My adventures in Lead Magnets, and what I learned from the online marketeers

If you're trying to build a mailing list which, as an entrepreneur, so they say, you should, you need a Lead Magnet. So they say.

What is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is a thing you offer for free to get people to sign up to your mailing list.

Here are my notes on possible Lead Magnets. As you can see, there are various ways to encourage somebody to hand over their lead magnets.

This is a list of suggestions that they gave me.

Who is they?

Oh - you know - they - the online marketeers selling courses teaching you how to generate a passive income by selling courses.

It's easy to dismiss these people but I've personally learned a lot by listening to Pat Flynn, Donald Miller, Mike Michalowicz and Amy Porterfield.

But their target audience is not really coders. Their expertise is more in the information economy than in the software business. They're mostly about selling courses, guides and checklists. People can make a lot of money doing this, and it's a genuinely fertile industry.

But what if, like me, you're more of a systems-thinker? What if you would rather build an iOS app than design a training course? Even if you could be converting people from free courses to $99 courses to $999 programmes and memberships? What if, like me, you looked into Udemy and rather than spend half a day throwing together an Arduino for Beginners course, you rebuilt Udemy on your own platform, just so... (uh... honestly I don't even remember why I thought that was a good idea. I have a problem...).

My first lead magnet worked well

My first lead magnet actually worked pretty well. I had written a document years ago that was included as a "user guide" in my Happiness app. I had recently overhauled the app and rereleased it as Changes. I updated that old user guide document with some new thoughts and mentions of the new app and made it available for download in exchange for an email address.

So, of course, I had to try something more difficult...

When I pivoted to Squares TV I struggled to find a good way to encourage people to sign up. I produced interviews with users of my camera app as a way of building up my network and learning what people might need.

I had this hair-brained idea that I could get people to sign up by offering an interactive rig explorer.

I don't think a single person signed up to look at this. And it wasn't super-easy to build!

I felt like I was overthinking it - I looked back at my list. "Why am I making this complicated? Why don't I just make a 'Top 5 X' pdf and use that?".

The problem was that other people were doing a great job of the sort of "information content" that I might have wanted to create. And I'm not big on researching and reading and writing. I like making.

Developing my intuition - when is a product a lead magnet?

I'm always building little tools to make my life easier. I started thinking of these as living on a spectrum between "Product" and "Lead Magnet".

Tools that weren't worth turning into a full-blown product could be used as a lead magnet.

It took me a couple of tries to find the right level and capability for a good lead magnet. My "Rig Explorer" was a failure. But my Delay Calculator was a success!

A success story

Thanks to my Delay Calculator (and the questions I ask people after they first sign up to Squares TV) I ended up on a call with somebody who had tried it but not tried my mai product. I told him about my camera app and he immediately bought it. He subsequently evangelised my work to a wider community and I ended up making thousands of dollars in app sales.

It was a huge deal for me - I had never seen anybody discover the app that had been paying my bills for two years - I didn't really understand its appeal! But now I've seen somebody's face when they first install it, the way it lights up with the relieved satisfaction of a problem well-solved.

In conclusion

If you build a tool to solve a problem for yourself, but it's not something worth turning into a full-blown product, why not make it available for free in exchange for an email address?

If your tool serves the same customer base as your main product, this is a great way to generate leads.