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Marketing›Indie SaaS & digital products

Free tools as marketing for a paid product ("engineering as marketing")

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.

Updated 2026-10-24·2 sources·free-toolsengineering-as-marketingseolead-generationindie-hacking

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.23 A Reddit post of the tool got ~6,000 upvotes and fed the tracker for a long time.4

Where ideas come from.52

  • 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.36

  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 (calculators) as SEO/AEO entry points into the 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

Footnotes

  1. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 04:36 — Marc Lou ↩

  2. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 05:39 — Marc Lou ↩ ↩2

  3. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 06:35 — Marc Lou ↩ ↩2

  4. I made these 10 SaaS (and earned $237,631) @ 02:17 — Marc Lou ↩

  5. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 04:36 — Marc Lou ↩

  6. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 07:58 — Marc Lou ↩

  7. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 29:38 — Marc Lou ↩