# Playbook — Free-Tool / PLG (Product-Led Growth) Funnel

**Derives from:** HubSpot (Website Grader, launched 2007) — the canonical case. See MANUAL §4.8.

## Thesis

A free instrument delivers a personalized diagnostic result. The **gaps in that result are the sales argument** for the paid product — the prospect isn't told they have a problem, they're shown their own quantified score and left to draw the conclusion themselves. This is Cialdini's pre-suasion (§2.3) operating structurally: the tool *is* the privileged moment, not a message that precedes one.

## When to use it

- You can build (or already have) a tool that produces a **personalized, credible** result — a score, a grade, a gap analysis — that a stranger will trust because it's about *them specifically*, not a generic quiz.
- The tool's diagnosed gap connects directly and obviously to what the paid product fixes — the tighter that connection, the harder the funnel converts.
- You want a scalable top-of-funnel that doesn't require paid traffic to work indefinitely (a genuinely useful free tool gets shared/linked organically — the seed of `flywheel` mechanics).

## When NOT to use it

- The tool's result doesn't clearly connect to the paid offer — if the diagnosis and the fix feel like two different products, the pre-suasion breaks and the funnel just gives away a free tool with no conversion engine attached.
- Building a credible diagnostic tool is expensive relative to the audience size it would convert — a beautifully engineered scorer for a niche of 200 people rarely pays for its own build cost.
- The tool can be gamed to produce artificially bad (fear-mongering) or artificially good (flattering, no urgency) scores — either destroys the credibility the entire mechanism depends on.

## Step-by-step build

1. **Design the diagnostic input** — what does the prospect give the tool (a URL, a set of answers, an upload)? Minimize friction here (Fogg ability, §2.6) — every extra required field is a drop-off point before the value is even shown.
2. **Design the scoring logic** to be genuinely credible and specific — sub-scores across multiple dimensions read as more trustworthy than one blended number, and each sub-score becomes its own sales argument for a specific part of the paid product.
3. **Results page** — ONE job: get the prospect to act on their gap (book a call, start a trial, opt into a report). The result itself does the persuading; the CTA should feel like the obvious next step, not a hard pitch.
4. **Email capture** — decide whether the score is gated behind an email (higher lead capture, lower completion) or shown free with email required only for the full report (lower friction, softer capture) — this is a real trade-off to state explicitly, not default silently.
5. **Stage Map**: traffic → tool landing page → tool input submitted → results delivered → CTA (nurture sequence or direct offer) → purchase.
6. **Conversion Math**: landing→tool-started, tool-started→completed (watch this one — ability-cost from a too-long input form shows up here), completed→email captured, email captured→purchase.
7. **Instrumentation**: `tool_started`, `tool_completed`, `email_captured`, `results_viewed`, `cta_clicked`, `purchased`.
8. **Failure Exits**: abandoned mid-tool → single reminder email with a direct link back to their in-progress result (not a generic "come back" email — reference what they started); completed but no purchase → nurture sequence built around their *specific* worst sub-score, re-surfacing the gap over time.

## Worked mini-example — the ZIION Builder Passport diagnostic

- **Tool:** free "Builder Readiness Score" — 8 questions across the 8-level readiness ladder, output is a 0–100 score plus a per-level sub-score.
- **Sales argument built in:** each low sub-score names the exact Passport level that addresses it — a prospect scoring low on "Capital Readiness" sees that named as their gap, and the Premium cohort (see `application-high-ticket`) is offered as the specific fix.
- **Email capture point:** full sub-score breakdown gated behind email; the headline 0–100 score is shown free to reduce initial friction.
- **CTA:** "See your Level 3 unlock plan" → nurture sequence into the Core Passport rung.
- **Conversion Math:** landing→tool started 35% `[guess]`; started→completed 60% `[benchmark, short-form assessment norms]`; completed→email captured 50% `[guess]`; email→purchase within 30 days 4% `[guess, no historical data]`.

## How the verify gate applies

`funnel-blueprint` (MANUAL §8.1) with an added honesty requirement specific to this style: the scoring logic must be documented as genuinely computed from the input (no cosmetic randomization dressed as diagnosis) — a "free tool" whose score doesn't actually vary meaningfully by input is fabricated proof, which the "no bullshit bar" (§8.6 item 3, hype standing in for proof) extends to cover. Every stage transition number still needs its source tag, and the tool-started→completed number in particular should be watched closely as the primary ability-cost signal (Fogg, §2.6) — a low completion rate here almost always means the input form is too long, not that the offer is weak.