[rayalez]

Recently I've read about a similar tactic - a guy wrote an ebook, and just shared it on forums and torrents. Because it was niche, valuable, and free, it "went viral", people kept sharing it with each other and downloading it. The book was(non-obnoxiously) sending people to his site, and he had a lot of success with it.

It all comes down to the same fundamental principle - exchanging something of value for attention. Most of the people do it with content marketing(articles and videos), but there's an unlimited number of applications. As long as there's something of value you can provide at a relatively low effort - you can use it as a marketing channel.

If you are in a technical niche, open source projects do extremely well. It doesn't even have to be a polished startup-like SaaS, it can just be a useful python script, or a boilerplate project for some tech stack, or a guide on how to install or deploy something.

Authors give away their books to bloggers before publishing, or share them with influential people in the industry - same idea.