I've been following this strategy and it works pretty well for me. A few tips if you want to pursue this strategy (sorry, English is not my mother language):

I've been following this strategy and it works pretty well for me. A few tips if you want to pursue this strategy (sorry, English is not my mother language): - It can be great for SEO, so pay attention to keywords for these free tools - Collect email addresses if possible - Mention your main product, multiple times. But don't annoy your users (minimize popup, snag screen...) - Minimize your time on building these tools, ideally less than 2 weeks - Picking features to make it free: ideally not a core features (obviously), but fun and good for marketing (visual appealing, wow effects etc.) - Submit to as many directories as you can. People love free tools - Subdomain/subfolder or separated domain? Ideally subfolder for SEO juice, but it could live on its own and you can 301 redirect later. Also you might want to turn one of these tool into a paid one, separated domain would be better in this case. - If you collect email addresses, do not promote the main product after at least 3-4 product email updates of that free tool. People _might_ remember your free tool, but almost never remember your main product. Here are 2 examples: 1. I build a native ChatGPT/AI app for Mac called BoltAI[0]. One of the features was to "chat with screenshots", basically take the screenshot with a shortcut key then type your prompt and let GPT-4 Vision handle your request. I turned it into a free, standalone app called ShotSolve[1] and it's been welcomed by many users. So far it brought ~1k visitors to BoltAI with about 5% converted to paid customers. I also collected about 500 emails, which I could nurture into paid users later (hopefully) 2. I build a tool to send web articles to Kindle called KTool[2]. It supports multiple type of content and so I figured I could build free, standalone tools for each of these content and give it for free for the right community. - [Send Hacker News threads to Kindle](https://ktool.io/hacker-news-to-kindle https://ktool.io/hacker-news-to-kindle) - [Send AZW3 to Kindle](https://ktool.io/azw3-to-kindle https://ktool.io/azw3-to-kindle) - [Send Reddit to Kindle](https://ktool.io/reddit-to-kindle https://ktool.io/reddit-to-kindle) The HN tool brough about 20K visitors to my product and helped kickstart the initial growth of my product. Each tool drives about 200-500 visitors monthly to the main product. [0]: https://boltai.com https://boltai.com [1]: https://shotsolve.com https://shotsolve.com [2]: https://ktool.io https://ktool.io