A new marketing strategy for engineers who hate marketing

One thing I keep noticing with SaaS app builders is this strange paradox.

Most of us can build pretty complex systems. APIs, integrations, automation, AI features, data pipelines. No problem.

But the moment it comes to marketing the app, everything slows down.

Now suddenly we have to:

• write content

• do social media

• post on LinkedIn

• run ads

• build funnels

• do outreach

And a lot of engineers, like myself, simply hate doing this.

Not because marketing is bad, but because it often feels unnatural compared to building things.

Over time I started noticing something interesting: the builders who grow the fastest are often not the ones doing the most traditional marketing.

They are doing something called engineering-as-marketing.

Instead of trying to become great marketers, they simply build small useful tools that attract the exact people they want based on keyword research.

Examples for app builders could be things like:

• a website conversion calculator

• a theme performance analyzer

• a checkout UX audit tool

• a product description generator

• a bundle pricing simulator, etc

These tools solve a small real problem for B2B users (kinda my niche right now)

A potential user searches for something like

“how to improve website conversion rate”

They land on your tool.

They use it.

They get value.

And now they trust the builder behind it.

At that point your app is no longer a random listing in the app store. It is the logical next step.

The key insight is that engineering becomes the marketing channel.

The tool itself does the discovery.

The tool qualifies the user.

The tool demonstrates your expertise.

And it scales much better than manually posting everywhere.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot while building our AI sales agent - https://www.aurevia.io/home/ - for SMB Shopify brands looking to improve their customer experience, sales and AOV.

A huge number of merchants struggle with things like:

• visitors browsing but not buying

• customers asking repetitive questions

• abandoned carts

• product discovery issues

Which is why I’m experimenting with tools that help merchants diagnose those issues first, before introducing the actual product.

Have you built any engineering-as-marketing tools for your apps?

If not, what free tool do you think people within your niche are interested in?