P2-07: Gated Content / Lead Capture

Gate any content behind an email capture form — auto-create contacts, trigger sequences.

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Scoring Card

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Pain	4 / 5	Teams use Typeform or custom forms, then manually export leads
Revenue	4 / 5	Direct acquisition feature — drives top-of-funnel growth
Build	3 / 5	Web Component + backend contact creation + sequence trigger
Moat	3 / 5	Value comes from auto-connection to Contact Graph and Sequences
Total	14 / 20

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Classification

Painkiller

Acquire — Top of Funnel

Gated Content is a direct acquisition tool. It captures leads at the moment of highest intent (wanting to read your content) and immediately feeds them into the growth engine.

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The Pain It Kills

Content-led growth is one of the most effective SaaS acquisition channels, but the tooling is fragmented:

1. Typeform/Google Forms for gating — Visitor fills out a form, gets a PDF link. The lead sits in Typeform until someone exports it.
2. Manual CSV export — Marketing exports leads weekly, uploads to Mailchimp, starts a drip campaign. Days of delay.
3. No attribution — No connection between the gated content download and the eventual signup. Can’t answer “which ebook drove the most conversions?”
4. Custom code — Engineering builds a one-off gate for the blog, hardcoded to one email provider. Fragile, unmaintainable.

Real scenarios:

• A SaaS startup publishes a “State of the Industry” report. They gate it with Typeform. Leads trickle into a spreadsheet. By the time marketing sends a follow-up email, the lead has gone cold.
• A developer tools company wants to gate API documentation behind a signup. They build a custom solution that breaks every time they redesign the docs site.

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What It Does

GrowthOS ships an embeddable <growthOS-gate> Web Component that can wrap any content — blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, videos, tools.

The flow:

1. Visitor lands on a page with gated content.
2. They see a preview + the gate overlay asking for their email (and optional custom fields).
3. Visitor submits their email.
4. Contact auto-created in the Contact Graph (or merged if existing).
5. Content unlocked — either revealed in-place or redirected to the full content.
6. Nurture sequence triggered — the contact enters a configurable email sequence.
7. UTM data captured — source attribution stored on the contact record.

Everything happens in one seamless flow. Zero manual steps.

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Competition & What We Replace

Tool	Price	Limitation
ConvertKit	$15-59/mo	Email-first. Gating is basic. No connection to product analytics.
Leadpages	$37-74/mo	Landing page builder with forms. No CRM or sequence integration.
HubSpot forms	Free (limited)	Good forms, but free tier is limited. Full power requires $800+/mo.
Typeform	$25-83/mo	Beautiful forms, zero automation. Manual export required.
GrowthOS Gated Content	Included	Auto-create contact + trigger sequence + UTM attribution in one flow

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Moat & Defensibility

The moat is the automatic connection between lead capture and the rest of the growth stack:

• Captured leads immediately appear in the Contact Graph with full UTM attribution.
• Sequences start within seconds, not days.
• Segment Builder can create “gated-content-leads” segments for targeted follow-up.
• Analytics show content → signup → activation → revenue attribution.

No standalone form tool can replicate this without extensive integration work.

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Interoperability Advantage

Gated Content is the entry point for new contacts. Every downstream module benefits from the leads it captures.

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What Ships

1. Embeddable <growthOS-gate> Web Component — drop into any page with a single HTML tag
2. Configurable fields — email (required) + optional custom fields (name, company, role)
3. Unlock modes — reveal content in-place OR redirect to a URL on capture
4. Dashboard analytics — views, captures, conversion rate per gated asset
5. Sequence trigger — configure which email sequence to trigger on capture
6. UTM passthrough — UTM params from the page URL stored on the contact record

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What Does NOT Ship

• Content hosting — GrowthOS does not host your PDFs, videos, or blog posts. The gate wraps content you host.
• Paywall functionality — this is lead capture, not monetization. No payment collection.
• Advanced form builder — no multi-step forms, conditional logic, or file uploads. Keep it simple: email + a few fields.

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Build vs Buy

Build (chosen)

• Web Component is lightweight to build (~1 week)
• Must integrate with Contact Graph and Email Sequences natively
• UTM capture requires SDK integration
• Estimated: 2 weeks

Buy

• Typeform/Leadpages provide form UI but zero backend integration
• Would still need to build the Contact Graph sync, sequence trigger, and UTM capture
• Integration maintenance cost exceeds build cost

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Dependencies

Dependency	Phase	Status	Notes
Contact Graph	P1	Required	Auto-create contacts on capture
Email Sequences	P1	Required	Trigger nurture sequences post-capture
UTM Attribution	P2	Optional	Source tracking on captured contacts
Segment Builder	P2	Optional	Create segments of gated-content leads