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.
- Honest pricing — the number is on the page, not hidden behind a "book a call."
- 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.
- Email capture → the 5-day mini-course — the way a curious visitor stays in the room.
- Free Off Leash Bytes + a book sample — a taste of the voice, given away.
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.
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.