🧠 How to grow your SaaS by building free tools
Hey all!
Charlie here 👋
All SaaS businesses inevitably go through periods of stagnated growth.
An awesome way to combat this is to build free tools into new growth channels.
Today I’m going to break down how and why this strategy works.
Plus I’ll show you the top SaaS platforms using it to grow.
This week in IdeaHub…
-
The free tool strategy: How free tools are amazing growth channels.
-
Best ways to use free tools: How to use free tools to test new ideas and create SEO goldmines.
-
Free tools in action: The OG in free tools and one solo founder having massive success.
Let’s jump in… 👇
Join 600+ tech peeps learning to build SaaS products every week for free on IdeaHub.
1. The free tool strategy
It’s important to understand we’re not talking about free trials here.
We’re talking about separate free versions of paid-for products that require no signup whatsoever.
You might be thinking to yourself:
“How can that be of any use to my business?”
Well, to answer that, you have to understand two big reasons customers resist buying your product:
-
They don’t trust you and/or your product to solve their problem.
-
They can’t see results quickly enough to make a buying decision.
Building a separate free tool instantly breaks down both of these barriers.
Firstly, a free tool is much easier to trust as there is ‘no harm done’ if it doesn’t work out.
Secondly, having no signup, payments or onboarding means customers can see the power of your product much more quickly.
All this means you have a better chance of customers trying out your free tool than your core product.
The trick is to heavily limit the feature set of the free tool and include a strong call to action to drive customers back to your paid-for product.
This naturally means more signups overall than if you had no free tool at all.
2. The best ways to use free tools
Free tools can provide more than just a growth channel.
They can be real assets in a few different ways:
Testing new ideas
Say you’re at a crossroads.
You’re trying to decide whether to expand your product into a new niche or stay put and double down on your efforts.
It’s a big decision to make and could have a huge impact on your future success.
Instead of choosing to go all-in on one or the other, you could spin off your core product into a free tool and use it to validate the new market.
If it shows promise, fold it back into your paid-for product, or simply ditch it if it doesn’t work out.
Building SEO
Free tools have huge search volumes.
We’ve all searched “free tool for [X]” when we know what we need, but we just don’t want to pay…
Launching a free tool therefore provides the perfect opportunity to match searcher intent and start driving organic traffic.
Plus, if it’s on a separate domain, you can start creating backlinks back and forth from your paid-for product in all of your blog posts.
3. Free tools in action
Ahrefs
The SaaS that made this strategy famous is Ahrefs.
It’s the number one platform for marketers to research new SEO opportunities.
Almost every vertical feature in their paid-for product is also available as a free tool.
It’s especially important as their products are aimed at users who aren’t usually the buying decision-makers in a business.
So when the free tools deliver value, marketers can evidence this to the real decision-makers.
And Ahrefs get the benefit of leveraging the existing trust circles of the organisation to close deals.
Pally
Pally is a social media management tool built by solo founder Tim Bennetto.
So far he’s built 9 (!) free tools each focusing on one feature of Pally.
But he’s also taking a unique approach:
He’s acquiring free tools as well as building them himself.
Subscribe to IdeHub for the best growth, marketing, tech and product development strategies for your SaaS.
Free tools are awesome for getting customers. Before creating one, it's useful to think about where in the buying journey your ideal customer is, and position the tool accordingly. If you position the tool in the early stage of the buying journey, your product will be top of mind later on. The less competitors they're aware of, the more chance you have at a sale.
For example, I had a QR code generator for wedding invitations. When generating their free QR code, users would also see my wedding website creator and sign-up, long before they considered having a website and began researching other options.
Nice use of this as a QR generator, I've not heard of that before 👍
Great post Charlie, free tools are indeed a good way to drive traffic.
Adding that clear CTA after usage is a great conversion tip, thanks!
No problem. Yep super important to have that CTA in there!
Charlie, thanks for the insights! Your piece on using free tools to grow SaaS businesses is spot-on. Your clear explanations and real-world examples, like Ahrefs and Pally, make it easy to grasp the concept. I'm excited to explore how we can apply these ideas to our company, logomakerr.ai (https://logomakerr.ai/). Offering a free logo design tool could be a game-changer for us.
This sparked some exciting possibilities for us. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and keep up the great work at IdeaHub!
Yeah I can definitely see that working for you guys! That's exactly the kind of product it works really well for! Best of luck with it.
Don't forget to check out the newsletter!
Great post! I think this is a great strategy.
Thanks for Sharing
Very helpful, thanks for sharing.
free tools a very powerful if you know how to implement them
Great piece of content. Very helpful. I will surely follow it. Thanks
Thanks for your sharing, I am trying to start to create some free tools also.
I have changed my way of thinking! I am simply impressed.
So glad it's helped! I love this community!
Such a cool method of finding early users. It's also a solid way to polish up your design and development skills before diving into the real deal.
Currently doing that with Kamemail. Started as an email gen tool to help me accelerate my outreach process. Thought it's helpful for me so why not with the general audience.
It's amazing how much feedback you can get if you don't put any paywalls in your product, certainly helped me!
Totally, you instantly break down all the barriers in customers' heads. Your product looks ideally suited to this
Does anyone have successful stories of doing this the other way around: building small free tools and unifying them into a full product?
Hmm I can't say I've heard of that myself, but sounds interesting.
It's a great strategy indeed, and we are trying something similar for our PLG too. But the question of revenue will come down the line. Currently we are only struggling with separating the premium features from the free ones.
I think this is a great strategy for getting distribution(better if the output of these tools are something that they share with people) One caveat is to correctly estimate the time needed to build out free tools vs X list of other things that you can do and not spend too much time building out for rapid experiments.
That's a great point about it being a shareable result. Might steal that for myself ;)
Free product as marketing is a great idea given two condition is true:
If you have this two it will be an easy task as you will already know where to market the product, else you will just building something that is not useful for others.
As for myself I am building free tool to test out the idea, marketing channel and the demand of the idea. At the end I will ask for email and feedback. If I manage to drive traffic and get early signup then I will build a complete version of the product ( which I am doing right now checkout creativeblogtopic.com ).
Here is an article about the rules and the idea behind side project as marketing: Grow Your Product Through Side-Project Marketing
Yes it can be really useful for validating new ideas. Best of luck!
The examples of Ahrefs and Pally are very interesting case study.
This can be a way to overcome the typical trust and visibility barriers in SaaS as a startup.
A rabbit hole that I am going to pursue.
Great post! I think this is a great strategy.
It can help with traffic + everyone loves a tool they can use and mess around with without being concerned about cost.
This was my thinking behind building ToolFinder AI for findcool.tools
Hey, thanks so much!
It definitely is a great strategy. findcooltools looks really cool too!
Thanks for the article, Charlie. I'm going to use some of those ideas.
Glad it's helpful!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago
This comment was deleted 3 years ago