How ColorCraft got its users
757 ungated free coloring page URLs, one per phrase people already type, each closing with one soft CTA into the paid AI generator, with a Meta Pixel and a Google Ads tag layered on top.
Read from signals. Consistent with what is publicly observable, but nobody confirmed it. Check before you quote it.
You could start this on Monday. No budget, no audience, no permission needed.
- Speed and predictability
- Fast message testing you can reuse organically
- A known LTV and a short payback
- A test budget you can afford to lose
- A creative machine, not a campaign
Paid advertising in 2026
Available to everyone, so no edge in itself. You are not buying growth, you are buying speed on economics that already work.
Everything on this channel →The play
5 steps, in the order they ran them.
- 1
Take the single artifact your generator already produces (here, one printable coloring page) and publish it fully ungated: the Download PNG and Open & print buttons point straight at a public storage URL, and there is not one email input on the page.
done whenA stranger in an incognito window can download your file in two clicks with no email typed, and the file loads from a public URL you can paste anywhere.
- 2
Build the tree the same shape: 1 hub, about 30 category pages (animals, anime, mandalas, christmas, dinosaurs), then hundreds of leaf pages titled with the exact phrase searched, e.g. 'Free Printable Owl Face Coloring Page'. Allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and CCBot in robots.txt while blocking your app routes.
done whenYour sitemap passes 300 <loc> entries, every leaf is reachable in two clicks from the hub, and your server logs show AI crawler user agents fetching leaf pages.
- 3
Name leaves after generic subjects, not licensed ones. ColorCraft has 69 pages under character trademarks (demon-slayer, madrigal, hello-kitty) while its own FAQ schema says the commercial licence does not cover trademarked characters, which is a takedown surface sitting on top of the whole library.
done whenZero page titles or slugs in your sitemap contain a brand or character name you do not own the rights to.
- 4
Put one soft CTA at the bottom of every leaf and nothing else: 'Want a custom coloring page? Sign up free and get one custom AI-generated page on us' pointing at /auth/login?redirect=/dashboard, with self-serve tiers ($14 to $119/mo, 7-day trial, card required) waiting behind it.
done whenAnalytics attributes signups to leaf page URLs, not just the homepage, and free trial starts appear from pages you never advertised.
- 5
Add paid last, on top of an audience that already exists: a Meta Pixel and a Google Ads conversion tag on the same free pages, retargeting people who downloaded toward the trial. Skip the blog until the library works; theirs is linked twice in the footer and still says 'No blog posts found'.
done whenYour retargeting audience is large enough to exit the learning phase, and the trial conversion from retargeting beats cold traffic on the same creative.
Run this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
776 URLs in sitemap.xml, 757 of them (97.5%) free coloring pages: 1 hub, 30 category pages, 726 leaf pages. The hero stats (29,000+ pages, 2,500+ books, 98%+ acceptance) and the three first-name testimonials are self-reported with nothing to check them against.
What else they ran
Nothing else identified. One channel carried it.
They ran the same play
Want this verdict on your product?
Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.