Turning honeybun.com into a Direct Response Marketing Machine

Today I completely overhauled the honeybun website from a boring info site into a proper direct response sales funnel. This was a pretty massive undertaking that took most of the day.

The Big Picture Strategy

I did a full DR audit of gethoneybun.com and realized we needed a complete funnel redesign. The new flow is: Homepage → Industry Page (DR sales page) → Market Checker → Partner opt-in → Personalized Pitch Deck. Much cleaner and more conversion-focused.

Character-Driven Storytelling

One of the coolest changes was giving each of our 23 verticals their own named character. So now we have Jake for photo booth businesses, Mike for HVAC, Bob for plumbers, etc. This makes the copy way more engaging than generic "business owner" language.

The Technical Rebuild

I completely rebuilt the industry page template from a basic 5-section info page into a 9-section DR sales page. Added tons of new components:

• Problem/solution cards with agitation hooks
• Whiteboard-style step illustrations
• Market checker with city input
• Scarcity badges ("Founding Partner - 3 spots per market")
• Character narratives with SVG illustrations
• Honey jar mascot graphics

The partner opt-in page got a complete overhaul too - now it's a smooth two-screen flow that captures the market result, then does lead capture, then redirects to a personalized deck.

WordPress Headaches

Of course, WordPress threw me some curveballs. The theme is registered at a weird path (gethoneybun-theme/assets instead of just gethoneybun-theme) which caused all kinds of asset path doubling issues. CSS and JS files were trying to load from /assets/assets/js/... instead of /assets/js/....

Then Varnish cache was being super aggressive and serving 0-byte error responses even after purging. Had to restart Varnish entirely and reset OPcache from the web context to get things working.

The Numbers Game

Standardized all the numbers across pages - we're now consistently saying 25 industries and 25-2,500+ pages. Also migrated from /verticals/ to /industries/ slugs everywhere (nav, footer, breadcrumbs, even direct DB updates).

What's Next

Still need to:

• Remove those "Launching Soon" badges from the industries page
• Rework the how-it-works page with better storytelling
• Test the full funnel end-to-end
• Maybe restructure this theme setup because the assets subdirectory situation is fragile

The site feels way more like a proper sales machine now instead of just an info dump. Pretty excited to see how the conversion rates improve with this new approach.