Vibe Code Your Marketing Funnel

0:00Welcome back to the Captain's Insights. I'm Ben founder of Pirate Skills and at the last weekend during the third Vibe Conference here in Cologne, many of you asked me, "Can't we talk more about Vibe marketing?" That means applying what we have learned in building with AI, which we usually call Vibe coding, also to marketing, sales, the funnel process and here we are. Today we're going to talk about how to Vibe code your actual marketing funnel so it searches out for the right leads for you, attracts them, brings them into your own environment, into your CRM so you can send them emails and allowed to contact them and

0:38nurture them, build the trust so that they have an easier time purchasing from you. It's also another one of these cases where I believe I can showcase why it's it's much much better to actually have the funnel also inside of the code base and not split product from marketing too far. So, let's dig in. As every time, you can read this here on pirateskills.com, watch it on YouTube, or listen to it on our podcast on Apple

1:07Podcast and Spotify. So, it all starts with um getting out of your head that you should like manually create your marketing funnels. Meaning landing pages and lead magnets and follow up sequences. Let me just show this to you in practice. We're going to use another bridesmaid example. This is our agentic wedding planner that

1:30Christina and I are building. And here we got this little tool section, which is like a collection of valuable resources for users that they can use as first-time brides to prepare their their weddings. And we already set up a lead magnet, but already set this site up in a way where we can test users' interest to try out new lead magnets, but this is the only one public right now. It's the idea that after the future bride said yes, that's the easy part, but now there's so much work to be done. How to get even started? Yeah, and the idea was to create like a 7-day playbook and it

2:08looks something like this, but dynamically created for them what they do next Monday, Tuesday to Sunday. Making some key decisions, not going down into certain rabbit holes and becoming a customer essentially. This is the lead magnet and then if they sign up they get a customer onboarding, they get an email sequence based on that that ideally leads to them trying out at the Bridesmaid pageant and then deciding to upgrade from a free trial to pro. That is the essential idea we usually run with. In the good old times, we had a WordPress website but an app built by some techies. They were complete distinct tech stacks on different code

2:49bases and it was very hard to like communicate between them without a lot of effort from the developer part. So, you had your WordPress website, you had to create a landing page, usually have to use some kind of form plugin to create a form, but every time a customer wanted to sign up, they had to fill out that form again and again like for every

3:10lead magnet you wanted to give people. This sign up also was not the sign up that they needed to do for the product. So, there was another huge gap and there was almost no attribution information between them, meaning that we actually know where users came from, which campaigns or keywords they came from before using the lead magnet, signing up for it, and then later converting to a trial users and a paid customer. After this revolution with the ability Vibe coding, also our marketing funnel, you can now have the advantage of having everything in one repo without any gap, meaning that the funnel and the product, so the whole marketing page essentially

3:49shares the same code base with you. And the same sign-in and sign-up process is the exact same for both the marketing and the product page, making it very seamless for users to switch back and forth. And you can record the user behavior as long as they consent from the first click when they join uh your

4:08website. So, let me show you what this looks like in practice. Let's go uh back to the Bright Space example and switch to Cloud Code. This is actually the conversation in which I built that lead magnet, went through the whole process, and here you can see at the end it again turns into a skill. If you're not familiar with this process, read the last two articles where we continuously do a process and wrap it into an agent skill, so it's executed exactly the same way again the next time, and you can continuously improve that process. But, essentially, if you if you look at the files in here,

4:42there's a lot of like developer blah blah blah around this. But, here in the app folder, there is the the web app that that lives in here, but also the the normal home page, the development environment, etc. So, the app lives here, the website lives here, the API lives here, and they're all aware of each other. The agent is at least aware that this is all connected. All our newsletters are in this email directory, our custom components we use for design

5:13on this directory. Um and that makes it very easy for an agent to really build custom solution for your audience that is heavily integrated with your product, as you will see with this lead magnet. So, let's go back to the article. If you want to read more about this, I linked the two mentioned articles here. But, one of the important starting points for lead magnet is always the consideration where do people come from? Well, we developed the content marketing skill in in the last Captain Insights, it gave us the ability to generate Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest posts like this here that are very very customized to the

5:50language we believe our audience would enjoy the most the design and this is already giving them a little preview not only as an image but also as a text so this is already valuable for the first time bride even if they don't click this increases engagement this increases trust and the probability that well that will click on this either organically through the link in the bio or paid with a call to action button below but this makes everything ready for this whole promotional process of the lead magnet then one of the huge things I love about this vibe coding process is you you do not have to re-explain

6:32everything how landing pages are supposed to look like we already had an established design language for bridesmaid so it kind of knew what we wanted it to look like it knows that we are on light mode and dark mode I chose the dark mode version to showcase this just because it fits more to the pirate goods theme but I assume that more more brides are interested actually in this light mode version and I don't have to re-explain this I don't have to explain the gradients to be used everything can be repurposed and even improved while building new landing pages so I I love that a lot

7:09and that way it's it's just a a command that that you say Okay. We want to create a new funnel and ask you maybe how many funnels do you want to build I've got seven ideas like do you want to pick one or three I would always recommend just choosing one going for that building this out doing the process then building the next one just because there are so many things in the beginning to improve for example on this one we completely changed the typography we looked at the landing page of the lead magnet and we're like, "Mhm, this is not easily readable, especially the display font here." And we actually

7:47built us a little um customization tool that only appears on our local environment where you as admins can choose how would this page look like with different fonts and different font weights until we found this one that we really like now that we find is easier readable and is a better match uh for for the brand. And that then was converted through the entire website and web app. So, everywhere on this website we now see this new font and this was a fundamental change that you don't do that often, but we thought we had the right font, but noticed no, it was not the right font and we could

8:23change it throughout the website just based on a learning we had from building a real lead magnet. So, let's go back. So, this handoff that is one of the the key parts like that you can continuously just say, "I want another one of these, but with this twist." And there was no big there was no huge process with developers. You can do it yourself. You can customize it to your liking. So, now that we have it all in one code base, um it's it's possible to build a

8:57seamless experience for the user. Meaning, if they decide, "This looks cool. I want to use this lead magnet." Here they they click on here, they they get custom onboarded to the app, but the real app. They are almost like in the app using the product and that is a huge differentiation to what normally happens where you like sign them up for email, then you try to email approval, and you ask them, "Hey, could you also sign up for the product?" It's It's nothing users will do. So, they go from click to custom onboarding experience to answers that they were looking for that we

9:33promised them in in the lead magnet. You'll see on on the landing page, we actually show them a preview of what they're going to get. This is a little static version of like a daily plan from Monday to Sunday, but in in the real system, it looks closer to the product. Yeah, this is actually the agent. This is the onboarding kicking off the questions we wanted to ask the users that will help them make the first initial decisions and help them and support them through the research process and so on and so forth. That actually is a lead magnet that is so heavily integrated into the product that

10:11I would consider this pretty ideal. But, we also honestly considered doing a pure PDF version. We saw brides even buying PDFs like this on platforms like Pinterest and we believe there would be value in that as well and it would also not require us like getting used to a new tool and everything. We can A/B test that later, hm, but even it would be a bit more expensive to get users to sign up for this, I would still prefer it because it's closer to the product making it more likely that the lead magnet actually

10:44converts to a sale. So, this closeness to the product is is really something beautiful once you also start coding your funnel inside the same tool stack and code base that that you have here. So, what you can also do later is then take it to the next level and write the emails from there as well. I don't have an example for this here right now, but

11:08all of my emails are also vibe coded. So, the personal maybe one to three email follow-up sequence is vibe coded as well. And the last thing that I really like is that during this whole process, we noticed things we didn't like in our strategic setup, in our content and storytelling way, like the typography for example or the the caption length, etc. While we gave the AI feedback, we also always told it change it here on this lead magnet until we like it. And then when we loved it, we said, could you also do the necessary update, for example, in the storytelling and content skill, so that the next

11:43iteration of the lead magnets can benefit from that. So, your whole company becomes this this brain for your organization and the one source of truth for it without having to think about like coding this or anything. Like, I do never write any line-by-line code. I just talk through my voice with Whisper Flo to my agent here on Claude the code and and give it advice, give it opinions, have it create ideas, and then I say something like, hey, could you please wrap this up in a skill so we remember this for the future? And then this is saved up here under skills, and voila, there's the new content skill

12:24with a couple of references, and there is the full description of how I want the next funnel to be created by, for example, hey, first read the context from the strategy and the context in the content folder, and then propose a couple of ideas, help the user make a decision for one, build it build the emails, etc. And we will keep building this out. Next week we're going to talk about how to set up the analytics for your funnel, but let's not get uh too far ahead. The main message is here that you can use this to actually improve the code base over time every time you build

12:59a marketing funnel. And so, marketing and building really joins here. So, what I like you to do is to follow these three steps. If you are reading this, you can come to paraskills.com, visit this website, and there are three copy-pastable prompts in here that you can get started with. I would assume that you maybe have some already done some of the work that we suggested in the growth part of Arctic ago and the content part, but if you haven't, you can start with this without It will interview you in order to create an ICP markdown file and an offer. ICP meaning ideal customer profile, asking you who's

13:35the perfect fit customer for you and what are you essentially offering. This gives them the context to suggest lead magnets for the right people and that actually lead to your paid offers. Then, after you're done with that, um the second prompt reads those files and then suggests a row of lead magnets for you that you don't have to agree with. You can steal them, ask them for more suggestions, but it should help you pick one and then build the landing page for that for you in your existing stack with your existing design components and in your brand voice. And then, you have a full lead magnet and you can expand that

14:14beyond the landing page. You can ask it to create the promotional social media post for it. You can ask it to create the email follow-up sequences. But in the end, you should go to step three and say like, "Okay, based on this and all of the feedback I gave you on the lead magnet and the language, please review the context documents we provided and make necessary updates to our strategy content ICP offer and the whatever you have." And if you don't want it to just mess around then ask it to propose changes before making any and then you

14:46just take the ones that you agree with. That's it. That is your funnel strategy in the repo and it's a part of the series. As you can see, we go through the Bridesmaid setup from strategy to content to funnel. This is the table stakes and for the more advanced folks out there who want to also invest a bit more in customer acquisition. It's very important to follow the next three steps. It's going to be data analytics, measuring what you can do, then traffic generation. We will set up, for example, an Instagram ads campaign with full tracking. And then last but not least, conversion optimization, where we

15:24optimize the landing page, the lead magnet, the email sequences, the ads, etc. until this becomes a profitable machine. That's it for today. I hope you enjoyed this. And if you're interested in going even deeper, every month we have free events like the Pirate Lab, where we meet online and discuss these latest insights. So, if you're actually reading this on on launch day, you always know like Wednesday we're going to talk about it in detail so we can exchange our best practices. This is online via Zoom. Then we once a month in the in case you are nearby Cologne and would love to meet me also in person and

16:02the whole community, we got the wonderful Vibe Coding Cologne event happening actually in 2 days. Very much looking forward to that. We host a hackathon every quarter. The last one was last weekend, which was really, really wonderful to see over 100 builders with I think we had 33 demos at the end of a really amazing to see. And then we also have the Pirate Forge, which helps you in a in a 12-week program of 6 weeks learning to vibe code your first SaaS and 6 weeks to vibe market your newly created SaaS to your first

16:39baseline revenue. All right, that's it from me. I hope to see you in the next one. Bye-bye.