Engineering as marketing for SaaS founders
How to generate more traffic, leads, and customers
What if you could use your superpower skills as a technical founder to market your product to more potential customers?
If you are like most technical founders, the idea of marketing the product you built is daunting and maybe even a little scary. However, the answer to growing your startup is RARELY tweaking your code of building more features.
The answer lies in sales and marketing.
As a technical founder, you have a skill set that most marketers don’t have. Instead of following a cookie-cutter marketing approach, you can build new scripts, templates, and tools that deliver an immense amount of value and get you more qualified leads for your core paid product.
That’s the basis of engineering as marketing.
Plus, if you are a small team, you have an added advantage over large incumbents. That’s speed. You can knock out something in a few days that would take a large company 3+ months to build based on bureaucracy and processes.
In this post, we’re going to share what engineering as marketing is, how to do it well, as well as share a bunch of templates and tools.
What is engineering as marketing?
At its simplest, engineering as marketing is the concept of building scripts, templates, and tools that add value for leads and complement your core paid product. This can generate more traffic, help you get more people on your email list, build trust, and make you more money.
If this concept sounds familiar, it is likely because you’ve seen one or more of the three most famous engineering as marketing examples:
HubSpot’s Website Grader: Anyone can submit their website, and HubSpot will send them a website grade along with suggested improvements automagically. This tool has been used by millions of people, builds trust and goodwill, and has made HubSpot millions of dollars in new customer sign-ups.
Shopify’s Free Tools Library: Shopify took this example to the next level by releasing dozens of free tools, including a free privacy policy generator, terms and conditions generator, shipping label templates, and more. They have free tools and templates for many of the biggest stumbling blocks that both new and existing ecommerce businesses run into. The result is millions of people have used these tools. Many of them go on to use their ecommerce platform as paid customers. And they’ve also generated tens of thousands of free press and backlinks (SEO perk) in the process.
Ahrefs Free Tools - They run a similar playbook to Shopify and released more than a dozen free SEO tools that people can use. These range from a keyword difficulty checker to a backlink checker and a free Chrome plugin. These tools serve as gateways to their paid eight-figure bootstrapped SaaS product.
Engineering as marketing examples that you can implement in a day
However, I’m also guessing that if you are reading this post, you don’t have dozens of people on your marketing and engineering teams that are solely assigned to spinning up complex new free tools and templates.
The reality is you don’t need to create complex free lead gen tools like the three examples above to see great results. You can see near immediate impacts by creating smaller scripts and templates.
This all starts by building out a product usage dashboard. The usage metrics you track will vary based on the product. However, it will likely include things like new free trial signups, % free trial signups who convert to paid, # of free trial signups who use X, Y, or Z key features in the product, etc.
You can use the key product usage and adoption metrics that move the needle the most to create automation scripts that trigger in-app notifications, SMS notifications, or emails.
Here are a few examples of what these automation triggers can look like:
Send an upgrade email and in-app notification to any customer when they reach 80% of their quota on their current plan (if you have metered usage / billing)
Send an email with template data or customizations to new free trial users who haven’t logged into the product in XX days
Offer a free trial extension for customers who started but haven’t finished migrating over from their prior solution
Send an automated “get you promoted email” to customers who reach key milestones.
Build a free template library. This is something you can start in a day and build out over time. For instance, Trainual does this well as they have hundreds of SOPs and policy templates that people can download and use in their businesses.
Create calculators - These are the OG engineering as marketing tools. Guess what? They still work incredibly well together. Many people will gladly fork over their email address to avoid spending ~20 minutes building a formula in Excel.
Pro Tip: Looking for more examples of small “engineering as marketing” concepts you can often implement quickly. Watch this full MicroConf talk from Patrick McKenzie.
This same approach can also work as a bridge before someone even signs up for your product. Tools like Demostack, Storylane, and Reprise, make it possible to create interactive demos often in minutes. This opens up countless new “try it before you buy it” ungated product experiences without having to commit to the full freemium plan route.
6 additional engineering as marketing examples
Want some added inspiration? Here is some additional, bigger engineering as marketing examples that can generate more traffic, leads, and paid signups to your SaaS.
Most of these tools will take more than a day to build, but the payoff is often larger than the smaller examples shared above.
Bonus: all of these examples are sourced from within the MicroConf Slack community. If you are a founder, here is where you can apply to join this community.
1. SparkLoop Magic
SparkLoop’s Magic tool allows you to add a one-click opt-in link to any newsletter. This is particularly useful for tracking newsletter sponsorship attribution. In fact, according to SparkLoop’s data, adding this link boosts signups by 20-50%.
Not only will people likely see immediate value from using this free tool, but there is also a natural tie-in to their paid SaaS product, which is email referral software. The larger someone’s email list is, the more likely they will get value and need referral software.
2. Smooth Messenger’s SMS Gateway Comparison Tool
Smooth Messenger built this SMS Gateway comparison tool to collect and display pricing data from all of the major SMS gateways. This helps their customers decide which gateway to use when integrating an SMS solution into Zoho CRM.
In addition to being a lead gen tool, the founder also used this as a pilot project to trial two new developers before they started working on the core product.
3. DNSimple’s Zone Vision Tool
Another great engineering as marketing example is DNSimple’s Zone Vision Tool. It is a relatively simple tool that gives insightful diagnostics on DNS zone. The best part about it is it’s complementary to their core paid product.
Note: DNSimple is MicroConf’s 2022 DNS Partner.
4. DebugBear’s HTML Size Analyzer
Matt Zeunert has built some tools like this for his company, DeBugBear. The most popular of the tools is his HTML Size Analyzer. This tool breaks the HTML document size down by tag and attribute. It also helps you discover bloat like code duplication, large hydration state, and inline images.
These free tools are the highest-traffic pages on his site. In addition, any time he launches a new tool, he also does an individual ProductHunt launch for it, which raises not only awareness for this free tool but also his paid product.
5. Preceden’s DateTime.io
Preceden is a SaaS timeline maker. Matt, the founder, had an idea to create various date calculators on the site to drive leads. For instance, things like calculating how many days are between two dates, figuring out how old you are in days given your birthday, etc.
It didn’t take much time for him to build these calculators, and eventually, the traffic to these tools eclipsed the rest of the traffic on the site.
These calculators served as great top-of-funnel traffic. However, because they are so broad, only a small percentage end up converting to his paid product. So, he wound up moving these calculators to a separate domain, DateTime.io, where they sit today and earn some ad revenue.
He gets the best of both worlds. He gets a small number of new customers for his SaaS product and also earns ad revenue on the traffic.
6. Versoly’s SaaS Pages
Another great top of funnel traffic generator is Versoly’s SaaS Pages. This tool is basically an interactive swipe file full of screenshots, tips, and tricks to build the best SaaS landing page that actually converts. It generates thousands of visitors each month, and many end up learning about and signing up for Versoly.
***
As a technical founder, leaning into your strengths can help you market your business far better than just following the sales and marketing playbook that you think you should follow.
The key is to build scripts, templates, and tools that are complementary to your core paid product.
Want to dive deeper into the engineering as marketing concept? Check out our curated playlist.