: full thread where Dan explains the process