Tools for growth

January 15, 2024

Building a startup is hard. It requires making something that people want, getting the right team onboard, establishing a winning culture, getting buy-in, ensuring that there's always enough cash in the bank, figuring out the right pricing model and finding sustainable ways to grow your customer base. There's of course a lot more that goes into it, but I want to focus on the last point – growing your startup.

Figuring out the right messaging and channels to reach your ideal customer is more art than science, and in my experience requires a lot of testing and iteration over an extended period of time. There's an incalculable number of ways to grow your startup – from reaching out directly to prospects via email, search and social media advertising, partnerships, PR and everything in between. But one tactic that I love and have experimented a lot with is what I'll call free tools.

Free tools are exactly as they sound - small products that are related to your main solution and that help users solve a specific problem for free. I love them and have found them tremendously effective over the years for a few reasons: they generally don't cost much to build and maintain, people love free stuff so tend to share these more with their friends and they provide affordable brand exposure & lead generation. Moreover, they're fun to build and to launch. Below are a few examples of free tools that I find interesting and that I believe marketers can draw inspiration from when thinking about building a free tool to grow their product's customer base.

Hubspot's Website Grader

When I started my career in growth at Pleo, we were looking for alternative ways to grow beyond paid social & SEO. We had been using Hubspot since day 1, and thus were very familiar with the brand and their marketing strategy. One of the things that we particularly liked about their marketing playbook and sought to draw inspiration from was their extensive library of free tools - from their Campaign Assistant, to their Persona Creator, Email Signature Generator and much more.

Hubspot's Website Grader

The most well-known free tool to come out of Hubspot's growth team is probably their Website Grader. Marketers looking to improve their site's performance can simply visit that website and get a quick evaluation of their website's most critical performance components - SEO, load speed, security, responsiveness, etc. Hubspot can then nudge people that score poorly to try out their CMS.

Pleo's Expense Report Generator

When you're trying to convert people that already know your solution exists, the tactics and strategy tend to be fairly straightforward. But what if your solution is novel and hasn't yet found its way into the mainstream? That's the position we were in in the early days of Pleo, when smart company credit cards was still a foreign concept to the vast majority.

Pleo's Expense Report Generator

To counter that, we set out to create a beautiful expense report generator. Our theory was that most people did not know what smart company credit cards were, and they were still doing expense reports the old fashioned way. We decided that we'd provide them with the most beautiful, seamless and simple tool to create expense reports. This gave Pleo a lot of free brand exposure to folks who might want to eventually switch to an easier way to report their expenses.

Clearbit's Weekly Visitor Report

Clearbit is a data enrichment platform that helps businesses enhance and enrich their customer data by providing detailed information about individuals and companies, including their demographics, interests, and online behavior. As a someone who's worked in growth for various B2B SaaS companies, Clearbit has been one of the tools I've relied on the most to help sales teams close more deals and improve ad retargeting.

Clearbit's Weekly Visitor Report

Clearbit has also been one of the companies I've most been fascinated with from a marketing standpoint since I've started my career. Similar to Hubspot, they owe some of their growth to their extensive offering of free tools. By far the one I've found most useful is their Weekly Visitor Report. By simply installing a snippet of JavaScript code to their website, users get, once a week, a free overview of the companies that have visited their website, ranked by number of visits. Of course, the number of companies shown is capped in order to nudge people to pay for their full product. It's a great example of a free tool that doesn't cost much to build and maintain, but surely provides outsized returns for Clearbit.

In this article, I've focused on B2B SaaS companies because it's what I'm most familiar with and curious about. But building free tools as part of your go-to-market tactics isn't limited to this class of company, and I believe that, if done right, it can be a low-cost and effective way to reach more potential customers and increase conversions.