📂 Engineering as marketing: Your product is my marketing opportunity

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📖 The following is an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, Founding Marketing. It's a (very) rough draft of thoughts, notes, and research... so feel free to reply with your feedback on what I should expand more on and what needs to be clarified. Enjoy!

Mikael, founder of Crew, explained how Engineering as marketing saved their business: “We had no money. We changed our business model and had 3 months worth of cash left to turn things around. If we didn’t we were toast. Done. We needed to find customers. But no one knew who we were. A marketing budget? Please. We were just trying to keep the lights on.”

They decided to give away for free all the extra photos they didn’t use that they had shot for their website redesign.

A Tumblr theme and three hours later, they launched Unsplash. Unsplash not only saved their startup, but turned into a standalone product that generates over 11 million unique visitors a month.

The key to Engineering as marketing projects success goes back to the core of great marketing today: give before you get.

The truth is that it doesn’t matter what form your marketing takes as long as your potential customers are finding value in it.

It’s important to note that Engineering as marketing projects isn’t a sneaky way of trying to trick people into using your product. It’s to create value for others by creating tools, apps, websites, or a software — a value that is related to your core business that you build on the side without losing your main focus.

In return, some of those people who like what you create on the side end up wanting to learn more about you.

The best Engineering as marketing projects aim to be useful and valuable; Aim to solve a real problem for free.

When you’re generous, your audience will be too. Don’t get link-happy back to your main website. You genuinely want to be generous, not manipulative.

Engineering as marketing projects are easier to pull off with partners. Find other companies who you share target customers with and find something to collaborate on.

Engineering as marketing projects can be refreshing and exciting for your team — a breath of fresh air away from blog posts and ads, which can get monotonous.

Keep it small and low maintenance. Make sure it’s not too complicated or time consuming. The last you want is to have a free product that is costing you more than it brings in return.

Baremetrics created a free forecasting tool.

Baremetrics also built a build vs buy calculator to show you why it’s better to buy something off the shelf.

Moz created a free version of their product to find keywords. This alone drives hundreds of thousands of website visitors every month.

Datanyze’s Insider: Datanyze offers a suite of sales intelligence products that include predictive analytics, lead prospecting, data enrichment, and more. Its free insider Chrome extension and domain analyzer tool helps sales people qualify leads by providing data for company websites.

CoSchedule created a free headline analyser

Hubspot created a free email signature generator.

This has generated thousands and thousands of leads for them.

Buffer created a free tool to help you make social media content.

Shopify created Hatchful, a free logo generator to help you get up and running with an online store.

Memberstack created free Webflow templates and cloneable assets you can use for your own site.

Quick Sprout spent $45,000 on building a free website analyzer. Within the first four days 17,747 people ran 22,562 URLs through the free tool.

Github’s Atom: Atom is an open-source text-editor. It was designed by developers at Github to offer better extensibility for writing code. The developer community has helped create 800 different packages for Atom, and Atom has been starred 34,199 times on GitHub. GitHub provides free public hosting for developer projects. Its paid plan allows individuals and businesses to host private repositories.

Docker’s Container Engine: Docker’s core product is its open source docker container—a standardized unit for software development that wraps your application file system into a universal container. Docker’s open-source projects have been downloaded by over 450 million people, helping the company reach massive distribution. The company monetizes by charging for hosted containers on Docker’s cloud, as well as extra services like support.

WPEngine’s speed test.

Sticker Mule created this tool to remove background images, which is a common task when you’re creating stickers.

Buffer created this salary calculator not only as a part of their marketing around being an open startup but also to attract talent to work for them.

HubSpot signature generator and website analyzer.

It doesn’t matter what form your marketing takes as long as your potential customers are finding value in it

Aim to solve a real problem for free

Don’t forget to find a way to tie it back to your product

Examples:

• ProductWars
• Battle of the Brands
• TaskMagic by v.one
• How to say no by Pigeon
• How much to make an app by Z1
• Copywriting Prompts
• Side Project Led Growth by Michael Novotny

—Corey

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