Typically your product team has a BIG roadmap, they grind through and release features into the main product. They then send an email to the product marketing person who is then responsible for "creating the assets":
And if you're lucky, you may get some external promotion for this new feature. Maybe just maybe...
We looked at our product and then at the market. We saw a gap for a feature/standalone product that we could build AND promote. Making noise in the market whilst also improving our product.
Here is our story...
Engineering as marketing is a creative and underutilised strategy to raise awareness of your SaaS. The idea is simple: you use the time of your team to build a calculator, different widgets, browser extensions, or micro sites that add value to your target customer AND complement your main product.
To make this work, the new product must:
Companies underestimate this channel mostly because of this main drawback — it takes away the time and focus of your team from the main product. This is the downside that must be managed. Though if managed correctly, it can be an effective way to get much more exposure than simply updating your main product.
When a new potential customer uses your new tool, not only are they getting exposed to your brand, but they are building their belief that they can get closer to their desired end result. If you are then able to subtly introduce them to next step in your funnel (e.g. your main product), then this can produce customers at a lower acquisition cost than say... paid ads.
You avoid the bloody red ocean of Facebook or Google Ads, in the ever increasing bid price for clicks. But more importantly, you are adding value to your market at zero cost to them. This almost always ends up with good things happening. Your customers may stay with you for longer, you will generate partnerships and people will refer you to their friends.
Through development and work on our main tool Perfomante (we create short 15-sec videos for Facebook Ads), we discovered that our clients would often add links to competitor ads from the Facebook Ad Library when trying to describe to us what they would like us to create.
Though more often than not, these links would expire as their competitor stopped running or tweaked their ads. In such cases, we had to ask the client to send the link again or make a screenshot, this was not an ideal solution. It wasn't convenient neither for the clients or us.
After several weekly meetings where we were discussing this problem with our development team, we came up with a crazy idea:
What if we put our main service on hold and create a Chrome extension that allows our clients to save videos to the cloud without even leaving the Facebook Ad Library?
Instead of starting to bang out code right away, we decided to test the waters. Even though we know our clients faced this problem, we were curious of how common other people faced this issue. We posted in two professional Telegram chats:
Originally, the text was in Russian and the message looked like this:
They each claimed that this extension can solve their problems. We put these people on the waiting list to send them the beta version first.
While we were looking through the Lamborghini website we came up with a cool name for our tool —
. As a result, after a week of sleepless nights and constant development, we finished the landing page, logo and the tool itself.
After running tests for several days, we decided to build an simpler "in-browser" version first, and then build the Chrome extension.
Then, once built, we had to raise as much awareness as possible. And of course, we first head to Product Hunt.
We created a sweet .gif, a mini video to introduce the product and various “how to use” screenshots:
Once live, we posted to a number of Telegram chats, used our own social media networks (both business and persona) and emailed all of our Perfomante clients, asking them to support us on Product Hunt.
The launch went well, we ended up in the middle of the pack on launch day, this brought us 230 registrations and 8 client demos for our main product (Perfomante) and many kind words from our current clients.
We now continue to raise awareness for Spyder through our own top of the funnel content.
Your additional tool must complement your main product and add value to your existing clients. This helps justify your investment in the side project.
In our case, Spyder made it possible to add reference links on competitor’s ads while working within Perfomante. Before, the links on the ads from Facebook Ads Library were temporary... not anymore.
Spyder also moves leads down our funnel: they can save references to competitor ads and once they have this library... now they need someone to help use this inspiration to make their own. That's where
comes in.
To make this link clear, we linked directly from the homepage of the tool, back our main product:
Of course, all Spyder users were emailed to inform them of our services at Perfomante.
As a result of Spyder launch, we recouped all the funds invested into the tool development (aprox. $5,000) by 2x whilst also:
Check our traffic stats on the Spyder domain here:
Here you can find other examples of how other companies used engineering as marketing to build free services which helped them do the same:
In summary, when looking to build out that new feature think: could this be spun out as a standalone free, mini product that we can launch on Product Hunt? ;)