Momentum Episode 22:
Side Product Led Growth with Michael Novotny

Technology startups face unique challenges in today's market with more options than ever for customers to choose from. Standing out from the crowd with your core product isn't as straightforward as it used to be, but sometimes it's the side product supplementing your core value proposition that can make all the difference.

Today we'll be talking about side product lead growth with an expert and founder on the strategy, Michael Novotny. Welcome to Momentum, a podcast by Jotform where we talk about technology productivity tips, insights, and best practices that help us move forward in business and in life. Let's get started.

All right, we are live. This is your host Elliot and I am here today with Michael, founder of Side Product Lead Growth. Welcome to the show today, Michael.

Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, it's awesome to have you here. Now, you're a proponent of side product lead growth. You're even a founder of an initiative by the same name. I can't wait to explore this more and really dive into your philosophy around this strategy. But first, I'd love to start with a little bit more background on you and how you ended up having this really kind of unique platform and perspective in the industry. So do you want to just give listeners a little bit of context about you and where you're coming from?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for that. Just to answer directly, there's by accident. If I were to backtrack almost 18 months ago, maybe a little bit less than that, I put a tweet out there just saying, hey, I'd like to help startups. I'm a zero to one type of builder and that's where my passion is. Lo and behold, the founder of Thredo reached out to the DMs of Twitter and the magic of Twitter once again strikes where you can get connected to all types of folks and opportunities can just kind of fall in your lap through Twitter.

He mentioned he wanted to launch this thing called Community OS, which was basically just this giant resource for helping community managers. He was preparing to launch his startup called Thredo, which wasn't quite live yet, and he was trying to get a ton of momentum going with sign-ups and early users in that aspect.

So what we did is I helped him create it. It was just a simple kind of Notion dashboard with 700 resources. We launched on Product Hunt, had a thousand sign-ups within 24 hours, and it was the number one Product Hunt of the day. We were blown away by that and said, well, actually, that was cool, let's do it again. So every month from there on, we launched eight more and grew sign-ups by seven or eight times from just under a thousand.

We helped really grow his first several dozen users and customers who discovered his product through the strategy where every month we were launching a new side product adding value for community managers in that space. This kind of give value first approach was really a magnet for people discovering a startup and then trying it and signing up, which was huge for a SaaS-based product.

These were all products associated with his startup but not per se the core product. So what does Thredo do? Can you paint the broader picture and give an example of one of these side products that really helped boost him?

Absolutely. Thredo is a dashboard for helping community managers engage with their community through messages, onboarding flows, analytics, and really helping them find community members who aren't really getting a lot of value out of the community so they can find those and reach out to them and help them find whatever they're looking for in the community.

It connects to Slack or Discord as well as a few other integrations. Basically, the easy way to think about it is that your user or customer is on a journey trying to get from point A to point B to solve a problem as easily and frictionlessly as possible, hopefully at the lowest cost.

Your product is along that journey from point A to point B. Usually, when you're first starting out, you're just solving one of many problems for them to get to where they're going to solve the jobs to be done. As a startup founder, you can't always build everything along that journey, and that becomes the opportunity.

Before, that might be paralyzing because you think you have to build all these things to get adoption of your SaaS product or whatever startup it is. Actually, that's a fallacy. Start small, start solving one problem and expand from there. All of those tangential problems along that journey become opportunities for side products. Those are small things you can build with the power of no code easily within 30 days, launch it as a cheap experiment without using engineers or distracting them.

It could be a product person or a marketing person that creates this and solves that problem. Many times, you give away for free to help really give value first to your potential target customers.

It has to be a supplement to your core product. It's essentially removing one more technology in the technology stack that so many of us need these days. For example, my company Jotform uses dozens of subscriptions. If one of those products suddenly offers a couple more affiliated products that can remove a couple of those subscriptions, you can make your company more of a one-stop shop.

Exactly. You can even think smaller. One of my favorite examples is Buffer. Buffer is a social media scheduling tool. One of their all-time favorite side products was before Canva existed, basically a free microsite like Canva where you could stitch together an image and a quote to make really nice social media posts.

They launched this about seven or eight years ago. It solved a problem for social media managers who wanted to create engaging posts that look nice so people can engage with their content. Before, you might have used Adobe or some other tool and stitched all this together, which took a ton of time. They created a simple web app on their domain called Pablo, where you could upload an image, grab a quote, put it all together, export it as a PNG, and have a really nice easy way to create social media images.

When you go through that experience and get that value, you then discover what Buffer is. Buffer can help schedule your social media. So you just created a nice little piece of content and then try Buffer to solve your problem as a social media manager. That's interesting because you didn't have to use the core product to use their free product, but they led one into the other very easily.

Why would a company give away something that could be used standalone for free? If it's part of the integral workflow, like now you can do this with your data, but you begin with the company itself and its core product. For example, we use forms that lead into tables or apps, but you have to fill out a form for that. For other companies, they might have standalone products. Why would they not charge for something that adds value on its own without working back towards the core product? Is that a risk?

Yes, it's a risk but also an opportunity. Buffer has written about this. It's driven millions of page views and visitors to their site. How much would you pay for that if you're doing marketing? Advertising doesn't work as well as organic giving value for free. If you're paying for people to come, the quality of site visitors and conversion is not as high as people discovering something that helps them along their journey.

There's a reciprocal nature of getting something for free and value that opens you up to understanding what Buffer is. It's human nature to appreciate free help. That's different and stands out. Marketing is to tell what your product does and adds value. Great marketing is to stand out above all others and attract more for whatever you're trying to do.

What are companies doing to stand out from the noise? If you're creating a simple, free, helpful tool, that stands out because no one else is doing it. It generated millions of people visiting their site. You can still charge money for this depending on the value you're creating and the problem you're solving. Some offer other services for a discounted rate to get people in the door as part of the sales funnel.

At worst, side product growth is good marketing. You acquire customers, especially if you're already spending marketing dollars. Nowadays, anyone can create content, especially with AI tools. Content is ubiquitous and becoming a bigger problem. How can you stand out if everyone is creating great content? This is a new frontier with no code tools that make this possible.

It's a powerful perspective to imagine side product growth as a form of marketing. As long as it connects to your product and drives views, you could pay tens of thousands of dollars to get 100,000 people to click through to your site. With no code tools, you can create something functional in weeks that really helps people, which could be more impactful than advertising.

This became more feasible with the advent of no code tools. Before, it was riskier to code everything yourself and pour resources into creating additional products. Now, you don't have to take engineering resources off your core product because you can develop side products with no code. That's a game changer.

How do you differentiate between your core product and potential side products? For example, with Thredo, the third or fourth product we launched was Serendipity Bot. It helped community managers match people with similar interests to provide introductions so they can meet and connect.

I built this with no code tools like Airtable and others. It took about a week to put together. We launched it, it was number two on Product Hunt, and we got hundreds of people to sign up and use the tool. We showed how to create it yourself or offered to create it for you, scheduling meetings that qualified prospects for the core product.

It was expensive to take 30 minutes of someone's time, but we could ask questions about what we're building at Thredo, get customers for the core product, and use it as a lead magnet. It promoted the founder's idea behind the core product but was less risky to build as a side product with no code, even if it lacked full functionality.

You can validate the need, talk to customers, see if people download and use it. This reduces risk and roadmap building. For startups with limited runway and no revenue, it's expensive to take risks with engineering resources when figuring out product-market fit.

For many no code products, it's a marketing tool. Someone in marketing can create these without engineering. When active with analytics, you can justify more exhaustive development. This is proof of concept and shows how the startup model is different now than 10 or 20 years ago with no code and the internet proliferation.

You can diversify with side-led products that don't cost as much revenue or stake but clutter the environment more. Core products are abundant; you type in form builder and get many options. Content automation requires differentiators to create more, which becomes mind-boggling.

The strategy gives clarity on navigating the startup landscape and weaponizing it to your advantage, even though it might seem like a disadvantage that it's easy to do. The fallacy of 'if you build it, they will come' is even more so now because it's easier to build things and harder to stand out.

Attention is the new oil. Distribution is more important than building the thing. Content and storytelling are key concepts in building side products effectively because many aren't doing it. This trend is catching on and is key for startups now.

You mentioned companies like Buffer, HubSpot, and Shopify who have done this well. Shopify solves e-commerce problems with side products like tax calculators or loan calculators. HubSpot built an email signature tool that marketers can plug in and embed in emails, which is a small value add but impactful.

E-commerce is a huge field with many people needing platforms like Shopify, broadening the umbrella of side product opportunities. Niche products might have fewer options but can still find impactful side products like Buffer did.

Many examples are high utility, but some are fun or novel. For example, Party Round started as a fun side product launching vintage e-commerce sites and AI resignation letter tools monthly. They accumulated over 100,000 email sign-ups and social media profiles, building a distribution pipeline before pivoting to financial lending.

That's smart and not manipulative because they add value and then pivot. Fun little products like email signature tools might not make or break a day but can be shareable and gain popularity, feeding back to your product and gaining eyeballs.

Short-term value is important, but the long-term SEO benefit is jaw-dropping. For example, Adobe offers free file conversion tools that rank high on Google. People trust Adobe over sketchy sites, sign up, and then discover Adobe's paid products higher up the value ladder.

Startups can use this strategy by providing what people search for around their product, launching on Product Hunt to get initial traffic, and then Google ranks it, creating an incredible SEO tactic.

With AI advent, SEO will still be powerful. For example, in my MBA studies, I've needed file conversions multiple times and landed on Adobe because it doesn't seem sketchy. This is an awesome example of how this can work for any company.

If you have limited resources but marketing and no code tools, some best ways to grow include using Typeform, Airtable, Zapier, or Jotform to create lead generator forms with conditionals and customized email responses. Whale Sync helps sync Airtable to CMS like Webflow.

Bubble is perfect for building small calculators or tools that can be embedded on your website or standalone apps. Notion is great for creating giant resources. For example, we used Bubble connected to Twitter API to create a real-time Twitter feed embedded on a startup's website.

Many of these tools are combinable. You might use Airtable or Jotform and integrate with Notion to create sophisticated user value and function that users might never guess was no code.

To summarize, side products are important because distribution is the barrier now, not building. Side product growth is an absolute growth hack to create small tools or resources and launch them because it builds organic traffic and valuable links, which Google values highly.

Justin Kan, founder of Twitch, said first-time founders obsess over the product, second-time founders obsess over distribution. Side products help with distribution by standing out and attracting users and customers.

We built a side product called AI Social Bio with Bubble and Twitter API that helps write perfect social media bios using AI. Since launch, it's been used over 50,000 times and has gained organic traffic and valuable links, hacking PR strategies with under 30 days of development.

Launching side products every 30 days led to stair-step climbs in organic search traffic and first-page Google rankings. This builds tremendous long-term and short-term growth. Building free tools is not ubiquitous yet and is a key strategy to stand out in the content-saturated market.

It's hard to grab users' attention when they have an itch to scratch, which is expensive to do with advertising. Providing value first helps them remember you when they need it. Founders should not treat side products as home runs but take a base hit approach, launching many to compound growth over time.

This advice is relevant for small business owners, established companies, startups, and even end users. Many products we use are side products we don't realize until later. Now is the time to jump on this before it becomes ubiquitous.

For example, Lowe's has a cubic inch calculator tool I found through Google, which helped me buy mulch. There are tons of these tools out there we don't think about until after using them. Realizing this can inspire startups to create their own side products.

I'm honored to talk with you. This was robust but great content. It's fascinating to peel back the curtain and see products through this new perspective. There are more side products out there than we think, and now is the time to capitalize on this strategy.

Thank you so much for lending your expertise today. It was awesome to talk to you. I'll link to sideproductledgrowth.com in the description for people to check out your site and learn more about this strategy.

Thank you for having me and thanks for your time. I'm honored to chat with you.