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Drew Teller's avatar

This is product led marketing. Specifically, most of these are called sidecar products. I wrote a lot about them 2 years ago in a big guide and I have an open source database of 300+ examples. https://www.drewteller.com/product-led-marketing-database

Check em out!

Jonathan Yagel's avatar

Nice! Yeah, PLM is a good term, too - and I think the 'sidecar products' is actually a helpful analogy for traditional engineering-as-marketing: One support structure that helps the core product go faster! I see this as being different from Satellite Apps, which will be launched much faster and form a constellation (across multiple funnel layers) around the core product.

Also: Your DB of examples is awesome! Thank you for sharing.

Joshua Lum's avatar

Saving this to try out the different example satapps!

π”Ύπ•–π• π•£π•˜π•– 𝕍𝕒𝕝𝕕𝕖𝕀's avatar

Thanks Jonathan, great post. It's very much the play I'm doing with toolblocks.app!

Karo (Product with Attitude)'s avatar

Brilliant. Really great examples. Thank you Jonathan πŸ€—

Vladimir Novikov's avatar

Thank you for the insights!

Jonathan Yagel's avatar

Thank you for reading!

Gabriel Amzallag's avatar

Amazing article Elena and Jonathan!

Olga Neroda's avatar

Really enjoyed this perspective πŸ‘

We’ve actually been exploring this approach ourselves and have already experimented with a couple of satellite apps.

For our B2B audience, we launched an Employee Cost Calculator to help employers quickly understand true hiring costs (especially with changing regulations). On the B2C side, we built a resume builder designed to provide immediate, practical value to candidates (https://indeedflex.com/resume-builder/ai-resume-generator/build-your-resume/)

Both have shifted the conversation from β€œdownload this PDF” to β€œuse this tool,” which feels much more aligned with how users want to engage today.