Death to Lead Magnets! All Hail Satellite Apps.

Goodbye gated PDFs. Your time is o.v.e.r.

Hey everyone! Jonathan, here - I’m the editor of Growth Scoop and an ‘Aspiring Elena.’ She’s letting me write this week’s post, to outline a massive growth opportunity we’re both seeing. Let me know what you think!

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What if the next big growth lever for the AI era is one we already know about?

In my favorite marketing book, Traction, the authors outline 18 different growth channels that startups should consider and test. One of the most interesting channels is engineering-as-marketing. In the past, this required (you guessed it)… engineering.

This is one of the biggest things that AI development (“vibecoding”) tools can unlock for marketers and growth teams: the ability to create what I’m calling “Satellite Apps.”

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A satellite app is any kind of micro-product that creates value for prospective customers.

Here are the key attributes:

• Free - One of the key elements here is that it does not need to monetize! It’s fundamentally built to be part of a funnel/loop that you will monetize later.

• Light-weight - You don’t want to have to optimize or tweak or refine this product. Maintenance generally won’t be worth it.

• Obvious value - It should be blatantly appealing to your target customers.

• Built-in distribution - It must be either self-launching or easily attachable to an existing stream of demand. You don’t want to have to build distribution channels for your distribution channels.

• Easy hand-off into primary product - If there’s no way to hand people off to your main offering, this isn’t really a satellite app. Fortunately, this should be pretty easy: worst case is just doing a drip sequence to people who register… but that can get spammy. Ideally, there’s a clean, in-product way to connect the dots.

Just to be clear: It won’t be long until companies start creating portfolios or ecosystems of related products that they can sell to their customers, but a satellite app is specifically one that orbits around (see what I did there?) a primary product.

Got it? Good. Now, let’s talk about why this channel is so amazing, why it’s being unlocked and expanded right now, plus some real-world examples and how you can get started building satellite apps at your company (particularly for getting rid of those pesky lead magnets!)

Part 1: Engineering-as-marketing, the secret superpower

Engineering-as-marketing is incredible. And… it’s not a new idea. The best companies have been building out free interactive tools and value-creating surfaces for years:

Hubspot’s Signature Generator

Everyone uses email and most people would like a professional-looking signature block. Don’t have one for your company? Just use this HubSpot tool and they’ll help you design it - plus, free brand distribution for them, because everyone who sees it will learn about Hubspot.

Airbnb’s ‘Estimate Your Earnings’

(Hot tip: If anyone has a spare 8+ bedroom in Manhattan, it seems like there’s some money to be made!)

ROI calculators are one of the most popular examples of this approach. Airbnb makes it super appealing for potential hosts to see the upside.

Related: It’s a bit more complex/robust, but I have to shoutout the Turo Carculator™ for their version of this, because of the A+ pun.

Canva’s Remove.bg

Before everyone’s AI chatbot could do this, removing the background photo used to be a pain. Remove.bg to the rescue! Upload an image and get the background removed. It’s a very simple usecase that funnels directly into Canva’s core value as a ultra-simple design tool. (Note: This one is particularly interesting because Canva bought this popular tool through an acquisition.)

SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool

Who better to do this than one of the kings of SEO? Coming up with the right keywords used to be really tricky, so SEMrush made it easy. And, of course, they’re showing off all of the helpful competitive data that you don’t get from Google Keyword Planner.

Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker

Hm, is there something about website-focused platforms that make them invest in this? (Yes, more on that, later). Ahrefs offered major value to anyone trying to figure out SEO by making their backlink tool totally free and ungated. And, once again, this tool was particularly useful for their target audience.

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Despite the amazing impact these microproducts can have, there’s a reason why they’re not super common: They’re expensive (or at least used to be). Not necessarily in terms of dollars spent, but in terms of resources. Building them has always meant needing the time and attention of designers, developers, maybe even PMs. In software companies, these are often the most expensive resources in the organization. In non-software companies, you may not have access to them at all.

This meant that each micro-app was a major bet. It would take the time, planning, and resourcing that teams would use to build their core apps. While later-stage companies and well-resourced companies could potentially make these investments, it certainly isn’t common. And even if you happened to be an org where this was a possibility - say, with a dedicated Growth pod focused on building out these surfaces - the number of ‘shots on goal’ would be limited.

Despite the huge possibility, this has been a long-shot channel where most companies couldn’t afford to play.

Part 2: Engineering-as-Marketing, Unlocked

This all changes, with the arrival of AI. Vibecoding tools, in particular, are unblocking engineering-as-marketing and expanding where it can be applied.

We already started to see this trend with the ‘NoCode’ era. These allowed non-technical people to set up websites on their own, without engineering support. This was a big step toward engineering-as-marketing-but-without-engineering, and great marketing teams were able to spin up one-off pages or micro-sites to support campaigns or aggregate attention. (I built CutTheSlack.com for a ClickUp campaign in Contentful, before our web team took it out of my hands and just coded it themselves, haha).

But even those builders required training (WebFlow University is still my favorite product education experience). And the outputs were still primarily static - there’s a big gap between a website and a web app.

This is what Vibecoding has changed.

With the arrival of Lovable and other tools, non-technical people can create entire interactive apps or products with just a few sentences of prompts in natural conversational language.

This dramatically changes the calculus for using engineering-as-marketing for most teams. First, it unlocks the full potential, without the previous cost:

• Reduced resources: The most obvious one - not only do you not need to allocate precious engineering hours to build these tools: anyone can open the prompt window for a vibecoding app and ask for what they want. No training required.

• Reduced coordination: Placing these capabilities in the hands of one individual means you can completely remove the coordination layer that normally exists to manage a multi-disciplinary team: meetings and meetings and meetings to coordinate planning, scheduling, and ongoing alignment.

• Increased speed to build: These apps can be created in days (if not hours), rather than the weeks or months that a traditional tool would take to build.

This means that companies can build interactive experiences much more quickly. Need to get your audience’s attention? Build it!

This is why there’s going to be an explosion of new ‘engineering-as-marketing’ efforts… and why I think we need a new term for the outputs: I’m calling them Satellite Apps. Or SatApps, because who has time for three syllables?

Case Study: How Lovable is doing this.

Yep, Elena is a Satellite App builder. Check out some of her recent projects:

SheBuilds portal

This microapp allowed the Lovable team to launch and manage a hackathon - including collecting submissions, communicating with participants, and managing everything through an admin backend. Check out the full story of how she built in this post: Why every exec should be vibecoding

‘Lovable for Schools’ platform

More recently, the Lovable team launched a campaign that allowed people to vote for which universities should receive $100k in Lovable credits. This was a classic EAM strategy in a lot of ways: An amazing offer that drew viral attention and word-of-mouth, while demonstrating the demand and value of the platform. And, instead of needing a full team to build it, Elena did it herself.

So, you can now consider your marketing team officially unlocked to go start building these types of experiences.

But wait! There’s more. Because this new shift also affects way more than you might think.

Part 3: Engineering-as-Marketing, Expanded (Or, PLG’ing everything, everywhere, all at once)

You may have noticed that the original versions of ‘engineering-as-marketing’ were generally free-standing microsites. One best practice was to set them on their own URL, to allow them to take on a life of their own. Remember how many of the examples were companies with heavy involvement in the SEO ecosystem? HubSpot, Canva, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Airbnb - all of these companies heavily relied on programmatic SEO and knew how to get their assets to rank. Which is why they were the ones willing to invest the engineering resources to build them. And they were built to be a distribution channel - to drive brand awareness. The whole point was that they could generate attention at scale, without needing to be manually pushed out via ads or other expensive channels.

Now, with the cost of building at almost zero, this limitation no longer exists. SatApps aren’t just limited to driving acquisition for SEO-focused companies.

PLG’ing SLG

If you’re part of a company with a traditional growth motion (“Sales-led Growth”) and have always glared bitterly/jealously at your Product-led Growth peers… this is the moment you’ve been waiting for.

PLG companies have always had a big advantage: Giving away free usage and providing immediate, up-front product value makes them much easier to distribute and get initial buy-in. But for complex, expensive products (not to mention services and non-software products!), that just wasn’t an option.

This is exactly what Satellite Apps unlock for other types of business… now, freemium is available to everyone!

Even more Product-led PLG

And though the most extreme change is for the SLG folks, PLG companies can get… even more PLG’d. That’s right: You can now create value-proving productized experiences across your entire funnel!

While traditional Engineering-as-marketing was Top Of Funnel (TOFU) – Satellite Apps can do a lot more! Beyond being a distribution tool, they can get into the work of persuasion: the Middle of Funnel (MOFU) and Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) efforts to convince people to try and then buy your product.

Elena sidenote: Just to expand on what Jonathan is saying - this is not just limited to marketers! Any non-technical team members should be considering where a Satellite App could unblock things. For Growth, Sales, and Product people: Think beyond acquisition. Where could a micro product experience help to unlock activation, expansion, retention, or resurrection?

Case Study: How Amplitude is showing value, vs talking about it. (via Ran Chen!)

Want to see this in action? Look at some of the interactive tools Amplitude has recently created:

AI Visibility tool

Is there a single marketer in the world who isn’t thinking about how to appear in more ChatGPT conversations? Amplitude created this free tool that lets any company see how they rank in LLM-driven search and conversations. And… it’s totally ungated! Anyone can enter their brand and receive a detailed report at no cost.

Product metrics benchmark tool

Every team wants to know how their metrics stack up against industry standards, so Amplitude published this tool, which not only shows the data, but allows teams to input their context (company size and industry) to filter it.

Elena and I reached out to Ran Chen, their Head of Growth & Product Adoption, and she mentioned that they’re also going even further down the funnel: their PMM team is using Lovable to spin up demo environments that can quickly show their product in a personalized, compelling way.

Ran emphasized that the value in these tools comes from the ability to drive awareness and product adoption. Beyond measuring traffic and signup conversions, they’re also looking at activation rates. For instance, she shared that the AI Visibility app drove a significant amount of traffic and new signups, and also led to strong cross-activation into the core analytics product.

Why does this work so well? Ran highlighted that it’s because this shows the value, instead of just talking about it:

“We’re bullish on leveraging vibe-coding to build more free tools. The goal is to create low-friction experiences that show the value of our product (and why users should care) rather than just telling them. In an increasingly noisy market, showing versus telling is critical! With vibe-coding, the technology is no longer the limiting factor, and the real constraints are the strategic bets we choose to make and how effectively we execute them.”

Part 4: Where to start - What’s your customer’s biggest blocker?

Inspiring, right?

Now, let’s get practical. How can you apply this at your company? The potential here is massive, so it can be hard to know where to start. So, first, just ask yourself: “What’s the biggest blocker in my marketing funnel or growth model? What’s stopping people from buying our product?” Hopefully you already know the answer to this, but if not:

• Get qualitative: Do user interviews and watch people trying to convert and see where/why they get stuck, and

• Get quantitative: Look at your analytics and make note of the biggest dropoffs in your conversion flow.

Once you have a clear picture, you now have the problem that your SatApp can solve. Let’s try a few examples:

• Problem: 2% homepage-to-signup conversion; interviews say “I don’t know what it does”
  → Possible solution: Create a lightweight demo environment, where the users can get a taste of the product experience before signing up. (Like Ran said: Show, don’t tell!)

• Problem: Massive engagement in problem-focused content on social, but no conversions to product.
  → Possible solution: Interactive data report, to let customers see impact for their specific org.

• Problem: 50%+ Prospects ghosting after signing up for demos; hearing “We’ll follow up on this, later”
  → Possible solution: Simple problem education tool to show the cost of the problem.

Each of these scenarios has a lot of potential, but let’s dig into one, in particular.

Part 5: Kill your lead magnets! (My favorite opportunity for SatApps)

The most obvious example to me is figuring out a better way to engage people who visit your home page. Here’s what I mean:

When someone comes to your site and they’re not ready to buy, what do you do? Ideally, you’d get their contact info, so you can follow up. But how do you get that info? For the past 10ish years, marketers have been using a downloadable PDF, aka gated content, aka a ‘lead magnet.’

To be clear: Lead magnets are better than nothing! If you’ve just got “Contact Sales” as your primary CTA or (gasp!) don’t have a CTA all, at least a download hints at offering some value.

But… it’s not a great option:

• It’s not what they want: Why do they want a PDF on their computer, instead of just a link to the content?

• It’s probably generic: You can’t tailor or personalize the information, so all of the recommendations or insights will remain high-level.

• It doesn’t reflect your product experience: The gap between a text-based document and your interactive product or service is massive, which creates more work for you to connect the dots.

When’s the last time you actually read a full ebook or whitepaper? Or got excited about a PDF? See, that’s what I mean.

All of that means that people are tired of this type of content. And so it’s not enough to make them give you their email address, when they know they can probably get similar content from a quick Perplexity request, and that giving you their email addy may trap them in a never-ending drip campaign.

So, in almost every case: Replace that lead magnet with a SatApp!

Just go look at your current website and figure out where you’re asking people to exchange their email for some piece of content. How could that content be better as a lightweight, interactive experience?

You’re already paying for this traffic: either directly (through performance ads or SEO) or indirectly (through all the organic traffic that all your other campaigns have accumulated over the years). Make better use of it with a high-value interactive experience. Whether you gate it or not… the potential customer will get a much clearer picture of why they should choose you.

Elena sidenote: Don’t forget to make something that people love. With so many products saturating the market, brand is a product job... and if you’re going to make mini-products, you better make sure that they put a smile on the user’s face. These need to be Minimum Lovable Products.

Final thought: Where does it end?

If at some point during this article, you asked yourself, ‘Wait, if every company starts building SatApps up-and-down their funnel… won’t that overlap with other companies’ core products?’ or ‘If I can vibecode this for my customers, why won’t they vibecode it for themselves’... well done! Now you’re asking the really tricky questions.

The massive disruption to software as we know it is what’s creating this opportunity, but where does it stop?

The reality is that the era of building generic point solutions for a super broad audience is over. If an existing company (or your customer!) can spin up your idea in a few prompts, you have no moat. You have a commodity. And it is soooo hard to build a good business model around that. This means that your core product needs to leverage something different:

• Unique data that only you have.

• A network effect that creates increased value as more people use it.

• Ongoing trust with an audience who feels loyal and personally invested in what you’re building.

These are the types of anchors that survive the disruption. They create a center of gravity strong enough to hold a core product together – while everything else is replaced by Satellite Apps.

And although other companies could build similar offerings or customers could build it for themselves, if you build a lovable experience and give it away for free… why would they? The constellation of excellent, interactive value itself becomes a network. The initial connection and loyalty of your ecosystem will only compound.

So, what are you waiting for? The arrival of vibecoding has unlocked this whole new era of engineering-as-marketing. It’s not only available to more people and more types of companies, it can be applied across the entire customer journey. So don’t wait: Find your funnel’s biggest friction point (or at least start with your lead magnets), fire up a vibecoding tool, and start launching.

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If you’re planning to build some Satellite Apps, I’d love to hear about it! Leave a comment or shoot me a message on Linkedin.

Thank you for reading!

Jonathan

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