A bespoke marketing site for a Frankfurt-based investment firm, built around daily commentary, a quarterly publication, and a private LP dashboard — all on one Payload instance.
Halberd is a 19-person investment firm. They write more, and better, than anyone in their category — but the previous site buried their commentary in a tabbed PDF library that nobody opened. New clients were finding them through shared screenshots, not through their own homepage.
The brief was small in words: put the writing first. Make the publication the front door. Move the LP-only material behind a private gate. Don't make us touch the marketing site to publish a 2 PM note.
One. The homepage is a list of essays, not a hero with a CTA. Each card carries the full lede. Reading is the conversion.
Two. A single Payload instance powers three audiences — the public, the prospect, and the LP — with role-based access. No second CMS for the dashboard. No third system for the quarterly. Everything in one schema.
Three. The typography pair (a refined sans + an editorial serif italic) carries the entire brand. No imagery is required to publish. If they can write it, it goes live in five minutes.
Halberd's old site relied on stock photography that aged badly. The new site removes it entirely. The brand is two fonts, one accent, and a strict editorial grid — every page renders with zero images if the team chooses.
We licensed a custom serif italic for pull-quotes and the cover of the quarterly. Body type, eyebrows, and the LP dashboard use the studio's system pair. The whole site is under 180 kB of CSS + fonts.
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The LP dashboard ships side-by-side with the marketing site but lives at lp.halberd.co, behind a magic-link login. Quarterly returns, holdings detail, and capital-call notices are accessed only by named LPs. Under separate NDA — the screenshots below are stand-ins.
From a 26-second bounce to an 88-second median session, six months in.
Inbound capital interest, quarter-over-quarter, sourced from the public site.
Internal publishing metrics under NDA — shared on request.