If there's one consistent issue that plagues startups, consultants, and even large established business it's marketing.
And that whole thread touches on a subject that I wish would get more traction here on HN: content engineering.
Content Engineering (building tools and useful online software projects) is an incredibly effective way to build an audience and awareness by helping people instead of writing yet another 500 word blog post or dumping six figures of VC money into FB or Google ads.
It honestly feels like cheating. I think tools just occupy a different part of people's brains than articles and certainly a different spot than ads.
This is a hot topic for me as I was looking through the analytics for my site yesterday and found that our Subject Line tester [1] was driving about 10x the traffic of our dozen 2000+ word carefully crafted and educational blog posts [2]. F'ing ridiculous
Marketing is not:
"Spending money on ads, Spending years building a social following, Going to networking events, Cold calling"
but is:
"posting it on relevant forums, sharing it with bloggers, sending it to journalists to potentially write about"
Isn't that sort of a contradiction, if the thing I want to market is a side project in itself?
I guess I'll try his strategy of talking about one of my side project's outputs instead of the side project itself: Learning Chinese with movies and music.
Unsplash [1] was a side-project for our company freelance developer and designer platform, Crew [2] (Crew was later sold to Dribbble; Unsplash now operates independently).
We knew as creators that finding beautiful, useable imagery was one of the hardest challenges in any creative project, so we decided after shooting some photos for our homepage header image, to give the rest of the photos from the shoot away for free for anyone to use.
We setup a $19 tumblr theme, a domain, and posted the site to here.
What happened next was amazing: the site was flooded with traffic thanks to trending on HN, thousands of photos were downloaded on the first day, and most shockingly to us, other creatives began submitting their own photography to Unsplash.
Fast forward a year later and Unsplash was the main source of traffic and revenue for the parent company Crew. I think it peaked at around 60% of our monthly revenue due to customers finding Crew from a simple 'Made by Crew' link on Unsplash. At the same time, Unsplash was doing around 1M downloads a month.
We eventually sold Crew to Dribbble to focus full time on Unsplash, so it's no longer a side project. It's grown a lot since those early days, with more than 20M photo downloads every month, half a million free-to-use photos, and is integrated into thousands of applications, including Trello, Adobe, and more.
If you're interested in more about Unsplash, we've got all the main milestones here: https://unsplash.com/history
Yes, it was built by crew.co, a company that aims to bring together freelancers (dev / design / ...) and companies that are in need of them for a certain project.
It got so successful that they split it into two companies at some point (I can't find the reference blog post talking about this right now, so if anyone does feel free to comment)