Today’s ✨ free marketing idea ✨ is sponsored by Gumloop
Gumloop takes the marketing work you do every week, gives it to an AI agent, and you never do it again.
It’s like cloning your best marketer. One person builds a Gumloop agent, and then the entire team can use it. The agent works inside the tools you already use (like Clay, Ahrefs, HubSpot, Slack, and 400+ other apps).
Teams at Shopify, Ramp, and Instacart all use Gumloop to run their marketing.
The best-converting homepage button 🕹️
A while ago, I wanted a better form for sponsors who want to advertise here.
I googled “form builder” and clicked on forms.app, a form builder with 4 million users. The top of their homepage was a big empty text box: describe the form you need → and their AI builds it for you.
I liked the idea, but the box needed a written description of my form (see image), and I didn’t have time to write something up. So…. I closed the tab.
My sponsor application is still a Google Form.
What the A/B test showed 🧪
A few months later I came across an A/B test that forms.app ran on that exact same box. They showed 25,000 new visitors 3 versions of the homepage:
The AI text box that I saw.
Sign-up buttons: Google, Apple, email.
A single “Create a form for free” button: build first, sign up after.
Which converted better - A, B, or C?
Guess which one won before you scroll down ↓
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Sign-up buttons → 15.15% signed up. 👑
”Create a form” button → 9.60%.
AI text box → 5.74%.
The boring buttons got 2.6x the signups of the AI box. The box came last on EVERY metric they tracked, and 84% of the people who saw it clicked nothing at all. (Same as me!)
Why the AI text box lost ❌
Because it asked me to think. I had never used forms.app, so I couldn't describe what I wanted from it. Signing up with Google, on the other hand, takes zero thinking.
What about the playground (“Create a form” button)? Fewer sign-ups, but the most active users (3.63% vs 3.23%) and the most buyers (0.176% vs 0.102%). I’ve recommended playgrounds since 2023, and I’d still pick that one over the buttons.
The AI box is the one that lost everything, so the lesson is to be careful what you ask for. People will click a button, give you their email, or paste a URL. They won’t write you a paragraph before they know who you are.
That’s why marketingideas.ai, my upcoming product, asks for one thing: your website’s URL (zero thinking required).
Only ask for what they already have ✅
Now look at the first thing your own homepage asks a visitor to do. If it’s one of these, you’re fine:
✅ “Sign up with Google”
✅ “Enter your email”
✅ “Drop your website URL”
✅ “Try it free” (if the product opens instantly)
If it’s one of these, you have the forms.app problem:
❌ “What do you want to build?”
❌ “Tell us about your project”
❌ “Ask me anything”
Here’s what I’d do about it:
1. Move the question to after signup. Keep buttons on the homepage and put the AI box inside the product. That’s what forms.app did.
2. If you really want to keep the box, add buttons under it. 4-5 example answers people can click instead of type. forms.app does this on their AI page now: the same box, plus “Or, choose your goal: Lead gen / Feedback / Registrations / File uploads / Payments”.
Bolt does the same thing under “What will you build today?” with Website / Slides / App / Prototype buttons.
3. If you need context to personalize, ask for something people can paste. A URL, like I do. Or a link to a form or a page they already have. Bolt lets you start from a Figma file.
And if you’re not sure whether your box is a problem → install Microsoft Clarity (it’s free), watch 20 recordings of your homepage, and count how many people click into the field and then type nothing. At forms.app it was 84%.
See you next week ✌️
Tom
Agreed on the playground, and the buyer numbers make the case stronger. It got about 70% more buyers than the sign-up buttons, 0.176% vs 0.102%, even with fewer signups. A team that judges this test by signups alone would ship the page that makes less money. I'd set buyers as the goal before the test starts, so nobody picks the winner by signups later.