How I Grew My App to $13K/month (Even Though I Hate Marketing)

Almost 1 million people have visited my website thanks to this strategy.

This is Banu, a builder from India who built a $13,000 MR SAS. But here's the crazy part: he spends $0 on marketing and still gets thousands of people visiting his website every 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 Banu did something different.

This is the cheapest, lowest-effort way to drive traffic to your SAS.

I brought Banu onto the channel to share his exact strategy. 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 you can't miss. Let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story.

All right, welcome to the channel, Banu. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story.

My name is Banu and I built two SAS products. I grew one of them to 6,000 MR and I sold it for $250,000 and grew the other one, SiteGPT, to 13,000 MR. I launched SiteGPT 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, Banu, to talk about engineering as marketing. But first I want to understand what does your app do? What is SiteGPT and how does it make $13,000 a month?

So SiteGPT is short for GPT for your site. It's like giving your website its own little brain. You have a 24/7 AI assistant that answers everything about your business content. More than a million people have come to our website since launch, and we haven't done any paid marketing. Everything has been through organic channels. 60 to 70% of traffic is from Google. And in Google, almost 90% of traffic is from these free 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 SAS or a website? What is it?

Yeah. SiteGPT is a straightforward SAS product. You go to the website, create a chatbot, put it on your website, and pay a monthly fee based on how many chatbots you need, how much content you have, or how many messages you expect each month. So we get around 50,000 visitors a month. In those 50,000, around 200 people convert to leads. In those 200 leads, around 60 convert to trials, and in those 60, 25 to 40% end up becoming customers. Average revenue per customer is around $100 and we have around 130 businesses. So that's how we got to 13,000 MR. One other thing SiteGPT has is a very large customer lifetime value. Lifetime value is how much revenue you make from a single customer over their lifetime. For SiteGPT it comes down to around $1,700 to $1,800.

Okay, Banu, thank you for sharing all those metrics with the audience. I think it's super cool that you're transparent. 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 8 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 wouldn't have any expenses and just started building my own things. One of them took off. It went to around 5,000 to 6,000 MR. 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 thought, why not spend a weekend to figure out what this AI thing is? The best way for me to learn is to build something with it. I had 100 Feather customers, so what can I build for them? Everyone has a blog, so I thought, why not build a chatbot that can answer everything that is on their blog? While I was building it, I realized I shouldn't limit this to the 100 people of Feather. So I separated it out. I took two weeks from idea to launch. When I launched it, it got to like 10,000 MR within the first month. It got so much traction that I had no time to work on my actual product. So I thought I need to sell this to someone who is capable of making it better. I sold my previous SAS product, Feather, for $250,000, completely started focusing on SiteGPT and growing it. That's what I'm doing now.

You showed me earlier that insane amount of traffic you got from Google search, 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. I built dozens of free tools, almost 50 free tools in total. You upload a PDF and you get markdown out of it. Or a chatbot name: you give some information about what your chatbot is and it creates a chatbot name. I should be able to 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. We get around 300 leads. The majority of these leads are from Google, and I really think this is the easiest, low-cost, low-effort way to drive traffic to your SAS product. If I want to create a new tool, it takes less than 5 minutes for me to do it because I already have all these tools. I can just tell Cursor, "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 5 minutes. That's how easy it is to get traffic from these tools.

Banu'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. That is why we launched Starter Story Build. It's our program where we 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 boot camps and launched their first apps. And with the new year coming up, we have a ton of boot camps 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 Banu at checkout for a special offer on one of our Starter Story Build boot camps coming up in the new year. That's B-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, Banu, I really like this, especially because the vibe I 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, well, I've already built something, they've got a SAS, 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 would do if I had to go back and create all these tools from scratch. Step one: go to Ahrefs, go to Keywords Explorer, and I leave this blank. This is a trick I found someone sharing on Twitter. Just click on search. This is especially useful if I don't exactly know what keyword people are using to search for it. I'd rather get all the keywords. Step two: start applying filters to get my target keywords. For example, we'll start with an include keyword. I'm building AI SAS, so I would include AI as one of the keywords. Let's say I want to create a generator kind of tool. I would use generator and you will see all keywords that are AI generator. 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 was 87 keyword difficulty. Step three: add a KD filter. Let's say I only want to get keywords with less than 10 keyword difficulty. I put it as 10 and then apply. Now I see all the AI generators that have very low keyword difficulty. Any decent website would be able to easily rank for these keywords. Step four: add volume filter. The main idea of engineering as marketing is to drive traffic to the website and hopefully convert some of this traffic to customers. So my next filter is volume. I need at least 1,000 monthly search volume. I'll apply 1,000. Here I would look for keywords that are relevant to my product. If you see AI reply generator, that is relevant to my product. You can also experiment with more filters like more types of keywords. For example, AI generator or AI builder, AI creator. Step five: list all of these keywords in a Notion page. Just list down, okay, these are my main keywords. For each keyword, this is the monthly global search volume and this is the keyword difficulty if I were to rank for that. Step six: think, if I were to build this tool, what CTA 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 chat with PDF, I will say something like, "Okay, you have tried chatting with one PDF. What if you could create a chatbot with all of your business content? If you want to do that, try SiteGPT." Step seven: create a table with keyword as the main column and then volume, keyword difficulty, how much effort it's going to take for me to build this tool, and how relevant this free tool is to my main product. Once I have this table written down, I will prioritize it based on tools that have high volume, low keyword difficulty, that are easy to build and highly relevant to my product.

Banu, that was an amazing playbook. Thanks for sharing that step by step. For people watching this, hopefully you 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 Ahrefs for SEO for creating these free tools and I use SiteGPT mainly for website support. I use cal.com for booking calls with customers. I use Data First and PostHog for analytics. I use something called Cibili to get call recordings from users. I use Bento for sending emails and I use my previous product Feather for writing blog posts. I use Featurebase for getting feature requests and bug reports from customers. I use Mintlify for docs and I use Cloud Code for actually coding. And finally I use ChartMogul 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 SAS 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 user feedback guide you to figure out how the product should go forward, like what direction you want to take with the product. Let user feedback tell you. So that's what I would say to my past self.

That's great advice. Launch first, figure out what happens next. Thanks for coming on to the channel, Banu. 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. 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 because 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?

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 for me to hear. And just seeing him walk through the keyword research stuff was pretty cool.

He also mentioned something that I thought was cool: 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 you can. He mentioned specifically that you can do it in like 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 4x4 boot camp, where you build four projects in four weeks. A lot of those are very similar, like side project type 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.