This content details an effective "engineering as marketing" strategy, specifically through the creation of free tools, which allows builders to drive significant organic traffic and acquire customers for their SaaS products without traditional marketing spend.
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Almost 1 million people have visited my
website uh thanks to this strategy.
>> This is Bonu, a builder from India who
built a $13,000 MR SAS. But here's the
crazy part. He spends 0 on marketing and
still gets thousands of people visiting
his website every single month.
>> I'm a builder. I'm not a marketer.
>> I read all of your comments on our
YouTube videos, and I know you guys are
always asking, "Building is cool, but
how do I market my app?" Well, this
video is for you. Most builders hate
marketing their products, but Bonu did
something different.
>> This is the cheapest and loweffort way
to drive traffic to your SAS.
>> I brought Bonu onto the channel to share
his exact strategy. And in this video,
we'll go over how he gets thousands of
views on his website for free, his
sevenstep process that drives thousands
of clicks every single month for $0, and
why this strategy is perfect for
builders who love building and hate
marketing. If you're a builder, this is
one that you cannot miss. Let's dive in.
I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story.
All right, welcome to the channel, Bonu.
Tell me about who you are, what you
built, and what's your story.
>> My name is Banu and I built two SAS
products. I grew one of them to 6,000 MR
and I sold it for $250,000
and grew the other one, Site GPT, to
13,000 MR. I launched Site GPT back in
March of 2023 and so far we have made
around $500,000
in revenue. What's also cool is most of
our customers come from the strategy
called uh engineering as marketing and
I'm very excited to share my own
approach on that today.
>> I'm really excited to have you on Banu
to talk about engineering as marketing.
But first I want to understand what does
your app do? What is site GPT and how
does it make $13,000 a month?
>> So site GPT it's short for GPT for your
site. It's like giving your website its
own little brain. Like you have like a
24/7 AI assistant that answers
everything about your business content.
More than million people come to our
website so far since the launch. And we
haven't done any kind of paid marketing.
Everything has been through organic
channels. 60 to 70% of traffic is from
Google. And in Google like almost 90% of
Google's traffic is from these free
tools that we made.
>> Okay, that's amazing. Thank you for
showing off your analytics, showing that
this is a real thing, and showing me all
this free traffic that you got. We're
going to be talking all about exactly
how you got this free traffic without
having to spend on marketing. Can you
show me a little bit more about what
your site does? Could you pull up your
site and explain the business model? Is
this a SAS or it's a website? What is it?
it?
>> Yeah. Yeah. So, SiteJ, it's a
straightforward SAS product. You go to
the website, create a chatbot and put it
on your website and you just pay a
monthly fee based on how many chat bots
you need or how much content you have or
how many messages you expect uh each
month. So we get around 50,000 visitors
a month and in those 50,000 around 200
people convert to leads and in those 200
leads around 60 convert to trials and in
those 60 25 to 40% actually end up
becoming customers. Average revenue that
we get per each customer it's around
$100 and we have around 130 businesses.
So that's how we got to 13,000 MR. One
other thing like site GPT has is it has
a very large customer lifetime value.
Lifetime value is like how much revenue
you make from a single customer over
their lifetime. For site GPT it comes
down to around 1700 $1,800.
>> Okay, Bono, thank you for sharing all
those metrics with the audience. I think
it's super cool that you're super
transparent to show that kind of stuff.
So, thank you for doing that and it
looks like amazing business. That LTV is
really impressive. We're going to dive
into the engineering as marketing, how
you got all that free traffic. But
first, I want to understand how do you
even get into this? What's your
background? How do you get into building
apps and building stuff online?
>> I was a software engineer. Right after
college, I ended up joining a very large
startup. Within 8 months, I felt like
this is not what I wanted to do for the
rest of my life. So, I quit my job to
build things on my own. I moved back to
my parents house so that I won't have
any expenses and just started uh
building my own things. One of them took
off. It went to around 5,000 6,000 MR.
It's called Feather. Around like January
or February of 2023, I started seeing
all these new AI tools popping up on my
Twitter feed. So, I felt like I was
missing out. I felt like, okay, why not
spend a weekend to just try and figure
out like what this AI thing is. The best
way for me to learn is to build
something with it. So, I thought, okay,
I have 100 feather customers, so what
can I build for them? Everyone has a
blog. So I thought okay why not build a
chatbot that can answer everything that
is on their blog. So while I was
building it I realized that why like why
should I limit this to 100 people of
feather. So I thought okay why not
separate it out. So that's what I did. I
took 2 weeks from an idea to get it to
launch. When I launched it it got to
like 10,000 MR within the first month
itself. So it got so much traction that
I had no time to work on my actual
product. So I thought okay I need to
sell this to like someone who is
actually capable of making it better. So
I sold my previous SAS product fee for $250,000
$250,000
completely started focusing on site GPT
and growing it. So that's what I'm doing now.
now.
>> You showed me earlier that insane amount
of traffic that you got from Google
search and that is super cool and that's
one of the reasons why I wanted to bring
you on the channel to talk about that.
So how do you get all this free traffic
and essentially free customers to site GBT?
GBT?
>> The way I get all this traffic is
through something called free tools
marketing. Like I built dozens of free
tools like almost 50 free tools we built
in total. These are some of the free
tools. You upload a PDF and you get
markdown out of it or chatbot name. You
give some information about what your
chatbot is. It creates a chatbot name. I
should be able to somehow relate this to
my main product. So people who use this
tool should be a potential customer of
site GPT. Right now we get around uh
50,000 clicks from Google every month
and almost 90% of it is because of these
free tools and we get around 300 leads.
Majority of these leads are from Google
and I really think this is like a
easiest and low cost way and low effort
way to drive traffic to your SAS
product. If I want to create a new tool,
it takes less than 5 minutes for me to
do it because I already have all these
tools. I can just tell cursor, okay,
look at these free tools. Now, in a
similar way, create this new free tool.
This is the keyword for it. And it will
just build it out in less than 5
minutes. That's how easy it is to get
traffic from uh these tools.
>> Bananu's strategy is super simple and
there's a lot of lessons you can take
from it. But even the best marketing
strategy means nothing without an actual
product. And nowadays, AI has [music]
made it even easier to build than ever
before. And that is why we launched
Starter Story Build. It's our program
where we will teach you how to spot an
idea, build it fast with AI, and launch
it to the world. Thousands of people
have gone through our boot camps and
launched their first apps. And with the
new year coming up, we have a ton of
boot camps that I think you're going to
[music] love. If you've made it this far
into the video, I've got a very special
offer for you. Just enter code Bonu at
checkout for a special offer on one of
our starter story build boot [music]
camps coming up in the new year. That's
BH NU at checkout if you're ready to get
off the sidelines and build something
dope in 2026. Then I hope to see you in
there. Just click the link in the
description to see that special offer
and see if it might work for you. All
right, let's get back to the interview.
Okay, Bono, I really like this,
especially cuz the vibe that I kind of
get from here is that it's kind of fun
to create these free tools. You're a
builder. I'm a builder. I love building
stuff. I hate doing sales, marketing,
cold email, writing content. These are
all things that engineers and a lot of
builders watching this channel don't
enjoy doing. And it's way better to do
things that you enjoy doing. That's what
I really like about this. So, my next
question for you is, how can other
people do this? A lot of people watching
this, well, I've already built
something, they've got a SAS, they've
got something they want to figure out
marketing. What would be your
step-by-step playbook to get started
with free tools or side project or
engineering as marketing in 2026 if they
were to get started right now?
>> This is exactly like what I do if I were
to like go back and create all these
tools from scratch. Step one would be go
to HFS, go to keywords explorer, and I
leave this as blank. Like this is a
trick that I found someone sharing on
Twitter and just click on search. Like
this is especially useful if I don't
exactly know what keyword people are
using to search for it. Right? So I
would rather get all the keywords and
step two would be now we'll start
applying filters to get to my target
keywords. For example, we'll start with
an include keyword like I'm building AI
SAS. So I would include AI as a one of
the keyword. Let's say I want to create
a generator kind of tool. So I would use
a generator. you will see all keywords
that are AI generator. So this is how
you get all the keywords that you might
want to build. But this is still not
enough. It's very difficult to rank for
AI image generator. If you see here, it
was 87 keyword difficulty. Step three, I
will add a KD filter. Let's say I only
want to uh get uh keywords with less
than 10 keyword difficulty. So I just
put it as 10 and then apply. So now I
see all the AI generators that have very
low keyword difficulty like less than 10
like any decent website would be able to
easily rank uh for these keywords. And
then step four would be I would add
volume filter. So the main idea of like
this engineering as marketing is to
drive traffic uh to the website and
hopefully convert uh some of this
traffic to customers. So my next filter
is going to be volume. Okay. I need at
least 1,000 monthly uh search volume. So
like I'll just apply thousand. So here I
would look for keywords that are
relevant to my product. If you see AI
reply generator that is relevant to my
product. So you can also experiment with
more filters like more types of
keywords. For example, AI generator or
AI builder, AI creator. Step five, I'll
list all of these keywords in a notion
page. Just list down. Okay, these are my
main keywords and for each keyword uh
this is the monthly global search volume
and this is the keyword difficulty if I
were to rank for that. And step six
would be now I'll think of okay if if I
were to build this tool what CTA would I
add below this tool so that I can drive
traffic to my main product through this
tool. For example, if my product is a
chart with PDF, so I will say something
like, okay, you have tried charting with
one PDF. What if you can create a
chatbot with all of your business
content? So if you want to do that, try
site GPT. So like something like this, I
will think of CTS for all the potential
keywords that I want to rank for. And uh
finally step seven would be I'll just
create a table with uh keyword as the
main column and then volume keyword
difficulty. How much effort it's going
to take for me to build this tool. How
relevant is this free tool to my main
product. So once I have this table
written down, I will just prioritize it
based on uh tools that have high volume,
low keyword difficulty, that are easy to
build and highly relevant to my product
and then just prioritize based on that.
>> Bonner, that was an amazing playbook.
Thanks for sharing that step by step.
For people watching this, hopefully
enjoyed it. Leave a comment if you got
value out of that playbook. I want to
move over to tech stack and cost. I know
you're building this pretty much as a
solo dev. What is your stack? How do you
build this? What tools are you using?
>> I use Hrefs for SEO for creating these
free tools and I use Site GPT mainly for
website support. I use cal.com for
booking calls with customers. I use data
first and post hog for analytics. I use
something called cibili to get call
recordings from users. I use bento for
sending emails and I use uh my previous
product feather for writing blog posts
and I use feature pace for getting
feature requests and bug reports uh from
customers. I use mintify for docs and I
use cloud code for actually coding with
the and finally I use chart mgle for my
subscription analytics. Last question
that we ask all founders who come onto
starter story. What would be your advice
if you could go back in time before the
successful projects or for anyone
watching this that wants to build SAS
and do free tools marketing like you?
What would be your advice?
>> I would not spend months and months on
launching something. I would say just
launch with a very core feature of your
product and then let users feedback
guide you to figure out how the product
should go forward like what direction
you want to take with the product. let's
uh users feedback uh tell you. So that's
uh what I would say to my past self if
if I were to go back. Yeah,
>> that's great advice. Launch first,
figure out what happens next. Thanks for
coming on to the channel, Banu. Thanks
for sharing everything, all your
analytics, all your playbooks, free
tools marketing. I think people are
going to love this video. So thanks for
coming on.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank
you so much. I'm surprised we haven't
had an interview yet where we've really
gone in depth on engineering as
marketing, free tool marketing, side
project marketing. It's one of my
favorite things, especially for I know a
lot of builders watch the channel. If
you hate marketing and you suck at
marketing, it's going to be a long road
to get good at it. Why not just do the
thing that you're already good at, which
is building stuff and finding a way to
market that way? Would you think?
>> Yeah, that's kind of exactly what I was
thinking. this is almost like a little
hack that lets you drive traffic and
focus on what he likes to do. That was
like really fun, I think, for me to
hear. And and just see him walk through
like the keyword research stuff, like
all that is pretty cool.
>> He also mentioned something that I
thought was cool was how like with now
with AI, these tools are really easy to
create. I remember a few years ago I was
doing a lot of free tools marketing for
starter story and it was kind of a pain
to build like before the days of AI, but
now you can. He mentioned specifically
that you can do it in like five minutes,
especially if you already have existing
tools. So, you just say, "Hey, do it
like this, but for this keyword." That's
super cool. And it reminds me of one of
our boot camps, the 4x4 boot camp, where
you build four projects in four weeks.
And a lot of those are very similar,
like side project type of tools. For
anyone watching at this point in the
video, I think if you have a business,
that is a great uh boot camp to take and
maybe come out of it with four side
projects in four weeks. So, if you are
interested in that boot camp, I will put
a link in the description. That is it
for this episode. Thank you guys for
watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
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