/suede-free-tools

name: suede-free-tools
description: "Suede AI engineering-as-marketing strategy for selecting, scoring, and scoping calculators, graders, generators, and other free interactive tools. Includes a search- and AI-answer-ready tool page (crawlable method, worked example, schema) and KPIs. Use when the user wants a lead, link, education, or product-adoption asset with a measurable path to the paid product. NOT FOR: downloadable lead assets (use suede-lead-magnets), implementation of a full website (use suede-site-alchemy), or search diagnostics (use suede-seo-audit)."
metadata:
  version: 2.0.0

Suede Free-Tool Growth Strategy

Suede uses engineering as marketing when a genuinely useful tool can create qualified discovery and a natural bridge to the paid product. Select, score, and scope the smallest maintainable calculator, grader, generator, or utility whose output earns attention rather than merely capturing it.

Initial Assessment

**Check for product marketing context first:** If `.agents/product-marketing.md` exists (or `.claude/product-marketing.md`, or the legacy `product-marketing-context.md` filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for information not already covered or specific to this task.

Before designing a tool strategy, understand:

1. **Business Context** - What's the core product? Who is the target audience? What problems do they have?

2. **Goals** - Lead generation? SEO/traffic? Brand awareness? Product education? What is one lead worth (LTV and close rate from this source)?

3. **Resources** - Technical capacity to build? Ongoing maintenance bandwidth? Budget for promotion? Timeline?

4. **Existing Behavior** - What tools or manual workarounds does the audience use today? How are leads generated now?

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Core Principles

1. Solve a Real Problem

• Tool must provide genuine value
• Solves a problem your audience actually has
• Useful even without your main product

2. Adjacent to Core Product

• Related to what you sell
• Natural path from tool to product
• Educates on problem you solve

3. Simple and Focused

• Does one thing well
• Low friction to use
• Immediate value

4. Worth the Investment

• Lead value × expected leads > build cost + maintenance

Populate all four terms before calling the go/no-go, and show the arithmetic:

• **Lead value** = customer LTV × close rate for this lead source, from the intake numbers.
• **Expected leads** = monthly search volume for the SEO target keyword × a stated visit-to-use rate × a stated use-to-capture rate.
• **Build cost** = the MVP scope below, in engineer-days.
• **Maintenance** = engineer-days per quarter to keep data, dependencies, and the hosting current.

State every rate you assumed and where it came from. If a term cannot be sourced, say which one and mark the go/no-go unresolved rather than filling it in.

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Tool Types Overview

| Type | Examples | Best For | |------|----------|----------| | Calculators | ROI, savings, pricing estimators | Decisions involving numbers | | Generators | Templates, policies, names | Creating something quickly | | Analyzers | Website graders, SEO auditors | Evaluating existing work | | Testers | Meta tag preview, speed tests | Checking if something works | | Libraries | Icon sets, templates, snippets | Reference material | | Interactive | Tutorials, playgrounds, quizzes | Learning/understanding |

**For detailed tool types and examples**: See [references/tool-types.md](references/tool-types.md)

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Ideation Framework

Start with Pain Points

1. **What problems does your audience Google?** - Search query research, common questions

2. **What manual processes are tedious?** - Spreadsheet tasks, repetitive calculations

3. **What do they need before buying your product?** - Assessments, planning, comparisons

4. **What information do they wish they had?** - Data they can't easily access, benchmarks

Validate the Idea

• **Search demand**: Is there search volume? How competitive?
• **Uniqueness**: What exists? How can you be 10x better?
• **Lead quality**: Does this audience match buyers?
• **Build feasibility**: How complex? Can you scope an MVP?

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Lead Capture Strategy

Gating Options

| Approach | Pros | Cons | |----------|------|------| | Fully gated | Maximum capture | Lower usage | | Partially gated | Balance of both | Common pattern | | Ungated + optional | Maximum reach | Lower capture | | Ungated entirely | Pure SEO/brand | No direct leads |

Lead Capture Best Practices

• Value exchange clear: "Get your full report"
• Minimal friction: Email only
• Show preview of what they'll get
• Optional: Segment by asking one qualifying question

The gating trade-off itself (per-field conversion cost and how to frame the exchange) is owned by `suede-lead-magnets`. Use its gating tables when deciding what to ask for; the table above only covers where the gate sits in a tool.

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SEO Considerations

Keyword Strategy

**Tool landing page**: "[thing] calculator", "[thing] generator", "free [tool type]"

**Supporting content**: "How to [use case]", "What is [concept]"

Make the tool page indexable and quotable

A tool that is all JavaScript inputs gives search engines and answer engines nothing to read. Around the widget, ship crawlable HTML text:

• A direct answer to the query the tool serves in the opening 40 to 80 words

("A [thing] calculator estimates [output] from [inputs]").

• How it works: the formula, data source, and last-updated date, so the output

can be cited and checked.

• A worked example with real numbers the user can reproduce.
• Question headings for the follow-ups people ask next.
• `WebApplication` or `SoftwareApplication` JSON-LD with the visible name,

category, and price (`0` only when the tool is actually free).

Answer engines cite methodology and worked examples far more readily than they can run your widget. If the tool produces original benchmarks