🧰 Trends #0016 — Growth Tools

From Trends.vc

🔍 Problem

Free marketing channels are crowded and paid channels are expensive.

It's an arms race.

Companies must work harder and pay more to succeed in free and paid channels, respectively. The Red Queen Effect applies to marketing.

💡 Solution

Growth tools allow companies to escape the marketing rat race with assets such as quizzes, calculators, games, directories, aggregators, checklists, apps and more.

This is not freemium. These are independent tools that may or may not require users to sign up.

🏁 Players

Growth Tools

• Zappy
• Quiz Party
• Email Signature Template Generator
• Startup GIFs
• Moving Cost Calculator
• Pablo
• Time To Build --- House Calculator
• The 50/30/20 Budget
• Employer Tax Calculator
• Founder Bingo

Companies Using Growth Tools

• Ahrefs
• Skillshare
• Shopify
• HubSpot
• Moz
• Sparktoro
• moveBuddha
• Zapier
• Snovio
• NerdWallet

🔮 Prediction

• No-code tools will make it easy to build growth tools. Outgrow helps you build quizzes, chatbots and calculators without writing code.

☁️ Opportunities

• Create multi-use content like resource roundups and directories. You'll get repeated exposure to potential customers.
• Use no-code tools to build growth tools. Rita Roloff shows you how to build a quiz that sends personalized text messages without writing code.
• Buy growth tools instead of building them. Acquire assets with existing traffic to reduce market risk. Skillshare bought Coolors.
• Clone successful growth tools and make improvements. This reduces market risk. But you'll need a plan for discovery and growth.
• Build a micro private equity fund to acquire growth tools. Sell advertising, setup affiliate programs, collect leads or anonymized data.

😠 Haters

"This is engineering as marketing."
It's engineering as marketing, engineered marketing, side-project marketing and more. I'm a fan of simplicity. Growth tools has less syllables.

"This is not new."
It's not new. It's underutilized.

"Why not freemium?"
They're not mutually exclusive. Most SaaS companies using growth tools also have a freemium model. See Sumo, Shopify and Zapier. But freemium doesn't work for every business. What about agencies and consultants? High marginal costs prevent them from using freemium. But growth tools work.

🔗 Links

1. Side Project Ideas — Rishabh Dev offers 101 growth tool ideas.
2. Tool Marketing for B2B SaaS Founders — A short chapter from the B2B SaaS Marketing Playbook that shows how B2B SaaS companies are using growth tools.
3. Engineered Marketing  — A short video with examples and guidelines to create a successful growth tool.
4. SEO Project Marketing —  @harrydry writes about the SEO benefits of growth tools.
5. 10 Brilliant Examples of Side-Project Marketing — Jules Maregiano gives 10 unique examples of growth tools.

Any Thoughts?

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