SaaS Strategists,

Last week I was in Dubai for vacation.

And I noticed something.

Dubai & SaaS products actually have a lot in common.

You see,

In Dubai, there are plenty of attractions you can visit and each one of them is like a separate entity.

Combine multiple entities into one city and you get a place everybody wants to visit.

So what does this teach us about SaaS?

Well, we answer this exact question in today’s issue.

Ladies & Gentlemen, I present to you “The Dubai Strategy” (named by myself lol).

Let’s dive in 👇

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Let’s draw a parallel.

In Dubai, each attraction has its own “wow” moment.

You might visit because of the Dubai Frame 🖼
You might visit because you want to eat dinner in the sky 🍽
You might visit because you want to parachute off of Burj Khalifa 🪂

Combine these multiple attractions into one city and you get a place everybody wants to visit.

So what can this teach us about SaaS?

Well,

Just like I visited Dubai because I wanted to experience the high views,

Your users may turn into paid customers because of 1 feature you marketed really really well.

The strategy I shamelessly renamed into “The Dubai Strategy”, is actually called Engineering as Marketing.

Engineering as Marketing emphasizes the concept of extracting 1 feature from your software, spinning it up as a dedicated app & marketing it as a separate product.

This small app then serves as another funnel towards your SaaS.

Here are some of the examples:

Taplio utilizes this strategy really well, by extracting one of their core features and spinning it up as a dedicated app.

A LinkedIn carousel maker.

Taplio was capitalizing upon this strategy with their automatic Twitter Thread to LinkedIn carousel maker at first.

And added a whole custom carousel creator later on.

This just shows that you can also scale a “mini app” in parallel to your software.

Canva extracts colors from the image and presents it to you in the form of a color palette.

This is a great way of utilizing “Engineering as Marketing”, or better known as “The Dubai Strategy” 😎

The marketing giant created a free website grader tool that helps you understand what points of your website you should improve.

Ahrefs extracted their keyword generator tool that gives you the option to discover keyword ideas to rank against.

They use this app to lead potential customers to subscribe to their product.

Turo helps you understand how much income you could earn with different vehicles as you build your business on Turo, with their Carculator app.

While this strategy may take a bit of time to implement,

It can bring great results!

After all, Dubai wasn’t built overnight.

Are you currently using this strategy for your SaaS?

If not, but you would like to, reply to this email with the word “audit” and my team of engineers will do a complete audit of your SaaS and help you extract one single feature into a dedicated app.

Free of charge.

Ognjen Gatalo

Chief SaaS Strategist ☁

P.S. Found this issue useful? Forward it to a fellow SaaS founder!