$248K in Pipeline From One Website in 16 Weeks. Zero Outbound. Zero Paid Ads.

This page is the retrospective. It shows which pages produced the calls, which channels produced the money, and what we would change. It exists because prospects ask us to prove that evergreen content funnels work before they pay for one, and the most verifiable proof we hold is our own pipeline.

Croton sells evergreen content funnels to financial brands. Before we offered one, we ran the same experiment on ourselves.

Like most agencies, Croton grew up on outbound: cold email and LinkedIn to financial firms. It produced conversations, a few clients, and no repeatable pipeline. So in early 2026 we stopped outreach and rebuilt our own website around the funnel we now sell: services pages for YouTube marketing, SEO and answer engine optimisation, industry pages for wealth management, family offices and investment migration advisers, two "best agencies" roundup posts, and a media section built for AI-assistant citation. The only conversion path is a discovery call.

The rule was simple. If the funnel could not book qualified sales calls for Croton, we would not put it in front of a client. What follows is the result of that test.

Tracking was thin at the start. PostHog only began recording on 14 April 2026, and the CRM had no attribution field. The channel for each booking was recovered from the intake question "Where did you hear from us?", which every prospect answers.

Pipeline created is the first-year value of every priced proposal, at the tier we recommended or the client chose, with monthly retainers counted at 12 months and setup fees included. It includes the two proposals that were declined, because they were real opportunities the site produced. Nine of the ten proposals carried a price; the tenth was a white-label partner rate sheet and is left out.

That works out at roughly $13,000 of pipeline per booked call, at zero media cost. Two years of outbound produced no comparable pipeline.

Prospects were asked how they found us. Eleven said Google or "online search", four named an AI assistant, one said the website directly, and three said "online".

PostHog session data shows which page each organic booking entered on:

The free tools attract 20 times the organic sessions of the services pages and produced no calls. The industry pages, with the least traffic on the site, converted 1 in 14 sessions into a booking. Two of the three industry-page bookings came through the investment migration advisers page, and one of those is now a signed client.

Search-sourced pipeline came to about $119,000 across six priced proposals, including two of the three signed clients. Homepage entries are mostly branded searches from people who had already heard of Croton, so we credit those to reputation rather than to SEO.

Four prospects said they found Croton through ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. One wrote the exact prompt in the intake form: "What agencies specialize in financial content." All four booked, all four held the call, all four received a proposal, and one is now a signed client on a monthly retainer.

The three priced AI-sourced proposals total about $129,000 in first-year value, more than half of everything the site produced, from a fifth of the calls. AI referrals arrived further down the funnel than search referrals: they had already compared agencies before booking, and every one of them asked for a retainer rather than a one-off project.

The pages these assistants cite are the roundup posts, the media section and the services pages, which were written with citation in mind: entity definitions in the opening, honest concessions, and a clear "best for" line on every service.

Retainers are counted at 12 months. Every retainer except the UK agreement is month-to-month with 30-day notice, so first-year value is what the contract yields if it runs a year, not a committed sum. The law firm stated a six-to-eight-month horizon at signing.

Against this, the site cost nothing in media and nothing in outbound labour. The only inputs were the content itself and the time to write it.

Everything on this page was built with the same process we run for clients: buyer-facing service and industry pages, roundup content written for search and AI citation, and one booking path. We tested it on ourselves first because we would not sell a funnel we had not proven. If you run a financial advisory firm, a fintech, or a specialist practice and want sales calls to come to you, the next step is a short call.