Mini tools are 10x more powerful than free trials ⚙️

How "mini tools" are secretly fueling billion-dollar startups (and how you can create your own in 24 hours)

Earlier this month, a crazy simple “mini-tool” broke the internet:

It’s called Twitter Roast — you put a link to your Twitter/X profile, it scans your tweets with AI, and boom! You get hilariously accurate (and sometimes brutal) insights about your personality.

It was created as a side-project by WordWave, an AI agent company.

The founder later shared some numbers:

The result? Absolute viral madness. 💥 It’s one of the most successful products on Product Hunt in years.

Things I ❤️:

• Instantly shareable results

• Just the right amount of humor

• Perfect demo of WordWave's AI capabilities without a hard sell

• Tapped into our love of personality quizzes (remember Buzzfeed?)

Let’s dive into the world of mini-tools - one of my favorite marketing ideas. 👇

---

💡 The marketing idea

1. Build a free mini web app or tool that solves a super-specific problem for your target audience and subtly shows your product’s technology.

2. Use it to generate buzz, backlinks, and leads for your main product.

It’s called “mini-tool marketing” (or “engineering as marketing” if you want to sound fancy). And trust me, it’s EXPLODING right now.

💻 13 mini-tool examples that generated millions in revenue

I’ve seen some killer examples lately:

1. Copy.ai’s cold email generator ❄️

2. Wix’s QR code generator 📸

3. Ahrefs’ SEO keyword generator 🔧

4. Shopify’s business name generator ☕️

5. Calm’s do nothing for 2 minutes 🧘‍♂️

6. Hubspot’s website grader 📊

7. Buildfire’s mobile dev cost calculator 💰

8. CoSchedule’s headline analyzer 🧠

9. Wiz’s cloud threat landscape 🥷🏻

10. Grammarly's plagiarism checker 🤫

11. Loops.so’s bounce doctor 💊

12. Canva's color palette generator 🎨

13. Taplio’s viral post generator (😅)

The common thread? They all create free value while subtly bringing attention to the core product.

But wait, there’s more…

♻️ The secret sauce: repurposing existing features

Here's the growth hack within the growth hack: You probably already have the perfect mini-tool hiding in your product.

Examples:

• ⛔️ Slack could create a standalone emoji creator based on their custom emoji feature

• 🖼️ Zoom could offer a free background removal tool

• 🐶 Uber found a way to fill in the dead hours with UberPuppies

• 🕵️ GitGuardian just gave free access to one of their features and repackaged it as “Has My Secret Leaked?”

The key is to find a feature that:

1. Provides immediate value

2. Showcases your core technology

3. Naturally leads users to want more (i.e., your full product)

Pro tip: Make it 100% free. No email, no sign-up, nada. Instead of a limited free trial of your entire product → give users unlimited free value in one super-specific niche. Bonus points if it generates a shareable result with your watermark/logo (hello, viral loop!). ✅

Warning: Keep the mini-tool truly independent. Don't force users to your full platform just to use the mini-tool. VEED.io seems to offer many “mini-tools”, but in fact, all of them are just tabs in the full platform — they are not standalone tools. I do not recommend doing that. ❌

⏰ Your 24-hour playbook for creating a mini-tool

1. Find a feature in your main product that could be isolated.

2. Strip the feature down: Make it standalone and dead simple to use (e.g. only one input field).

3. Give it a home: Create a simple landing page where the mini-tool lives. Pro move: Buy a catchy domain (like https://bounce.doctor by Loops).

4. Brand it (lightly!): Name it, add a subtle “powered by [Your Company]” tag, use your brand colors/fonts. Include a soft CTA somewhere to check out your main product.

5. Kill the friction: No sign-ups, no credit card, no BS. Let people use it instantly without scrolling/clicking on anything.

6. Launch it: Do it on Product Hunt, Reddit (try r/InternetIsBeautiful), HackerNews, etc. Promote through your existing social media channels. Email your list (they’ll spread the word if it’s good). Reach out to relevant bloggers/journalists.

7. Monitor and celebrate: If it’s blowing up, tell the world!

TL;DR — Take a slice of your product, repackage it as a free mini-tool, and watch the magic happen 🌈

Can’t find a feature to repurpose? No worries! You can make calculators, quizzes, browser extensions, games, funny generators, or AI wrappers that your target audience would love (without repurposing anything that exists already).

---

📚 Further read:

1. Kyle Poyar
   ’s Copy.ai growth breakdown

2. Ali Abouelatta
   ’s turbo boosts ideas (on
   Lenny Rachitsky
   ’s Newsletter)

3. My guide to mini-games (a fantastic sub-genre of this marketing idea)

Have you seen any cool “mini-tool” campaigns?

Drop them in the comments below! 🔥

See you next week ✌️

Tom

---

—If you enjoyed this marketing idea, please tap the Like button below ♥️ Thank you!