29 Ways to Use Free Reports to Get 1,582 No Cost Leads

In this article, you’ll discover how top software CEOs utilize “Free Reports” as a powerful growth tactic to attract new users and generate millions in revenue. This strategy, centered on providing high-value, data-driven content, serves as a magnet for qualified leads. By offering exclusive industry insights, pricing guides, or performance reports, companies like Getcredo and Expandi have successfully turned anonymous traffic into a predictable pipeline of paying customers. You’ll get the 4-step process to launch your own successful “Free Report” campaign, complete with dozens of case studies you can use for inspiration. These examples are from top Founders like John Doherty at Getcredo, Stefan Smulders at Expandi, and Olin Hyde at LeadCrunch, collected directly from keynotes at Founderpath events.

The 4-Step Playbook for Winning with Free Reports

A “Free Report” is a form of gated content or a lead magnet that offers valuable information—such as an industry benchmark report, a pricing guide, or a data analysis—in exchange for a user’s contact information. The goal is to provide so much value that potential customers are eager to share their email to access it. This playbook breaks down how to turn this strategy into a powerful growth engine.

1. Identify a High-Value Problem: The best reports solve a painful problem or answer a critical question for your target audience. Look for information gaps in your industry. What data do your prospects wish they had but can’t easily find? This is your starting point. For example, John Doherty at Getcredo noticed companies constantly asked, “How much do agencies cost?” He used this question to create a pricing guide that became a massive lead-generation asset.
2. Create a Data-Driven Report: Your report must contain unique, valuable information that isn’t available elsewhere. This could be based on proprietary data from your platform, customer surveys, or in-depth industry analysis. The key is to offer exclusive insights that position your company as a thought leader and an indispensable resource.
3. Gate and Promote on a Dedicated Landing Page: Place your report behind a simple lead capture form on a landing page. Keep the form short to maximize conversions—ask only for essential information like a name and email address. Then, promote this landing page across all relevant channels: social media, your blog, email newsletters, and even paid ads. Stefan Smulders of Expandi used this exact method, creating detailed playbooks and promoting them through LinkedIn posts and Facebook groups to generate thousands of comments and leads.
4. Nurture and Convert Leads: Once a user downloads your report, don’t stop there. The follow-up is where the money is made. Enter them into a targeted email nurture sequence that provides additional value and gently guides them toward your paid product. The report has already established trust and authority, making the transition from lead to paying customer much smoother.

40+ Examples of “Free Reports” That Fueled Growth

Here are over 40 real-world examples of how SaaS CEOs have used free reports, guides, tools, and other high-value content to generate leads and drive revenue.

• John Doherty of Getcredo published a highly successful industry pricing guide by compiling proprietary data from over 100 agency profiles. This single piece of content generated a massive amount of organic traffic and backlinks, helping to grow their lead volume from $5.5 million to over $21 million in one year.
• The team at Expandi created in-depth playbooks on LinkedIn growth hacks and used them as lead magnets in social media posts. This strategy was so effective it drove thousands of comments and helped them book over 40 appointments each week, contributing to their growth to $7 million ARR.
• Tomer Levy from Logz.io built his lead generation strategy around providing extensive, high-value content for the open-source ELK community. By becoming the number one content contributor, they naturally attract thousands of qualified users to their paid SaaS platform.
• The team at grammarly grew by creating hundreds of landing pages that answered common grammar questions. These pages served as free, valuable reports that solved an immediate user problem while simultaneously promoting their core product as a better, automated solution.
• Security Scorecard’s CEO Alex offered a free security report that allowed companies to check their risk score. This free tool acted as the perfect lead magnet, attracting users who were then upsold on premium features, fueling their journey to over $100 million in revenue.
• Sarah Hawley at Growmotely used a “Future of Work” survey as a lead magnet to build a pre-launch waitlist of over 5,000 people. The resulting report not only provided value but also positioned them as experts and generated significant media attention.
• Prayag Narula, founder of LeadGenius, utilized a strategy of providing free, customized reports to potential clients. These reports analyzed a prospect’s existing campaigns and highlighted areas for improvement, effectively demonstrating their value and converting leads.
• Olin Hyde at LeadCrunch captured leads by offering a free report that analyzes a prospect’s marketing campaigns and provides actionable insights. This “try-before-you-buy” approach helped them grow to over $20 million in revenue.
• MonetizeMore’s CEO, Kean Graham, developed a free Chrome extension called PubGuru Ad Inspector. This tool provides publishers with detailed analytics and error-checking for their ad setups, serving as a powerful lead magnet that naturally upsells users to their full suite of products.
• Adam Robinson, CEO of GetEmails, grew his business by offering a powerful free tool that identifies anonymous website visitors and provides their email addresses. This high-value free offering served as the primary driver for attracting customers to their paid plans, scaling the company to $4 million ARR.
• The Scoop.it team leveraged a free content curation tool to attract over 4 million users. They then used targeted content marketing, such as newsletters with valuable insights, to nurture and qualify these free users for their B2B enterprise offerings.
• The founder of review wave utilized free, educational webinars as a primary lead generation tool. By teaching their audience valuable marketing and patient engagement strategies, they established trust and authority, which naturally led attendees to explore their paid software solution.
• GetAccept’s CEO Samir Smajic created a variety of free sales templates and guides. This content addressed common pain points for sales teams and served as an effective lead magnet, drawing prospects into their ecosystem where they could be upsold to the full platform.
• Nils Liedlich of Letter Leverage champions the use of educational email courses (EECs) as a lead magnet. One of his clients generated 10,000 extra leads in just four weeks by offering a high-value email course instead of a simple PDF download.
• Andy Cloke at Data Fetcher offers a freemium model where users can make 100 API requests per month for free. This allows users to experience the core value of the tool, with scheduling and higher volumes of requests reserved for paid plans, effectively using the free tier as a lead generator.
• Zest.is founder Yam Regev used a free Chrome extension that provides curated professional content as their primary user acquisition tool. This free product built a base of over 100,000 users, which they then monetized by upselling to a premium mobile app subscription.
• Justin McGill, CEO of LeadFuze, uses a “20 free leads” offer to attract new users to their platform. This free sample allows potential customers to experience the quality of the data firsthand, serving as a powerful conversion tool for their monthly subscription plans.
• HelloSign’s CEO, Joseph Walla, grew to over 6 million users by offering a freemium model that allows three free document transactions per month. This “try-before-you-buy” strategy successfully converted users who needed higher volumes or more advanced features into one of their 47,000 paying customers.
• The founder of UExec created a free PowerPoint pitch deck with high-quality templates that was downloaded over 200,000 times. This viral lead magnet built a massive email list, which he monetized by offering an exclusive “Plus” membership for more advanced content and resources.
• Mention’s CEO, Matt Gielen, acquired over 600,000 free users by offering a limited version of their media monitoring tool. The free plan allows users to track one keyword, driving them to upgrade to paid plans for more keywords, influencer dashboards, and advanced analytics.
• The team at Mahana.io, a collaborative work platform, used a free beta program to secure their first 15 seats across two companies. By offering the tool for free, they gathered crucial user feedback and testimonials before launching their paid, product-led growth strategy.
• Mostafa Hisham from Expovi pre-sold his business plan generation tool by creating a simple questionnaire that instantly delivered a customized business plan for a one-time fee. This transactional model validated the market need before he transitioned to a subscription-based platform.
• The founder of AppBroda uses free educational content and webinars to teach game developers how to better monetize their apps with ads. This content strategy establishes them as an authority and funnels developers toward their core product, which operates on a revenue-share model.
• The team at HelloSign built a base of over 6 million users by offering a freemium product that provided three free document transactions per month. This approach allowed users to experience the product’s value, leading to a natural upgrade path for those needing more volume or features.
• Varun Chandran of Corporate360 uses a data-as-a-service model, but attracts initial interest by providing sample reports and competitive intelligence briefs. These free data samples demonstrate the power of their platform and convert prospects into high-value annual contracts.
• Jimmy مِن MegaLeads provides a freemium plan that offers 1,000 credits per month for free, allowing users to download a sample of their B2B sales leads. This free tier serves as the primary funnel for their paid plans, which scale based on the volume of leads needed.
• Gatsby’s CEO, Brett Bernstein, uses a free version of his tool to help brands identify micro-influencers among their customers. The free plan provides basic data, while the paid plans unlock automated outreach and deeper analytics, creating a smooth upsell path.
• Chris Ingham Brooke of Pub Ocean built his audience by creating free, highly engaging content websites like Scribol.com. The massive traffic generated on these owned-and-operated sites served as a testing ground and funnel for their higher-tier publisher tools and ad management services.
• Jim Fowler at Owler grew a user base of over 3 million professionals by providing free access to crowdsourced competitive intelligence and company news alerts. This freemium model drives their enterprise data deals, where companies pay for API access and deeper insights.
• The founder of Corporate360 attracts enterprise clients by offering customized competitive intelligence reports as a foot-in-the-door strategy. These bespoke data reports showcase their capabilities and lead to larger, subscription-based data-as-a-service contracts.
• Aseem Badshah from Socedo leverages social data to provide B2B marketers with free reports on potential leads who are actively discussing relevant topics. This targeted, high-value information serves as a compelling entry point to their full lead generation and marketing automation platform.
• Yash Chavan of getsarole.com pre-sold his influencer search engine by offering early adopters a discounted lifetime deal. He created figma mockups and loom videos showcasing the tool’s value, using this “early access” offer as a way to generate initial revenue and validate the product.
• Dave at Whippio used cold email outreach that offered a free, valuable piece of content—a detailed analysis of a prospect’s competitor’s marketing strategy. This hyper-personalized report immediately demonstrated value and opened the door for conversations about their paid services.
• Adam Jankovits of Leadberry leveraged a free beta of his tool, which identifies B2B website visitors from Google Analytics data. This free offering generated over 2,000 signups and provided immense value, creating a pool of warm leads for their paid launch.
• ProLeads’ CEO, Anders Fredriksson, used a combination of free trials and high-value content to attract initial customers. Their platform aggregates sales data, and they provided free “warm introduction path” reports to demonstrate their unique value proposition before converting users to annual contracts.
• Peter Schmidt of The SaaS Co uses his own lead generation agency’s process as a case study. They offer free, detailed proposals that outline how they can generate qualified appointments, using this “free strategy session” as the primary way to land high-value monthly retainers.
• Adam from Leadberry successfully acquired 2,000 beta users by offering his B2B lead generation software for free. The tool, which identifies website visitors via Google Analytics, generated over 2 million leads for its beta users, providing a strong proof of concept that fueled its transition to a paid model.
• Jim Larrison, co-founder of Dynamic Signal, grew his employee advocacy platform by offering free educational resources, including white papers and case studies on improving internal communications. This content established them as thought leaders and drew in enterprise clients like GE and McDonald’s.
• MailUp’s CEO, Nazzareno Gorni, launched a free email editor tool called BEE Free. This tool became a massive lead magnet, attracting over a million users and creating a funnel for their more advanced, paid marketing technology solutions, helping them grow to €35 million in revenue.
• Chris Ingham Brooke, CEO of Pub Ocean, created several content websites like Scribol.com that were free for readers. These ad-supported sites generated massive traffic (20 million monthly visitors) and served as a powerful funnel and data source for their primary business of providing ad optimization technology to other digital publishers, growing to $25 million in revenue.
• Gil Eyal of HYPR attracts enterprise clients by creating free, detailed reports on their current influencer marketing campaigns. These data-rich reports highlight opportunities for improvement and showcase the power of HYPR’s influencer discovery and analytics platform, leading to six-figure contracts.

Conclusion

You’ve just learned how top SaaS founders leverage “Free Reports” and other high-value content to build multi-million dollar revenue streams. From proprietary data guides to free tools and educational courses, the strategy remains consistent: provide immense value upfront to build trust and attract highly qualified leads. By implementing this 4-step playbook, you can turn your expertise into a predictable growth channel, just as these successful CEOs have. To continue learning and get the capital you need to fuel your growth, explore the resources at Founderpath.

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