Engineering as marketing: Turning internal tools into external demand

Jun 25

When you think “marketing,” your first instinct probably isn’t: “Let’s spin up a new CLI tool.”

But in developer-first companies, that’s often exactly where the best marketing starts.

Welcome to engineering as marketing, a strategy where the tools you build for internal use, onboarding, or experimentation become public assets that drive traffic, build trust, and generate product demand.

It’s not about gimmicks. It’s about making real, useful stuff and giving it away.

Here’s how to turn your internal tools into external growth engines.

1. What is engineering as marketing, really?

It’s not just “content.” It’s not just “dev advocacy.” And it’s definitely not a slogan.

Engineering as marketing means using engineering resources to:

Build free tools
Open-source internal projects
Create product-adjacent utilities
Launch developer playgrounds, templates, or benchmarks

The output isn’t a pitch, it’s value. Tangible, usable value that solves a problem (often before a user even knows they want your product).

🎯 Think: “Here’s a thing we use internally to make our workflow faster and now you can too.”

2. Why it works (Especially for dev audiences)

Developers don’t trust ads. They barely trust blog posts. But they do trust tools.

If you build something that:

Saves them time
Shows off your product’s core value
Solves a painful edge case
Integrates with their stack

…you earn credibility and attention.

Utility earns trust. Trust earns traffic. Traffic earns adoption.

The best part? Engineering-led tools often bring in highly qualified leads because people who use your free tools are likely the people who need your paid product.

3. Start with what you already have

Most engineering teams already have a goldmine of tools they’ve built for themselves:

A performance benchmarking script
A linter or schema validator
A deployment helper
An internal dashboard or visualization layer
A CLI for managing sandbox environments

You don’t have to build something new. You just need to package it in a way that’s accessible, documented, and useful to others.

Ask your team:

What tools do we use every week?
What did we build because nothing else fit?
What do new hires onboard with?

That’s your starting point.

4. Turn tools into growth assets

Once you’ve identified a tool worth sharing, treat it like a mini-product:

✅ Add clear documentation
✅ Write a quickstart guide
✅ Make it installable (npm, pip, brew, etc.)
✅ Link it to a landing page or blog post
✅ Add analytics (lightweight + opt-in)
✅ Mention your core product sparingly but contextually

Pro tip: Make sure the tool solves a problem adjacent to your product. You’re not selling the product you’re proving the value space around it.

Example: If you sell a CI platform, open-source your YAML validator. If you offer a data platform, release a free schema explorer.

5. Distribution channels that work for tools

Don’t launch and hope. Promote it the way engineers discover things:

GitHub: Host it, document it, and tag it properly.
Product Hunt: Launch as a standalone utility.
Hacker News: Post with a technical write-up, not a pitch.
Reddit: Share it in the relevant dev subreddits (with context).
Your docs or CLI: Cross-promote it in your own onboarding flow.
Conferences and meetups: Mention it in talks or workshops.
Your blog: Use it as the centerpiece for a technical post.

And crucially: give your tool a real name and a clear README. Treat it like a product even if it’s free.

6. Measure what matters

You don’t need thousands of stars to justify engineering as marketing. Track meaningful signals like:

Installs or clones
Referrals to your core product
Mentions on Twitter, Stack overflow, or Reddit
Newsletter signups or doc views
Backlinks from dev blogs or tooling lists

And listening to anecdotal feedback: “I found your tool, then realized you also did X” is the golden moment you’re aiming for.

7. Examples that nailed it

Here are some standout examples of engineering as marketing in the wild:

Segment’s open-source projects (e.g., analytics.js) drove early dev attention
Stripe’s sample apps and API reference tooling show off their DX without pitching
Auth0’s JWT debugger became the go-to utility in the identity space
Fly.io’s “Firecracker VM playground” served as both education and promotion
Sentry’s open-source error monitoring tool fed directly into adoption of their paid platform.

These aren’t side projects. They’re strategic assets and they compound over time.

Final thought: Build for others like you

If your team built it to solve your own pain, chances are thousands of developers out there need it too.

So open it up.
Polish it.
Write about it.
Give it a home.

Because in developer marketing, the best pitch isn’t a pitch, it’s a tool that earns attention by being genuinely helpful.

That’s engineering as marketing. And it works.

Jerome Diaz