Almost 1 million people have visited my website thanks to this strategy. This is Bhanu, a builder from India who built a $13,000 MRR SaaS. But here's the crazy part. He spends $0 on marketing and still gets thousands of people visiting his website every single month. I'm a builder, I'm not a marketer. I read all of your comments on our YouTube videos and I know you guys are always asking, building is cool but how do I market my app? Well, this video is for you. Most builders hate marketing their products but Bhanu did something different. This is the cheapest and low effort way to drive traffic to your SaaS. I brought Bhanu onto the channel to share his exact strategy and in this video we'll go over how he gets thousands of views on his website for free, his seven-step process that drives thousands of clicks every single month for $0, and why this strategy is perfect for builders who love building and hate marketing. If you're a builder, this is one that you cannot miss. Let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. Alright, welcome to the channel Bhanu. Tell me about who you are, what you built and what's your story. My name is Bhanu and I built two SaaS products. I grew one of them to $6,000 MRR and I sold it for $250,000 and grew the other one side GPT to $13,000 MRR. I launched side GPT back in March of 2023 and so far we have made around $500,000 in revenue. What's also cool is most of our customers come from the strategy called engineering as marketing and I'm very excited to share my own approach on that today. I'm really excited to have you on Bhanu to talk about engineering as marketing, but first I want to understand what does your app do, what is side GPT and how does it make $13,000 a month? The side GPT is short for GPT for your site. It's like giving your website its own little brain. You have like a 24-7 AI assistant that answers everything about your business content. More than million people come to our website so far since the launch and we haven't done any kind of paid marketing. Everything has been through organic channels. 60 to 70% of traffic is from Google and in Google, almost 90% of Google's traffic is from these three tools that we made. Okay, that's amazing. Thank you for showing off your analytics, showing that this is a real thing and showing me all this free traffic that you got. We're going to be talking all about exactly how you got this free traffic without having to spend on marketing. Can you show me a little bit more about what your site does? Could you pull up your site and explain the business model? Is this a SaaS or a website? What is it? Yeah, yeah. So, side GPT is a straightforward SaaS product. You go to the website, create a chatbot and put it on your website and you just pay a monthly fee based on how many chatbots you need or how much content you have or how many messages you expect each month. So, we get around 50,000 visitors a month and in those 50,000, around 200 people convert to leads and in those 200 leads, around 60 convert to trials and in those 60, 25 to 40% actually end up becoming customers. Average revenue that we get per each customer, it's around $100 and we have around 130 businesses. So, that's how we got to 13,000 MRR. One other thing that side GPT has is it has a very large customer lifetime value. Lifetime value is how much revenue you make from a single customer over their lifetime. For side GPT, it comes down to around $1,700, $1,800. Okay, Bono, thank you for sharing all those metrics with the audience. I think it's super cool that you're super transparent to show that kind of stuff. So, thank you for doing that and it looks like amazing business. That LTV is really impressive. We're going to dive into the engineering as marketing, how you got all that free traffic. But first, I want to understand how do you even get into this? What's your background? How do you get into building apps and building stuff online? I was a software engineer right after college. I ended up joining a very large startup. Within eight months, I felt like this is not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So, I quit my job to build things on my own. I moved back to my parents' house so that I won't have any expenses and just started building my own things. One of them took off. It went to around $5,000, $6,000 MRR. It's called Feather. Around January or February of 2023, I started seeing all these new AI tools popping up on my Twitter feed. So, I felt like I was missing out. I felt like, okay, why not spend a weekend to just try and figure out what this AI thing is. The best way for me to learn is to build something with it. So, I thought, okay, I have 100 Feather customers. So, what can I build for them? Everyone has a blog. So, I thought, okay, why not build a chatbot that can answer everything that is on their blog. So, while I was building it, I realized that why should I limit this to 100 people of Feather. So, I thought, okay, why not separate it out. So, that's what I did. I took two weeks from an idea to get it to launch. When I launched it, it got to like 10,000 MRR within the first month itself. So, it got so much traction that I had no time to work on my actual product. So, I thought, okay, I need to sell this to someone who is actually capable of making it better. So, I sold my previous SaaS product Feather for $250,000. I completely started focusing on SiteGPT and growing it. So, that's what I'm doing now. You showed me earlier that insane amount of traffic that you got from Google search. And that is super cool. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on the channel, to talk about that. So, how do you get all this free traffic and essentially free customers to SiteGPT? The way I get all this traffic is through something called free tools marketing. Like, I build dozens of free tools, like almost 50 free tools we built in total. These are some of the free tools. You upload a PDF and you get marked on out of it or chatbot name. You give some information about what your chatbot is. It creates a chatbot name. I should be able to somehow relate this to my main product. So, people who use this tool should be a potential customer of SiteGPT. Right now, we get around 50,000 clicks from Google every month. And almost 90% of it is because of these free tools. And we get around 300 leads. Majority of these leads are from Google. And I really think this is like the easiest and low cost way and low effort way to drive traffic to your SaaS product. If I want to create a new tool, it takes less than five minutes for me to do it. Because I already have all these tools, I can just tell cursor, okay, look at these free tools. Now, in a similar way, create this new free tool. This is the keyword for it. And it will just build it out in less than five minutes. That's how easy it is to get traffic from these tools. Bhanu's strategy is super simple. And there's a lot of lessons you can take from it. But even the best marketing strategy means nothing without an actual product. And nowadays, AI has made it even easier to build than ever before. And that is why we launched Starter Story Build. It's our program where we will teach you how to spot an idea, build it fast with AI, and launch it to the world. Thousands of people have gone through our bootcamps and launched their first apps. And with the new year coming up, we have a ton of bootcamps that I think you're going to love. If you've made it this far into the video, I've got a very special offer for you. Just enter code Bhanu at checkout for a special offer on one of our Starter Story build bootcamps coming up in the new year. That's B-H-A-N-U at checkout. If you're ready to get off the sidelines and build something dope in 2026, then I hope to see you in there. Just click the link in the description to see that special offer and see if it might work for you. All right, let's get back to the interview. Okay, Bhanu, I really like this, especially because the vibe that I kind of get from here is that it's kind of fun to create these free tools. You're a builder, I'm a builder. I love building stuff. I hate doing sales, marketing, cold email, writing content. These are all things that engineers and a lot of builders watching this channel don't enjoy doing. And it's way better to do things that you enjoy doing. That's what I really like about this. So my next question for you is how can other people do this? A lot of people watching this will have already built something. They've got a SaaS. They've got something they want to figure out marketing. What would be your step-by-step playbook to get started with free tools, or side project, or engineering as marketing in 2026, if they were to get started right now? This is exactly what I do. If I were to go back and create all these tools from scratch, step one would be go to HFs, go to Keywords Explorer, and I leave this as blank. Like this is a trick that I found someone sharing on Twitter and just click on search. This is especially useful if I don't exactly know what keyword people are using to search for it. So I would rather get all the keywords. And step two would be now we'll start applying filters to get to my target keywords. For example, we'll start with an include keyword. Like I'm building AI SaaS. So I would include AI as one of the keyword. Let's say I want to create a generator kind of tool. So I would use a generator. You will see all keywords that are AI generators. So this is how you get all the keywords that you might want to build. But this is still not enough. It's very difficult to rank for AI image generator. If you see here, it shows 87 keyword difficulty. Step three, I will add a KD filter. Let's say I only want to get keywords with less than 10 keyword difficulty. So I just put it as 10 and then apply. So now I see all the AI generators that have very low keyword difficulty, like less than 10. Like any decent website would be able to easily rank for these keywords. And then step four would be I would add volume filter. So the main idea of like this engineering as marketing is to drive traffic to the website and hopefully convert some of this traffic to customers. So my next filter is going to be volume. Okay, I need at least 1000 monthly search volume. So like I'll just apply 1000. So here I would look for keywords that are relevant to my product. If you see AI reply generator, that is relevant to my product. So you can also experiment with more filters, like more types of keywords. For example, AI generator or AI builder, AI creator. Step five, I list all of these keywords in a Notion page. Just list them. Okay, these are my main keywords. And for each keyword, this is the monthly global search volume. And this is the keyword difficulty if I were to rank for that. And step six would be now I'll think of, okay, if I were to build this tool, what city I would I add below this tool so that I can drive traffic to my main product through this tool? For example, if my product is a chart with PDF, so I will say something like, okay, you have tried chatting with one PDF. What if you can create a chart but with all of your business content? So if you want to do a tri side GPT, so like something like this, I will think of CTS for all the potential keywords that I want to rank for. And finally, step seven would be I'll just create a table with the keyword as the main column and then volume keyword difficulty, how much effort it's going to take for me to build this tool. How relevant is this free tool to my main product? So once I have this table written down, I will just prioritize it based on tools that have high volume, low keyword difficulty that are easy to build and highly relevant to my product. And then just prioritize based on that. Bonner, that was an amazing playbook. Thanks for sharing that step by step for people watching this. Hopefully enjoyed it. Leave a comment if you got value out of that playbook. I want to move over to tech stack and cost. I know you're building this pretty much as a solo dev. What is your stack? How do you build this? What tools are you using? I use HREFS for SEO for creating these free tools. And I use side GPT mainly for website support. I use KL.com for booking calls with customers. I use data fast and post hog for analytics. I use something called CBLI to get call recordings from users. I use bento for sending emails. And I use my previous as product feather for writing blog posts. And I use feature pace for getting feature requests and bug reports from customers. I use mint lifi for docs. And I use clout code for actually coding with AI. And finally, I use chartmuggle for my subscription analytics. Last question that we ask all founders who come onto Starter Story. What would be your advice if you could go back in time before the successful projects? Or for anyone watching this that wants to build SaaS and do free tools marketing like you. What would be your advice? I would not spend months and months on launching something. I would say just launch with a very core feature of your product. And then let users feedback guide you to figure out how the product should go forward. Like what direction you want to take with the product. Let's users feedback tell you. So that's what I would say to my past self if I were to go back. That's great advice. Launch first, figure out what happens next. Thanks for coming onto the channel, Bonnu. Thanks for sharing everything, all your analytics, all your playbooks, free tools marketing. I think people are going to love this video. So thanks for coming on. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm surprised we haven't had an interview yet where we've really gone in depth on engineering as marketing, free tool marketing, side project marketing. It's one of my favorite things, especially for I know a lot of builders watch the channel. If you hate marketing and you suck at marketing, it's going to be a long road to get good at it. Why not just do the thing that you're already good at, which is building stuff and finding a way to market that way? What do you think? Yeah, that's kind of exactly what I was thinking. This is almost like a little hack that lets you drive traffic and focus on what he likes to do. That was really fun, I think, for me to hear and just see him walk through the keyword research stuff. All that is pretty cool. He also mentioned something that I thought was cool was how with now with AI, these tools are really easy to create. I remember a few years ago, I was doing a lot of free tools marketing for Starter Story, and it was kind of a pain to build before the days of AI. But now he mentioned specifically that you can do it in five minutes, especially if you already have existing tools. So you just say, hey, do it like this, but for this keyword. That's super cool. And it reminds me of one of our boot camps, the four by four boot camp, where you build four projects in four weeks. And a lot of those are very similar, like side project type of tools for anyone watching at this point in the video. I think if you have a business, that is a great boot camp to take and maybe come out of it with four side projects in four weeks. So if you are interested in that boot camp, I will put a link in the description. That is it for this episode. Thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
