Side Project Checklist
Get the Marketing Checklist
Give your side project a long-term plan for user acquisition and growth that won't cost you a lot of time or money.
Get the Sales Checklist
Create a simple, repeatable sales plan to help you get your first customers without being "that guy".
Side Project Marketing & Sales Checklists
What is This?
The side project checklists are comprehensive, chronologically ordered lists of marketing and sales tactics you can try with your next side project. They are free, open source, and designed to be customized to your project's needs.
Why Checklists?
I've been building software side projects for years, but I've always been terrible at marketing and selling them. I come up with some ideas, forget those ideas, do some random stuff, then lose interest. The goal of this project is to fix that by making marketing and sales as simple as a checklist.
Not sure how to use these checklists? Click here to learn more.
Latest Blog Posts
-
Why Your Blog Needs a Sneeze Page and How to Build One
Your blog is a marketing tool used to promote your side project. Each time you publish an article you can share it through various social media channels. The goal here is to attract current and new website visitors. Over time, you’re going to know which blog posts are the most popular. Don’t let them eventually disappear in your old archives! Instead, add them to your Sneeze Page.
-
Tracking Keywords and Topics with F5Bot
Imagine this: your side project is gaining traction; however, you’ve found your time—your most valuable resource—has become extremely limited. You look for ways to optimize how you promote your project and find conversations online relevant to it. And then you find F5Bot. At first glance, you realize this might be the perfect solution!
-
My Social Media & Email Marketing Automation Strategy
A couple days ago, I Tweeted a diagram of my social media and email automation strategy for Portable CTO/Side Project Checklist asking if anyone would like a writeup about how I do it. After a couple years playing around with different social media automation tools and about a year of running a pretty successful email list, I’ve come up with a workflow that works for me and I think is worth sharing. While the comprehensive diagram may look intimidating, don’t worry; I’ll walk you through each piece as well as the reasons I chose the tools I did, and some of the goals of my setup. Let’s get to it!
-
Using The Side Project Marketing Checklist: What Worked and What Didn't
I started the Side Project Marketing Checklist over six months ago, and ever since the beginning, I’ve used that checklist to market the project itself. The whole idea of the checklist is that it gives you lots of ideas, but you have to try things out and by process of elimination, come up with a formula for marketing your project that works.
-
Finding and Connecting with Customers on Linkedin
Linkedin gained users at a rate of 2 per second in 2017, and it has pretty much dominated the professional social profile space in most industries. That said, I think it’s quite underutilized for finding early customers to your product. If like most side project owners, you are looking for your first few customers, Linkedin might be a perfect outlet. Here’s how I’ve seen it used for early customer acquisition.