50 free tools built total
Bhanu and his team built approximately 50 free tools to attract search traffic, each linked back to SiteGPT.
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The Marketing Playbook That Grew My App to $13K/month | Starter Story
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Sep 9, 2026
Where this was said
Engineering as Marketing: The Free Tools Strategy
At 10:48 · chapter starts 10:40
This is the centrepiece of the episode. Bhanu explains that he built approximately 50 free tools — things like a PDF-to-Markdown converter and an AI chatbot name generator — each chosen specifically because the people likely to use it are also potential SiteGPT customers [1] — Bhanu "90% of SiteGPT's Google search traffic comes not from the main product but from ~50 free tools Bhanu built. Each tool targets a low-competi…" 10:35 . He gets around 50,000 clicks from Google per month, and roughly 90% of that traffic is driven by these tools rather than the main product landing pages [2] — Bhanu "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." 04:40 . The key insight is alignment: every tool must be adjacent enough to SiteGPT's core offering that the user it attracts is a plausible paying customer. Bhanu then reveals the AI-era advantage: with Cursor, he can now build a new tool in under five minutes by pointing the AI at an existing tool template and specifying the target keyword. What was once a multi-day build is now a lunch-break task.
Build a New SEO Tool in 5 Minutes With AI
With AI coding tools like Cursor, Bhanu replicates an existing free tool for a new keyword in under 5 minutes. What used to be a multi-day build is now a lunch-break task.
New tool built in under 5 minutes
With AI coding tools like Cursor, Bhanu can now create a new free marketing tool in less than 5 minutes by referencing existing tools.
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