The Autonomous Marketer: The Autonomous Future of Lead Gen

Shikshita Juyal started to notice an interesting trend while working with the founders and service providers she helps build MVPs through her company, Crework Labs. Their lead magnets, once such a core aspect of any good marketing funnel, weren’t getting as much traction.

While giving clients a peek at the value you offer is still useful, now that everyone is doing it, a free PDF or ebook is losing its luster.

On top of that, traditional lead magnets ask a lot of your potential customers.

“Lead magnets like ebooks or PDFs create cognitive load for website visitors; they have to download them, open them, and take the time to read all the details provided. It’s essentially adding one more task to their list,” explains Juyal. “We wanted to find a way to provide instant value without causing any friction to website visitors.” Thus, the AI lead magnet was born.

The goal was to ask for as little as possible from someone using the lead magnet—a link to their website, a PDF of a pitch deck they’re working on—and then share a teaser of the kind of feedback and insights they could expect from working with that company or service provider. From there, they’d generate leads for the business by encouraging visitors to book a free consultation or asking for their email for a more full report.

In the past eight months, Juyal has built over eight personalized AI lead magnets across different domains, all designed to help founders get more sign-ups and booked calls. And it’s working—on average, these tools have increased conversions by 32%.

The good news is, it’s possible to partner with AI tools to create an AI lead magnet, no technical knowledge necessary. Below, Juyal shares her workflow for using ChatGPT or Claude combined with a vibe coding platform like Lovable, which allows users to create web apps using plain English. (Replit and Cursor are popular alternatives.)

Here’s how you can start building your own.

A good interactive AI lead magnet will follow the same best practices as any effective lead magnet: It should tackle a single, core problem of your target audience and give them the feeling of a quick win. Ideally, it also shows off whatever your business does best.

Think about what customers come to you for, and how you could demonstrate that value in a small, tangible way. If you’re a graphic designer, maybe it’s logo feedback. If you’re a social media business, perhaps you offer ideas for improvement based on a customer’s recent social posts.

If you already have existing lead magnets that are successful, think about whether there are ways you could adapt them to something interactive. A static PDF checklist could be a page of dynamic to-dos tailored to the website a user uploads; a fill-in-the-blank workbook could become a live conversation with a chatbot.

And if you’re feeling stuck, Juyal suggests chatting with some existing or potential customers about what they would find valuable—or even brainstorming with ChatGPT.

Don’t worry too much at this phase how you’ll achieve this—AI will help you sort that out next!

With a rough vision in mind for what your interactive AI lead magnet could be, you can turn to ChatGPT or Claude to brainstorm.

“Tell them to act as your CTO helping you build out this product,” suggests Juyal. “‘This is my goal, this is what I’m vaguely thinking about for my lead magnet, and now I want you to tell me to make this user experience as seamless as possible for a website visitor.’” Through this conversation, the GPT should be able to help you identify the ideal user inputs and the outputs they can expect.

As part of this, you’ll also want to have a plan for how you’ll package it as a lead magnet. How are you going to create some urgency for the user to opt in further?

(Juyal loves giving the users a “score” for this, and focusing slightly more on opportunities for improvement than what they’re already doing well.) 

What are you going to ask them to do (e.g., give their email address, book a discovery call) and what will you offer in return? Again, this can be a brainstorming conversation with ChatGPT.

Finally, you’ll want to give ChatGPT information on your unique approach to solving that problem for customers.

“This ensures your tool feels authentic to your brand—not like a generic audit anyone could get from ChatGPT,” explains Juyal. This could include what makes you stand out from similar service providers, and anything that you don’t do or want to avoid (e.g., no black-hat tactics, no jargon, no overpromises).

With that simple information, you can start to explain to Lovable in simple language what you want your web app to look like: “I’m trying to create a lead magnet which will perform X function. A user will come and insert Y input and click a button to get Z output.” You could even ask GPT to write the training data based on your conversation to drop into Lovable.

Once your first version is live, expect it to need refinement. As Juyal explains, her early iterations “looked polished but weren’t useful”—the tool either offered vague, high-level advice or produced exaggerated numbers. The goal of this stage is to tighten the logic, strengthen the accuracy, and make your tool behave more like a smart strategist than a generic chatbot.

A good starting point is to train your app to ask clarifying questions whenever inputs are incomplete. If your tool doesn’t have enough data to produce a meaningful insight, instruct it to say “Not enough data” or prompt the user for missing information instead of making assumptions or guessing. For tools that rely on metrics or calculations—like SEO audits—Juyal recommends forcing the model to “show its math” so users can see how it arrived at keyword gaps, scores, or recommendations. This transparency builds trust and helps you catch inaccuracies early.

From there, commit to a cadence of improvements: update your training data with new client examples or best practices, review outputs monthly to catch odd or repetitive suggestions, and set up a feedback loop so your team can flag anything that feels unclear or off-brand.

“Just make sure to be as descriptive as possible,” says Juyal. “If Lovable is giving an output you don’t like, you have to be specific: ‘For X, Y, Z, you have given this output, but this is what the expectation is because of A, B, C reasons.’ If you’re clear, it’s very possible to get the results you’re looking for.” In other words: treat this as an ongoing collaboration. The more precisely you guide the model, the closer you’ll get to an interactive lead magnet that genuinely shows off your expertise—and consistently converts.

With the help of this process, you could build a lead magnet tool that gives website copy or design suggestions, that calculates cost savings from working with your company, that analyzes the potential ROI of bringing your expertise to the table — there are so many options, just get creative with showing off what you have to offer.

Juyal’s final advice for building your AI lead magnet? “Just play around. You don’t need to be super technical—keep experimenting, breaking things, and fixing them. Step by step, you’ll figure it out.”