The Marketing Playbook That Grew My App to $13K/Month

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url	The Marketing Playbook That Grew My App to $13K/Month Bhanu Teja built Site GPT to \$13,000 MRR with \$0 spent on paid ads by leveraging "engineering as marketing" (free tools marketing). By building around 50 simple, highly-targeted free tools, he dr... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adl5_lJfkEE

TL;DR

Bhanu Teja built Site GPT to $13,000 MRR with $0 spent on paid ads by leveraging “engineering as marketing” (free tools marketing). By building around 50 simple, highly-targeted free tools, he drives over 50,000 monthly visitors to his site, capturing high-intent Google search traffic and routing them to his main paid SaaS product via contextual calls-to-action.

The Founder’s Story

Bhanu Teja started as a software engineer at a large startup. Within eight months, realizing corporate life wasn’t for him, he quit, moved back in with his parents to eliminate personal expenses, and began building his own projects.

His first successful project, Feather (a blogging platform), reached $5,000–$6,000 MRR. In early 2023, noticing a massive influx of AI tools, Bhanu decided to spend a weekend building an AI chat tool for his 100 Feather blogging customers so their readers could query their blog posts. Recognizing the wider potential, he spun it out as Site GPT. The app hit $10,000 MRR in its first month, prompting Bhanu to sell Feather for $250,000 to focus 100% on Site GPT.

The Building Process

Site GPT is a simple B2B SaaS that allows website owners to train a chatbot on their content and embed a 24/7 AI assistant. Bhanu spent two weeks taking the app from idea to launch. As a solo developer, he keeps the building process rapid.

To create his network of 50+ free tools, Bhanu utilizes generative AI tools like Cursor. Since he already has a base template of free tools, he can describe a new tool idea based on a specific keyword, and Cursor builds the new free utility in under five minutes.

Launch & Marketing Strategy: Engineering as Marketing

Bhanu’s primary customer acquisition channel is Engineering as Marketing (building free tools to drive SEO traffic). Out of 50,000 monthly visitors, 60–70% come organically from Google search, and 90% of that organic search traffic is driven by his free tools.

Bhanu’s 7-Step Free Tools Playbook:

Keyword Discovery: Go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, leave the search box blank, and click search to view all possible keywords.
Apply Feature Filters: Filter for terms relevant to tools (e.g., include keywords like “AI” and “generator”).
Keyword Difficulty (KD) Filter: Set the KD filter to < 10 to target low-competition keywords that are easy to rank for.
Volume Filter: Filter for keywords with a monthly search volume of at least 1,000.
Notion List: Document all target keywords, their search volumes, and difficulties.
Call-to-Action (CTA) Mapping: Create highly relevant CTAs for each tool. For example, on a “Chat with PDF” free tool, the CTA says: “You’ve tried chatting with one PDF. What if you can create a chatbot with all of your business content? Try Site GPT.”
Prioritization Matrix: Build a table ranking tools by search volume, low KD, build difficulty, and relevance, then build and launch them in order of priority.

Technology Stack

Coding IDE: Cursor (referred to as Cloud Code)
SEO Tool: Ahrefs
Chatbot Platform: Site GPT (used for its own customer support)
Scheduling: cal.com
Analytics: PostHog & Plausible (“data first”)
User Feedback & Recordings: Sybill (“cibili”)
Email Marketing: Bento
Blogging Platform: Feather (his previous product)
Bug Tracking & Feature Requests: Featurebase (“feature pace”)
Documentation: Mintlify (“mintify”)
Subscription Analytics: ChartMogul (“chart mgle”)

Key Quotes & Metrics

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): $13,000
Total Revenue Since Launch (March 2023): ~$500,000
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): $1,700 – $1,800
Average Revenue Per Customer: ~$100/month
Monthly Website Traffic: 50,000 visitors
Funnel Metrics: 50,000 visitors → 200 leads → 60 trials → 25-40% trial-to-paid conversion rate.
“I’m a builder. I’m not a marketer… This is the cheapest and low effort way to drive traffic to your SaaS.”
“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.”

seo-growth — Search engine optimization, listicle hijacking, and pSEO
vibe-coding — AI-powered development and rapid MVP creation