CRO / Funnel Optimization Specialist for High-Ticket, Selective Education Business

We’re looking for an experienced conversion rate optimization (CRO) specialist to help us optimize a high-intent application funnel for a premium education/mentorship business. Website: www.brianwaldron.net This is not a typical “maximize the number of leads” CRO project. Our goal is to increase the number of qualified prospects who complete our application without lowering the standards that intentionally filter out poor-fit leads. About the Business Waldron Guitar Academy is a selective, high-touch guitar mentorship program serving serious adult students across the United States. We acquire prospects primarily through Google Ads and Meta. Our funnel intentionally asks prospects to demonstrate increasing levels of intent before applying. By the time someone reaches the final application, they have already encountered our philosophy, expectations, pricing, and qualification criteria. This filtering is important to us. However, we believe the current application experience may contain too much friction—or the wrong kind of friction—causing some otherwise excellent prospects to abandon the process. Traffic quality appears to be holding steady, but application completion has become a significant bottleneck. What We Need We want someone who can analyze the entire conversion path and help us distinguish between: Productive friction: Friction that causes low-intent, price-sensitive, or poorly matched prospects to self-select out. Unproductive friction: Friction that causes motivated, qualified prospects to abandon an application they otherwise would have completed. The objective is not simply to make the application easier. It is to make it easier for the right person and appropriately difficult for the wrong person. We are currently considering rebuilding the final application as a multi-step form/survey, allowing us to measure exactly where prospects abandon the process and potentially reduce the psychological burden of completing a long form. We want an expert who can evaluate whether that is the right approach rather than simply implementing it because we’ve suggested it. Scope of Work We would like you to: Audit our existing acquisition-to-application funnel Analyze the final application for unnecessary friction Identify likely abandonment points and UX problems Evaluate the sequencing, wording, number, and difficulty of questions Recommend what information should be asked earlier vs. later Determine which qualification questions are genuinely useful Help preserve the premium/selective positioning of the academy Design or advise on a multi-step application experience Establish analytics for each step so we can see exactly where prospects abandon Segment behavior where useful by traffic source, device, campaign, etc. Develop hypotheses and an A/B testing roadmap Evaluate results based on qualified applications, not merely conversion rate We are open to significant changes if the data supports them. The Central Problem Imagine 100 genuinely interested prospects reach our application. We do not necessarily want all 100 to submit it. Some should encounter our standards, expectations, or pricing and decide the academy isn’t right for them. But if 20 of those people are potentially outstanding students, we don’t want to lose 15 of them because the form is exhausting, confusing, repetitive, intimidating, poorly sequenced, or unnecessarily difficult to complete. That distinction is the heart of this project. Who We’re Looking For You should have meaningful experience with some combination of: Conversion rate optimization High-ticket lead generation Application funnels Multi-step forms / surveys Qualification funnels Premium services Coaching, consulting, education, professional services, or other considered-purchase businesses Funnel analytics and event tracking A/B testing and experimentation UX psychology and behavioral design Experience optimizing ecommerce checkout pages alone is not what we’re looking for. We particularly want someone who understands that maximum conversion rate is not always the correct business objective. Success Metrics Our primary KPI is not raw lead volume. Ultimately, we care about: qualified applications → interviews → enrolled students → customer acquisition cost We would rather generate 10 applications from excellent prospects than 30 applications requiring us to sift through people who were never appropriate candidates. At the same time, every qualified prospect unnecessarily lost to bad UX is extremely valuable to us. Existing Team You’ll work directly with the founder and our advertising specialist, who manages our Google and Meta campaigns and has extensive familiarity with the funnel and historical performance. We’re looking for someone who can bring a specialized CRO/UX perspective to complement the acquisition work already being done. When Applying Please review www.brianwaldron.net and the existing application funnel before responding. Then include: A brief explanation of how you would approach a funnel where some friction is intentional and desirable. Your initial impressions of our existing funnel and where you suspect unnecessary friction may exist. Examples of application, lead-generation, or high-ticket funnels you’ve optimized. An example where you discovered that a form or funnel was losing qualified prospects and what you changed. The analytics/data you would want access to before recommending changes. Whether you personally conduct the analysis/strategy or delegate it to other team members. Please don’t send a generic agency proposal. We’re specifically looking for someone who understands the difference between increasing conversions and increasing qualified conversions.