Plans a small, genuinely useful free tool (a calculator, checker, grader, generator, template or converter) that people search for, link to and come back to, and that leads naturally to the paid product. The winners are usually tiny and focused; the losers are over-built, unrelated to what the company sells, or gated so hard they become a disguised form. The result is a scored idea list, a buildable spec, the landing page plan, and a launch and measurement plan.
When to use
- "Should we build a free tool?", "calculator ideas", "which tool first?", "our tool gets traffic but no leads".
- Looking for a link-earning asset for SEO, or a lead source that is not another PDF.
- Not for: downloadable lead magnets such as guides and templates only (
cmo-lead-magnets), many template-driven SEO pages (cmo-programmatic-seo), or the tool's page conversion (cmo-page-cro).

