No lead left behind
Sellmore Windows & Doors runs paid ad campaigns and sells the leads that come out of them. Every lead costs money before it arrives. We have looked after the sites and the server behind those campaigns for years, and one day we found that some of those leads were arriving and being thrown away, and no one knew.
Where it started
It began with hosting. Sellmore had a growing collection of landing sites, one for each campaign and each brand they sold leads for, and they needed somewhere to run them and someone to keep them alive. We built them a Virtual Private Server and took the sites on. Each new campaign meant a new site from the template, a new domain, certificates, tag containers and the automation hooks that fed leads into their CRM. Over time we taught the pages to capture where each visitor came from, which ad they clicked and what they did on the site, so a lead arrived with its history attached. We fed completed leads back to the ad platforms so the campaigns learned what worked, and when a buyer wanted leads delivered straight into their own system, we wrote the code that talks to their intake API, with every field checked before it goes out.
Rebuilding the sites
The original pages were plain HTML and PHP, and they had grown hard to change. We rebuilt every lead generation site on a modern framework, one at a time, with a test copy of each so changes could be tried before anyone saw them. The forms got proper validation, so a typo in a phone number no longer cost a lead. We built the business its own lead submission API, which let us retire one Zapier task after another. We ran split tests between landing page designs, added financing and regional pages as the campaigns asked for them, put every domain behind Cloudflare, and when attackers started probing the server we hardened it, cut the old code out and moved everything that was left onto the new API. These days a new site goes up in days, with AI doing the first pass and us doing the checking.
The day leads went missing
The ad platform sent each lead to Sellmore's intake system. Some of those were rejected because the two sides disagreed about the shape of the data. The money had been spent and the lead was gone, while the dashboards looked normal. We traced the rejections to the mismatch, fixed it the same day and replayed every stranded lead back into the pipeline. Then we made sure it could not happen unnoticed again. Once an hour a test lead travels the whole path, from the form to the CRM, and if it does not arrive someone gets told. Contact details are saved as soon as they are typed, so an abandoned form still produces a follow up, and a lead keeps retrying from the visitor's device until it lands, even if the page is closed. Failures are saved, flagged and emailed for follow up.
The rest of the cleanup
On planfortheunexpected.net, every submission is now recorded by TrustedForm, so the lead's origin and consent can be proven later. The lead admin sits behind passkeys and a second sign in step, with duplicate detection so the same lead is never counted twice. Forms run in English and Spanish and carry campaign and source tracking. There is a set of phone first variants ready for testing. When one of Sellmore's clients escalates a problem, it lands with us and gets answered the same day.
Today
Leads that used to vanish are captured, delivered and proven delivered every hour. The automation subscriptions are gone, replaced by code the business owns. If a step breaks, Sellmore hears about it in minutes rather than at month end, and when they want a new campaign site it is live before the ads are.
Viscous Bits has been an irreplaceable partner to our business for years. They built us a Virtual Private Server and still maintain it, moved all of our lead generation sites onto it and modernized every one of them. They have built many web applications for us over the years and replaced our Zapier subscriptions with custom coded APIs, which took a recurring cost off our books. When we need a new site they help us stand one up in days with AI. If a lead ever goes missing they find it and get it back to us, and when one of our clients escalates a problem they respond right away. We are especially impressed with the personal service and quick turnaround time.
Stack
Node.js, Python, MySQL, nginx, WireGuard, Prometheus and Grafana, n8n