Turn a free tool into your best salesperson

0:00Think about the last time you used a free calculator or some online analyzing tool. You basically put in your URL, you get some numbers, and then you give your email address away because that's the way they gate it. So you have to get it somehow. The tool was basically doing sales for the company that built it. And it does it every day for every visitor without having to use a sales team. I'll show you how this works exactly and talk a little bit about the data and the companies that have a proven concept working.

0:31I'm Deian and this is Before They Buy. Most SaaS founders think that marketing means one of three things. You either write blog posts, you spend a lot of money on ads or you just post on social media. Blog posts however take months to rank, ads stop working the day you stop paying and social media resets every day especially with the algorithm them constantly changing. There's a fourth option that barely anyone talks about, and it outperforms all of those. It's building a free tool. And I'm not talking here about just some free trial

1:05of your product or some spinoff. It's a separate standalone tool that solves one little problem your buyer already has. Something they can use in 60 seconds without signing up for anything. The name for this is Engineering as Marketing. Justin Morris put it in his book, Traction as one of 19 channels for getting customers. But most SaaS founders, unfortunately, they just skip over it because to them, it doesn't really look like marketing. It looks like building a full-on site project.

1:36But let me convince you why this is actually worth a second look. Heaton Shah and Neil Patel spent 45k building a free content analysis tool for their company QuickSprout, and within four days, they generated almost 18,000 leads. Shah said, Out of all the advanced guides and content we've produced over the years, nothing has generated as much ROI as our free tool. $45,000 sounds like a lot, but if you compare this to ad spend,

2:06you'd need for 17,000 qualified leads in four days. It's just a fraction of what it would cost you. Now, the good thing is that the best free tools follow the same pattern. They solve the problem right before the one your product solves. Let's look at HubSpot. They sell marketing software and in 2007, they built something called a Website Grader, which was just a free tool where you put in your website URL and get a report on how your website performs when it comes to SEO, speed and so on.

2:37It's very simple, just one input, one result. At its highest peak, HubSpot was pulling 50,000 leads a month from this website grader. They didn't spend anything on ads, just people typing in the URL and getting the results back to them. The report shows you basically just what's broken and HubSpot has, of course, a product that fixes it. So the tool does the selling. HubSpot also didn't stop here because they built another tool, which was an email signature generator, which is just a very small little app

3:12that takes two minutes to use and it has captured over 273,000 leads from a tool that makes your email just look a little bit nicer. Clearbit did something different because their core product is an API for enriching lead data. This is not something most marketers set up themselves so they built something that's very helpful which is called Connect, a free chrome extension that enriches your gmail contacts so you just install it in the browser it works you don't need a developer and in just two months

3:43they got 30 000 users even from big companies like dropbox salesforce and uber the head of growth matt sorensen said building free products that showcase what our product can do has been our single largest source of inbound leads for our paid products. If we look at Moss's Open Site Explorer, a free tool for checking your backlinks, by 2013 it was driving 150,000 direct visitors just to Moss.

4:13This is their single biggest source of direct traffic. There's a reason these tools outperform blog posts and ads, because the person using a free calculator is already thinking about the problem. Someone who types their URL into HubSpot's website grader cares about their website performance right now. They are not a casual reader, but someone who is looking to solve a problem, and you just happen to be there solving it for free. The other cool thing about the tool is that it qualifies the lead for you.

4:43If someone grades their website and finds out that their SEO is poor, they don't need a sales call to understand why they need marketing software because the tool already shows it. And unlike an ad or a blog post, the tool also compounds. It gets shared, people link to it, it shows up in search results for free website grader or SEO checker. The longer it exists, the more leads it generates. An ad generates leads the week you run it, but a tool like this generates leads for years to come.

5:15And as I mentioned, HubSpot launched this website grader back in 2007, and now it's 2026. It's still generating leads. Obviously, this isn't limited to graders and calculators. The small freelance marketplace called Crew had some leftover photos from a shoot. And what they did was they just put it on a simple site called Unsplash, which is very well known for royalty-free images, what happened was that it cost them about $20 and a couple of hours of work,

5:46but in return, they got 50,000 visits on one day. Unsplash grew so big and was eventually acquired by a company for about $500 million, so the side project actually outgrew the company. Every tool that works follows the same five-point pattern. The first one is it solves an agent problem. It's not the same problem your product solves, but the one right before it. HubSpot, for example, doesn't give you free marketing software,

6:17but they show you why you need it. The other thing is it does one thing and one thing only. Again, HubSpot's tool has one input and one output. You put in your website URL, you get a score back. The moment you add a second feature you lose the simplicity that makes people actually use it. The third thing that works is it asks for an email, not up front, because there would be too much to ask, but after they get value, which is usually if you grade the website first, then ask them for the email

6:48to save or send the report, the value has to be first and you ask for something in return second. The fourth thing is it reveals a problem your product solves. So back to the grader, it doesn't just show you the score, but also what is broken on the website. and right next to the broken thing is a link to the product that magically fixes it. And last, it compounds. You build it once and it keeps working. The longer your tool is live, the more links and search traffic it will start collecting.

7:21Now ask yourself one question. What does my buyer Google right before they need my product? Let's assume you sell project management software. Maybe they're looking for a project timeline template. If you sell email marketing tools, maybe they want to check their email deliverability. If you sell accounting software, maybe they need a tax estimate calculator. Pick just one, build the simplest version you can from it, just one input and one output, and ask for an email before they can save the result.

7:54Then link the result to your product. This doesn't require really a big budget, especially these days. You can use Claude and whip it up in a few minutes, but a basic calculator like this should be live very easily on your website. And then the ROI doesn't come from how much you spend building it. It comes from the fact that every person who is using it already thinks about the problem you solve. This is Before They Buy. I'm Deian. See you next week.