---
title: Free tools as marketing for a paid product ("engineering as marketing")
slug: free-tools-as-marketing
summary: How Marc Lou builds single-feature, no-signup free mini-apps that plug his paid products — LogoFast ($10k+ for his course), Visualize Habits (10k visitors in 24h, habits imported into the paid tracker) — with rules for ideas, naming, the "seamless plug" and the Reddit trick of hiding the promo.
domain: marketing
tags: [free-tools, engineering-as-marketing, seo, lead-generation, indie-hacking]
related: [indie-marketing-channels-ranked, shareable-products-and-viral-loops, show-hn-and-reddit-launch-posts, programmatic-seo-for-indie-products, free-web-tools-feeding-quiz-funnel, lead-magnet-types-and-delivery]
sources: [yt:6SdpwZzUk_w, yt:D1BjJB-n9lg]
updated: 2026-10-24
---

# Free tools as marketing for a paid product

## TL;DR
- Build a standalone, 100% free, **one-feature** tool whose natural next step is your paid product.
- Ideas: (1) pull one paid feature out and give it away; (2) build the step your customer does *before* they need you.
- Name it for search ("user persona generator") or for exactly what it does ("LogoFast").
- No sign-up or email gate — the tool works on the home page.
- The plug must feel like the next step (import the user's data into the paid app), not like a banner ad.
- Ship in days, launch everywhere (HN, Product Hunt, directories, Reddit), repeat.

## Details
**Results Marc Lou reports.** LogoFast (logo/icon maker, built in 3 days) carries a sidebar promo for his coding course and made $10k+ for it; it still sent 583 visitors in a recent 30-day window.[^1] Visualize Habits shows what daily habits add up to in a year ("you'll read 8 books") and then offers to import those habits into his paid habit tracker with account creation; it got 10,000+ visitors in its first 24 hours.[^2][^3] A Reddit post of the tool got ~6,000 upvotes and fed the tracker for a long time.[^4]

**Where ideas come from.**[^5][^2]
- *Extract a paid feature*: Tweet Hunter's free "generate tweets like @person" tool with an ad for the paid product.
- *Walk back the customer journey*: what must someone think about or do before they would want your product? (Before a habit tracker: imagining the payoff of habits.)
- Persona generator for an AI marketing platform: search-friendly name, promo at the bottom.

**Requirements checklist.**[^3][^6]
1. Completely free.
2. One feature — two ideas means two tools.
3. Smart name: searchable keyword or literal description (people search it after seeing a TikTok).
4. No sign-up, no email, usable immediately.
5. Seamless plug: the paid product is the logical next step. Counter-example from Marc: a productivity-hacks list with a course ad at the bottom reads as an ad and does not convert.
6. Publish everywhere, then move on — do not polish.

**Reddit trick.** Most subreddits ban promotion, so Marc adds a URL flag that hides the promo and posts the clean tool; people who like it find his profile and links.[^7]

## Disagreements / caveats
- Built With Science found calculators rank well in AI answers and convert slightly better than blog posts ([[free-web-tools-feeding-quiz-funnel]]) — consistent with Marc, from a larger brand.
- Hiding the promo for Reddit is close to breaking subreddit rules; Marc admits re-adding it can get you banned.
- Traffic numbers are Marc's and partly pre-audience (2022–23); results vary with how shareable the output is.

## See also
- [[shareable-products-and-viral-loops]] — make the tool's output worth sharing
- [[lead-magnet-types-and-delivery]] — software as a lead-magnet format
- [[people/marc-lou]]

[^1]: yt:6SdpwZzUk_w @ 04:36 — Marc Lou
[^2]: yt:6SdpwZzUk_w @ 05:39 — Marc Lou
[^3]: yt:6SdpwZzUk_w @ 06:35 — Marc Lou
[^4]: yt:D1BjJB-n9lg @ 02:17 — Marc Lou
[^5]: yt:6SdpwZzUk_w @ 04:36 — Marc Lou
[^6]: yt:6SdpwZzUk_w @ 07:58 — Marc Lou
[^7]: yt:6SdpwZzUk_w @ 29:38 — Marc Lou