How I improved my founder-led funnel 817% with 24 mins of work

This week, I went from averaging 6 newsletter subscribers a day to getting 55 in a single day. It took one change and around 24 minutes of work.

My newsletter funnel works like this: social media → call to action (CTA) → email list → fractional GTM work and books. The CTAs are comments on one or two of my social media posts each day that ask people to subscribe to my newsletter via a sign-up link. This is the same funnel early-stage startups should be running, except selling their product instead of my services at the end.

My top-of-funnel has been crushing. I started posting on X and Threads in June and got 700K views. By July, 1.8 million. This month I’m on track to pass 2 million. My newsletter has been growing, but not as fast as I’d like. Looking at the data, I realized the CTA stage of my funnel was underperforming, so I set out to improve it.

I didn’t know how to fix my CTAs because I wasn’t tracking them, so I added UTM parameters to them. If you aren’t familiar with UTMs, they are custom URLs that look like this:

They allow you to keep track of where your website traffic is coming from. You can set up Google Analytics to see how many subscribers each CTA with a UTM brought in, but I wanted much more data than that.

So I decided to add a UTM creator to Yapp, the internal software I created with Claude Code that runs my entire funnel. I set it up to show me not only which CTAs were converting but also which social media topics were driving signups and which posts deserved a CTA in the first place.

My new tool allowed me to track everything, and once the data was in, I analyzed it and started adjusting what I was saying in my CTAs and which posts I put them in. I found the CTAs that did the best tied in directly to the post. I used to write CTAs like this:

Now, I tie them to the post’s topic like this:

The second version speaks directly to the founders reading the post instead of talking about myself, and converts much better.

I also changed which posts I was commenting CTAs on. I noticed I got the most sign-ups when I put CTAs on posts that appealed to preseed/seed founders, so I started doing it more.

In the three weeks before this change, I averaged about 6 subscribers per day. In the three days after, I added 100 subscribers: 25 the first day, 20 the second, and 55 the third. And I did not publish a single newsletter on any of those days. All of that growth came from changing what my CTAs said and where I posted them. If you have a SaaS product with a 2% conversion rate over email, that’s the difference between zero sales over three days vs. making two.

To create a similar setup, you need to get your API key for Google Analytics, get your API key for the email service provider you use, and tell Claude Code to create a UTM creator for you that lets you type a CTA, enter a sign up link, select a social media platform (X, Threads, LinkedIn, etc.), generate a UTM for you and save the CTA and the UTM in a database. Then tell it to show you the results in a dashboard, including how many subscribers each CTA has gotten, and to categorize each post by topic, so you can see which topics are getting the most signups.

This may sound like a big project, but it took me less than 20 minutes to build it with Claude Code, and the analysis itself took about 4 minutes. I already had my API keys, so if you are setting everything up for the first time, it may take around an hour.

You don’t have to stop there. I have all kinds of ideas I am experimenting with. Like having my software send me an email when a post is taking off and should get a CTA.

Of course, this investment only pays off once you have enough traffic to measure. If your posts are not getting consistent views yet, fix the top of your funnel first.