Do companies make standalone products solely meant for driving growth?

[AhmadBashir]

Okay, we know about product-led growth within the core product, talk to me about companies with standalone products solely meant for driving growth.
Freemium editions might be one version of this, but what kind of standalone products exist to be useful/cool/hype worthy, and then hook people into checking out the core product?

[RobMartin]

The wonderful world of Open Source is my favorite example of what you’re talking about.

We have some micro-products and services (like this and this) that are free tools we give to our users, but can be useful to people not using our software as well.

[SamanthaYuan]

@Ahmad My mind goes to “drops” like party round and “tools” like the hubspot website grader

[CarlosDubois]

Came to say what Samantha did with website grader - essentially ‘engineering as marketing’
Eg
Followerwonk and Open Site Explorer by Moz.
DontTrack.us by DuckDuckGo are other famous examples of this.

[AhmadBashir]

Aha, this is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for—I kept looking for “product as marketing” or “product as growth” which obviously did not work very well for a search query.