Founder Playbook · Starter Story
8 tactics from Bhanu
How I Grew My App to $13K/Month (Even Though I Hate Marketing)
Watch the full episode“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, majority of these leads are from Google. This is the easiest, low cost, low effort way to drive traffic to your SaaS product.”
Build ~50 free micro-tools — 90% of Google traffic comes from those tool pages
Bhanu built nearly 50 small free tools (PDF-to-markdown, chatbot name generator, etc.) each targeting a single low-KD keyword. They now pull 50K monthly Google clicks and ~300 leads, with 90% of his Google traffic coming from these tool pages rather than a blog.
“Go to Ahrefs keywords explorer and leave this as blank, just click search. Then apply filters: include 'AI' and 'generator', add a KD filter of less than 10, then a volume filter of at least 1000 monthly search volume. Now I see all the AI generators that have very low keyword difficulty.”
Ahrefs keyword filter stack: blank search, include term, KD under 10, volume over 1000
Bhanu's exact discovery flow is a blank Ahrefs search, then layered include-term, KD<10, and volume>=1000 filters. The blank-search trick surfaces keywords you'd never think to type, and the KD<10 ceiling lets any new domain rank without backlink work.
“I have 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 why should I limit this to 100 people. I took 2 weeks from idea to launch.”
Shipped SiteGPT in two weeks by carving a chatbot out of an existing customer base
Bhanu spotted the AI wave on Twitter, scoped a chatbot for his existing Feather customers' blogs, then realized mid-build it deserved to be its own product. Starting from a known audience and a single narrow use case compressed idea-to-launch into two weeks and hit $10K MRR in month one.
“I'll create a table with keyword as the main column, then volume, keyword difficulty, how much effort it's going to take to build this tool, and how relevant this free tool is to my main product. Then I prioritize tools that have high volume, low keyword difficulty, easy to build, and highly relevant to my product.”
Score every candidate tool on volume, KD, build effort, and product relevance before building
Before writing code, Bhanu logs each candidate keyword in Notion with four columns: volume, KD, build effort, and product relevance. He also drafts the CTA back to the paid product per tool. Only the top-scoring combinations get built, which is why the funnel actually converts.
“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.”
Clone existing free tools in Cursor in under 5 minutes per new keyword
Once a tool template exists, Bhanu uses Cursor to clone it for any new low-KD keyword in under five minutes by pointing at existing tools and feeding it the target keyword. This compounding tooling speed is what makes the 50-free-tool strategy viable for a solo founder.
“If my product is chat with PDF, I will say something like, you have tried chatting with one PDF, what if you can create a chatbot with all of your business content? So if you want to do that, try SiteGPT. I will think of CTAs for all the potential keywords.”
Write a product-specific CTA under every free tool to bridge to a paid trial
Before building a tool, Bhanu writes the exact CTA that bridges from the tool's micro-job to SiteGPT's core value. That contextual handoff is what turns anonymous SEO traffic into the 60 trials per month that feed his 25-40% trial-to-paid conversion.
“You just pay a monthly fee based on how many chatbots you need, or how much content you have, or how many messages you expect each month. Average revenue per customer is around $100, and lifetime value comes down to around $1,700, $1,800.”
Tiered usage pricing on chatbots, content, and messages drives $1,700+ LTV
SiteGPT packages on three usage axes rather than seat-based pricing, which lets average revenue per customer hit $100/month and pushes LTV to roughly $1,800. The packaging is what makes the free-tools funnel economically viable despite small conversion volumes.
“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 won't have any expenses and just started building my own things.”
Move back home to zero out expenses while you build through failed experiments
Bhanu collapsed his runway problem by moving back in with his parents after quitting his engineering job, letting him build through failed experiments until Feather hit $5-6K MRR and SiteGPT hit $10K MRR in its first month. Zero burn is the bootstrapper's real cheat code.