Grow your product with free tools. Coding for marketing, is it a dream?
There's a specific way of marketing that involves coding, and you'll love it.
As a tech founder, I struggle with pure marketing.
If you are a coder too, you know what I’m talking about.
The question we wonder is, what am I supposed to do for marketing?
For SaaS products, it consists of these activities:
have an audience on social media
write content on your product blog for SEO
create free tools for backlinks and traffic
reach out to influencers
In this newsletter issue, I want to focus on creating free tools.
For a tech founder like me, creating free tools feels like cheating.
They consist of some very simple tools that you add to your main product website.
Usually, you create a “free tools” section, and you list them all.
These tools need to be relevant to the potential customers of your product. The reasons why free tools are effective as marketing channels are:
they are free to use, and people love them
they solve a small but real problem
other websites might link them or include them in articles (backlinks)
people might search for a solution to that problem
Backlinks are important if you are trying to create a reputation on Google.
Google ranking is based on two factors
the number of backlinks from other websites to your product website domain
the number and type of keywords your website ranks for
The more of these two things you have, the higher your domain authority, and the higher the probability that Google starts showing your web pages in the search results (which is your real goal).
Hence, you get a lot of organic traffic to your product.
That’s why creating content and free tools are the main activities to bring organic traffic in the long term (yes, guess what, none of these activities is a quick win).
Up to the date of writing this newsletter, I’ve created three free tools for my product Shipped.club (and it feels like cheating to me because I love building, but this activity is also relevant for marketing 🤩).
The tool Secret and Password Generator is to create secrets, unique random IDs, and passwords.
It is useful because the customers of Shipped need to generate a secret during the setup of the product, and in general, random password generators are very useful.
The second I created is a Timezone Checker for Meetings, particularly useful if you work in a geographically distributed environment. As the customers of Shipped are usually software engineers with full-time jobs, this product might be relevant for them.
The most recent free tool is a Blog Image Resize tool. This product was useful to me (and I hope to other startup founders). When I write an article on the blog of Shipped, I usually cross-post it on different platforms like Dev.to, HashNode, Medium, and they all have different cover image sizes and formats.
With this tool, I can upload my cover image and generate all the other images in one click.
Of course, you can’t expect these tools to generate a ton of traffic just because you built them. You need to market them with the usual channels:
Hacker News
Indie Hackers
Reddit/Twitter/X/Facebook/LinkedIn/etc
Do you want more examples from successful products that (also) use this technique?
Pallyy $83k MRR (5 years old) — Social Media Scheduling
PDF.ai $50k MRR — ChatGPT for your PDFs
What are you waiting for? Start creating your free tools today.
Personal updates
During the last weeks, I’ve been very active.
If you’re a reader of The Solopreneur on The Road to Freedom you know that I launched the Shipped’s bundle Startup + Chrome Extension boilerplate.
It performed well with 12 orders and $1.2k+ revenues generated in a couple of weeks.
The main challenge I had was to propose this new bundle, and I ended up adding it to the pricing section and creating a dedicated sales landing page.
New side project launch
A couple of days ago I had a crazy idea, and I decided to launch it as fast as possible using Shipped. It’s a platform very similar to the popular HackerNews website but dedicated to indie hackers’ content.
I called it Indie Hacker News.
The aim is to create a space to share links with the community, learn more about each other, and discuss them in threads.
I already discovered some very interesting products there, like StockmusicGPT
Next week I’ll try to market it on different platforms, let’s see how the community will welcome it.
And that’s all for today, see you next Sunday!
Luca
Whenever you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your founder journey.
Shipped.club is the Next.js Startup & Chrome Extension Boilerplate for busy developers, that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly
108 makers are already shipping faster.
The second is Userdesk, the AI Assistants platform to automate your leads collection and customer support for your digital business.
Great list, thanks!