No pitch. No pressure. We'll look at how your current intake is set up and show you where it's likely leaking hours, whether you hire us or not.
Your estimating time is a bet. These two systems make sure you're betting on the right people.
Filters serious buyers before they cost you a week.
Memorable design ensures the right prospects return.
Two parts. One pipeline. The Qualifier is the qualification form. The Front Door is the memorable web design that keeps the right prospects coming back.
Try it. Same flow a real lead would use.
Ask a position in a real process (land, financing), not a stated intention.
The bar starts partway filled. Beginning counts. Endowed progress.
High priority now, standard queue, or long-term nurture.
A costly signal is a trustworthy one: the handicap principle, applied to intake.
Ask whether someone is "serious about building" and everyone says yes. Ask something only a person who's done the work could answer correctly, and the tire-kickers select themselves out. Zahavi's handicap principle, also applicable to animals in general.
Ask what only they'd know. A costly question isn't a harder question. It's one that requires a real position, not a stated one.
There are two kinds of questions. Self-report questions ask what someone believes about themselves: "Are you serious about building?" Everyone says yes, because saying yes costs nothing. Position questions ask where someone actually stands: "Do you own the land?" A person can only answer that correctly if it's true.
The opening question breaks this rule on purpose. It's a simple image choice, and it isn't there to score anything. It's there to get a yes before anything real is asked. Once someone has answered one question, the rest is a smaller decision.
From there, every other question replaces a soft version with its costly twin:
| Instead of asking... | Ask... | Because... |
|---|---|---|
| What's your budget range? | What's the status of your land: owned, under contract, or still looking? | Land status is checkable. Budget is whatever they think you want to hear. |
| Are you serious about building? | Where are you with financing: pre-approved, talking to a lender, or haven't started? | Financing stage reflects effort already spent. Seriousness is just a feeling. |
| When do you want to start? | Do you have plans already, or are you starting from a blank site? | Plans are evidence of time invested. A start date is a guess. |
The pattern, not the specific questions, is what travels to your business: replace "tell me about yourself" with "show me where you stand."
Momentum is the interface. One question, one screen, and a bar that's never at zero.
The progress bar starts partway filled before the first question is even answered. It's a documented effect called endowed progress: people are measurably more likely to finish a task when it looks like it's already begun.
The bar also never shows a number. A bar with no label just shows motion, and motion is easier to keep watching than a countdown is to keep enduring.
Every screen keeps a Back button live. The option to undo a step lowers the perceived risk of taking the next one.
Answers carry weight. Weight sorts the lead. It never disqualifies.
Logistics answers (land, financing) carry the most weight. They're hardest to fake. Timeline sits in the middle. The opening image question carries almost none. It's there for momentum. The notification reads like a status report: "Owns land, ready in 6 months, pre-approved."
Because nobody buys a custom home on the first visit.
It reads like a website, not like one of your builds. The individual gaps are symptoms. That sentence is the disease.
Look at the failures on their own and they seem small. No testimonial above the fold, a scroll away from being fixed. A portfolio that's a photo grid instead of a set of stories, a caption away. A footer that still says 2022, a copy-paste away.
Stack them and they say something specific: nothing on this page was made recently, by someone specific, for someone specific. Trust doesn't transfer through a photo of a finished house. It transfers through a story.
Nobody buys a custom home on the first visit. The visit that matters is the one three months later, when they've forgotten your name.
A custom build is not an impulse decision. Someone finds the site, looks around alone, closes the tab. Weeks or months on, they search again, and this time they rarely search by name. They search the way they searched the first time: "builder near [city]."
This is the gap the Front Door exists to close. Being found once isn't the goal. Being the one they recognize on the second search is.
One thing, all the way through. Memorable design isn't more elements. It's one uncompromising choice, repeated without exception.
None of the sites worth studying are doing more than a handful of things. Each picked one move, and let that one thing carry everything else.
| Idea | The research | What it means here |
|---|---|---|
| Contrast beats volume | The isolation effect (Hedwig von Restorff, 1933): in a list of similar items, the one that breaks the pattern is remembered far longer than the rest. | One uncompromising design choice does more for memory than a dozen competent, unremarkable ones. |
| Consistency beats variety | Distinctive brand assets research (Ehrenberg-Bass; Sharp, 2010; Romaniuk, 2018): a single visual element repeated everywhere builds recognition faster than a rotating set of touches. | Pick one element and repeat it with zero exceptions across the site. |
| The peak matters more than the average | The peak-end rule (Kahneman and Fredrickson, 1993): people remember an experience by its most intense moment and how it ends. | A site needs one moment stronger than a visitor expected, and a strong close. |
Honest check on your own site. Tap what you already do. The bar tells the truth.
Deploy basic form logic to prove product-market fit before purchasing software infrastructure.
Prove the questions before paying for the software.
Before anything is wired to a tool, build the questions on paper first: a free Google Form, or even a printed sheet for phone intake, is enough. Score answers by hand in a spreadsheet.
This step exists to protect the thing that actually matters: the questions, not the software. Running the qualifier by hand on the first handful of leads lets you watch which answers actually track with who becomes a real client.
Utilize existing conditional form tools. The value is engineered into the strategy of the questions.
Translate the proven logic into a tool. Don't redesign it.
Once the manual version has run long enough to trust the weights, translate the same logic into a tool that already does branching and scoring natively. Typeform's Logic Jumps and Tally's native scoring both handle exactly this.
The translation should be one-to-one. This step moves the proven logic; it doesn't redesign it. Save redesign for after there's a second batch of real data.
For the notification: route it so the message reads like a status report, not a lead-score alert. Pass through the actual answers ("Owns land, ready in 6 months, pre-approved").
Deploy immediate customer-facing updates this week while calibrating the qualification system via live traffic.
The site fixes ship this week. The Qualifier calibrates as leads come in.
These two systems don't move at the same speed. Most of the nine-point audit is a same-week fix: a testimonial moved above the fold, a footer date corrected, three sentences added to a portfolio caption.
The Qualifier is the opposite. It can't be right on day one, because the weights are a hypothesis until real leads test them.
Trying to perfect the Qualifier before shipping the Front Door fixes just delays the changes that were never in question.
Rather have this built than build it yourself?
No pitch. No pressure. We'll look at how your current intake is set up and show you where it's likely leaking hours, whether you hire us or not.
I take on a small number of studios at a time, and I don't work from templates. A short call, and I'll tell you exactly what that looks like for yours.