Block types
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Author: Dmitry Dugarev
A FunnelCAD funnel is built from a small set of blocks, connected on the
canvas by links. Every block gets a part number when it is made —
SRC-01, STP-02, OFR-04 — and keeps it through a rename, a move and
a price change. Every amount is per calendar month.
Source
Where visitors come from: ads, SEO, social, a newsletter. A paid
source has a budget a month and a cost per click (CPC), and
brings budget ÷ CPC visitors in an average month. An organic source
has its visits a month instead. Either kind can carry your time and
your costs every month. Code: SRC.
Step
A step people pass for free: a landing page, a lead magnet, a call. A
step can carry your time and your costs per person — a free check
that takes you six minutes is 0.1 h — and time and costs every month.
Code: STP.
Offer
A step people pay for once. An offer carries a price, your time and
costs per person, and fixed costs. It can credit an earlier payment:
an audit of €330 credited on a remediation of €2,500 sells the
remediation for €2,170. A step that gets a price becomes an offer and
keeps its number. Code: OFR.
Recurring
A subscription: people pay its price every month, for as many months as a subscriber pays on average — the lifetime. If 5% of subscribers leave a month, that is 20 months. Your time and costs are per subscriber a month. The lifetime matters as much as the price: a recurring block's value depends on retention, not just on the first sale.
In the app, a subscription is an offer billed every month: select an
offer and set its Billing to Monthly in the property sheet. It
keeps the OFR code of an offer.
Scorecard
The totals and the risk of the blocks linked into it, and of everything
that leads to them: expected profit, the typical month, the chance of a
month without a client, the delivery load and more. A scorecard takes no
inputs of its own — it reads its links. You can have several, one per
branch for example, and a block can count in more than one. Code: SCR.
The example funnel walks through
every readout.
Note and task list
Text or a checklist on the canvas. Notes and task lists are never part of
a computation. Code: NTE.
Links
A link moves people from one block to the next. It has a conversion rate from 0 to 100% and a basis:
| Basis | Meaning |
|---|---|
| All | A share of everyone who reached the block. |
| Rest | A share of those who did not leave by another link. |
| Up | An add-on to the order. It takes nobody away from the other links, and it is dashed. |
A link into a scorecard moves nobody: it only says what the scorecard counts. A link to a note or a task list is dotted and only shows what the note is about.
Inputs at a glance
| Input | On | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | Paid source | Money for ads, a month |
| CPC | Paid source | Cost per click |
| Visits | Organic source | Visits a month |
| Price | Offer, recurring | What a person pays: once, or every month |
| Credit | Offer | An earlier offer whose price comes off this one |
| Time | Source, step, offer, recurring | Your hours per person (per subscriber a month), or a month |
| Costs | Source, step, offer, recurring | Your money per person (per subscriber a month), or a month |
| Lifetime | Recurring | Months a subscriber pays on average |
Blocks also carry notes and tasks — free-text reasoning and to-dos attached directly to the block they belong to, so "why we assumed 5%" and "what to change next" live next to the number they explain rather than in a separate document. A note is an Assumption, a Plan or an Actual, signed with your initials and dated.
Every block can also have a tag, one of seven colours. A tag only groups blocks visually; it never changes a number.
The example funnel puts a source, steps, offers, a recurring block and a scorecard together in one model.
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