Lead Magnet & Free Tool Design

The usual lead magnet is a PDF called "The Ultimate Guide to X", gated behind a form, promoted to everyone. It collects hundreds of emails and almost no buyers, because the people who download a guide about a topic are people interested in the topic, not people with the problem you solve.

AAJ's rule is the reverse: ungate ideas, gate tools. Publish the thinking openly, because its job is to travel and be forwarded. Ask for an email only for something that does a job - a calculator, a template, an assessment - where the trade is fair and the inputs tell you who is asking. This skill scores ideas on that rule and on four others, ranks them against the effort to build them, and afterwards judges a live magnet on the qualified leads it produces, never on downloads.

When to use

The user is choosing what to build to capture leads, deciding whether to gate something, or looking at a magnet's numbers and wondering whether to keep it.