Teardown No. 12 · Lead magnet

How Virgil Brewster turned an internal Claude Code skill into a lead magnet people actually run

Virgil Brewster's best PDF lead magnet had a 2% completion rate. So he took a meeting-transcript skill his agency runs every morning, used Claude Code to cut it down to one markdown agent file, and made that file the download.

Virgil Brewster · @thevirgilbrewVerified Oct 15, 2026Markdown copy

The problem

His best lead magnet, a 30-page media-buying guide, “had a 2% completion rate.” In his words: “A PDF asks you to read. An AI lead magnet asks you to paste something in and get a result back.”

The blueprint (his 7 steps)

  1. Start from a workflow you already run. His agency’s morning skill processes Fireflies transcripts and does six things. He kept three: content stories, action items and client notes.
  2. Talk it through in Claude Code. He described what he wanted. Claude Code read the existing skill file and asked him questions: what the trigger word should be, whether to ask for the transcript or wait for it, and how to format action items. It took about 20 minutes.
  3. Build the first draft. “Create the markdown agent file based on what we just discussed.” It took under a minute and had three parts: a system prompt, an input handler and output templates.
  4. Strip out everything internal. He removed the Fireflies API call, the file paths and his category names, and generalised the wording.
  5. Test each output separately on a real 30-minute call. The action items were picking up priorities, so he added a filter: “only extract items with a clear owner and a clear next step.” It took three rounds.
  6. Make it work for anyone. He asked Claude Code to read the file as if it had never seen his company. It found four internal references (team names, a Slack channel, a formatting preference), and he removed them.
  7. Host it. He put the file in his Next.js public folder behind a single download button, on a page at virgilbrewster.com/newsletter with seven one-sentence instructions.

Funnel layer (as he describes it): each output ends with one CTA line offering a custom AI workflow. The welcome sequence includes one “reply if you want a custom build” email. Every download is tagged “Gift downloaded” so his sales team can follow up.

Stated results

  • Build time: “Total: six hours from internal tool to live lead magnet” (about 4 hours on the agent file, plus about 2 for the page and hosting, per his FAQ)
  • Downloads, signups or replies from the lead magnet: None stated

Caveats

  • His time figures don’t match: the body says “two days on the markdown file and 30 minutes on the landing page”, while the FAQ says four hours over two days plus two hours. We quote only the 6-hour total he states.
  • He’s an agency owner who sells custom AI workflows, so the lead magnet is also his sales funnel.
  • A related post on his site reports “11 signups overnight” from a mid-article signup he built with Claude Code. That’s a separate experiment, and he says he can’t see conversion per article. His “3-5x” placement claim is “based on the research Claude pulled”, not his own data, so we don’t repeat it.
  • Contact: his CTA line includes a plain email address. Don’t copy it into our pages.
  • X: @thevirgilbrew, verified both ways on 2026-10-15. virgilbrewster.com links x.com/thevirgilbrew, and the X profile links virgilbrewster.com (10.6k followers).

Sources

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