The Public Site & Funnel

This is the front of the house — the page a stranger lands on and the path it walks them down. It's the whole experience for the Unpaid persona: everything someone sees and does before they've paid a dollar or had a conversation with Jer.

Verdict

The public site/funnel is BUILD — the brand voice lives here, off-the-shelf templates feel generic, and building is cheap now. Booking and payments are BUY — plugged in, never built. The reason to build the site itself is the same reason for the steakhouse, not the McDonald's: the first impression is the product's first promise, and a generic funnel-builder can't keep it. But the dangerous, solved parts — taking a payment, holding a calendar — you buy and plug in. We proved the build is cheap by making this very microsite the same way.

What it does

The Unpaid experience, in order:

• The promo video, front-and-center — the voice and the eagles do the selling; the page just frames them.
• The four values stated plainly: Excellence, Sacrificial, Team, Resilient. No jargon, no badges.
• The free Leadership Soul Scorecard — the front-door lead magnet. This is the most validated piece on the page: every comparable leads with a free assessment (Full Focus's LifeScore, Glazer's Four-Capacity Quiz, Scazzero's EH assessment, Arrow's Leadership Score Card). See Building the Scorecard.
• A free "taste of the experience" — a short mini-journey or 5-day mini-course that previews the formation, not just content (the Transforming Center's free 4-week journey is the model). Stronger than a content dump because it samples what Jer sells.
• Honest pricing, published on the program page — the number shown plainly, with scholarships and payment plans right beside it (the barbell, made visible). The trust-first brands (Transforming Center, Arrow) reveal price on the deep page rather than hiding it behind "book a call" — and transparency is on-brand for Jer.
• The deselection line, said out loud: "If you want leadership training to advance yourself, this isn't for you." It screens as much as it sells.
• The two doors — one clear choice between "book a coaching conversation" and "join a cohort." Nothing else competes for the click.
• The nomination form — the five questions from Finding the Pack live right here.
• Generous evergreen content — the recommended-listening list, Off Leash Bytes, a newsletter (Glazer's Friday Forward is the model), a book sample. Lean into radical generosity with the ideas — publish the frameworks and the map openly. It costs little, fits the no-grind constraint, and proves the thesis that information isn't transformation. The pack, the practice, and Jer's presence stay paid.

The framing that matters (from the red-team review): the nomination front door is the primary path — good people arrive because someone who knows them sent them. The public site's real job is to catch and screen the people who arrive without a nomination — to either route them toward getting nominated or quietly deselect them. It's a net, not a billboard.

What comparable sites prove (the free-vs-paid line)

A scan of the field — Maxwell, Lencioni, Carey Nieuwhof, Glazer, the Transforming Center, Arrow, Coaching for Leaders, Faith Driven, a Maven cohort — shows one unanimous pattern, and it's the answer to "should we publish the courses free?":

Give away the ideas; charge for the journey. Free = podcast, newsletter, articles, and a free assessment. Paid (and the real product) = the guided, time-bound, with-others transformation — the cohort, the community, the coaching. No comparable operator gives away the full curriculum.

This is the most on-brand model Jer could pick, because it is his thesis — "information doesn't form character; only practice does." Free ideas + paid formation isn't a compromise; it's the argument made visible. So be generous with the map, and keep the cohort, the pack, and the presence as the paid product.

How we'd build it

Same stack as this microsite, plus bought services for the dangerous parts:

• Static site on the same stack as this microsite — built static, hosted on Cloudflare Pages (~free).
• Cal.com (open-source) for the "book a conversation" door.
• Stripe for payments.
• An email service (Resend / Buttondown / MailerLite) for capture and the 5-day sequence.
• A serverless function or form backend that pushes form submissions into the pipeline tracker (Airtable), so nothing arrives and gets lost.

  visitor
     │
     ▼
  Scorecard / nomination form  ──►  email service (5-day mini-course)
     │                                      │
     ▼                                      ▼
  TWO DOORS                          Airtable pipeline / CRM
   ├─ book a coaching conversation ──► Cal.com
   └─ join a cohort ─────────────────► Stripe

Effort & cost

A day or two of AI-assisted build — we know, because building this microsite was the proof. Hosting is ~free on Cloudflare Pages; Cal.com is free; Stripe is per-transaction only; email runs on a cheap or free tier. Lean and small on purpose.

When

Phase 0 — the front door. It unblocks the first repriced dollar and isn't income-gated, because it's cheap to stand up and cheap to run.

Connects to

This door swings open onto Building the Scorecard — the screen that sits right behind it. The email capture and the free Bytes are fed by The Content Studio, and the nomination form is the front end of the flow described in Finding the Pack. It's the concrete build behind the Strategy Brief's "Make the website hunt", and it's the public (Unpaid) layer of The Platform.