How I used the knowledge I gained from completing the 7-day challenge with a real client

Hey everyone, just wanted to share a small win for me this week.

So mostly everyone who's a desk worker spends a lot of time sitting in front of a screen, and for the past year or so I've been going to a mobility coach who's been treating me for months, doing assisted stretching and mobility work. Also, because I'm an athlete on the side, I run a lot and do a lot of resistance training too, so my body takes a beating either way.

One thing I noticed for months is that this coach had a very old Squarespace template which isn't exactly built for mobile. The text doesn't flow very well and the copy isn't very well written either. When he opened his business he bought a Squarespace domain and was using one of their templates. He's not very tech savvy and gets overwhelmed easily. He's very good at what he does obviously, but the website was kind of working against him.

During one of my sessions with him a few months ago, I told him I could offer my services and rebuild his website as a proper paid engagement. He said yes, and he's on a monthly retainer with me now.

But the part I actually want to talk about is how a project like this pulls together a whole pile of things I'd built up separately over the past year into one system, all pointed at one outcome. That combining is the bit I find genuinely satisfying. The website itself is almost the least interesting part of it.

The first thing I did wasn't even design. I asked Claude to read through his existing website and tell me why it wasn't pulling the right people in. Where the copy was vague, where it hid what he actually sells, why someone landing on it wouldn't immediately know if they were in the right place. You want to understand what's broken before you start rebuilding.

Then I interviewed him, and this is where a real person is different from a project brief. He's flat out all day, back to back with clients, barely on his phone, and like I said he gets overwhelmed easily. He was never going to sit and type me paragraphs. So he just sent me voice notes on WhatsApp between sessions. I transcribed them locally using mlx-whisper, which is basically Whisper running straight on my Mac, so it's free and none of his words leave my machine. That gave me his actual words, the way he talks about his own method, which went straight into the copy. The site ended up sounding like him because it literally is him, just tidied up.

For the design itself I started in Claude Design, then handed off the whole thing to Claude Code and rebuilt every section properly. The big thing I fixed was his leads. He'd been spending real money on Meta ads and getting bad leads out of it, people from all over the UK messaging to ask about his services when they could never actually book, because he works in person and they weren't local. So I rewrote the whole site to speak clearly to who he actually serves, set expectations up front, and left room for the real fix, which is products he can sell to anyone, anywhere. More on that at the end.

Because he gets overwhelmed easily, my whole rule for this project was to make everything as simple as possible for him. So the way he reviews the site is by leaving comments directly on the live preview in Vercel. He just taps the spot he wants changed, types a note, and I see it and fix it. No new tool to learn, no back and forth over email. He's basically pointing at his own website and talking to it.

When it was ready I moved his domain off Squarespace and onto Vercel, and the website went live yesterday on the same url with nothing lost and limited downtime.

And then the part I'm most happy with, which came straight out of that same keep it simple rule. He collects reviews from clients as edited screenshots. Adding them to the site used to mean sending them to me and waiting for me to update the website. Now he just drops them into a Google Drive folder from his phone, and about a minute later they're live on the site, resized and published on their own. Behind that there's a GitHub Action that checks the folder on a schedule, optimises anything new, and publishes it. For a guy with no spare minutes, that's the whole point. He does the one thing only he can do, save a nice review, and the system handles the rest.

The bit I was careful with, because it's sensitive, is that those reviews are real people's faces and words, and some of them mention injuries and pain. So I didn't guess at the rules. I used my research skills, the ones that run on Perplexity and check their own sources, to pull the actual UK guidance from the ICO, and built the consent and takedown around what it actually says. The clever bit is that the Drive folder is the consent gate. He only ever puts consented reviews in it, and the moment he removes one from the folder, the next run takes it off the site too. So right to be forgotten is basically handled by a folder.

It's worth pulling back and explaining how this is all wired, since I know a lot of you in here care about the actual setup. The entire website lives in a GitHub repo. That repo is connected to Vercel, so any change to the code rebuilds and redeploys the live site on its own.

The reviews automation rides the same rails. When it finds a new review it opens a pull request, Vercel builds the preview, and because I trust that check it merges itself to publish. The key that lets it read his Drive folder is stored as an encrypted secret inside the repo, never in the code, and it publishes using GitHub's own built-in token, so I didn't even need to create a separate access key for it. I did explore building this part on Trigger.dev, the cloud job tool I picked up on Day 4, but since the job lives inside the website's own repo, a GitHub Action was the more natural home, and it runs for free with nothing extra to babysit.

And on the hosting itself, a quick one for the builders. Back on Day 5 of the challenge I actually went against the grain and hosted my own brands on a 7 dollar server (Hostinger VPS) with no Vercel at all. I still think that's the right call for my own stuff. But for a client who needs to update his own site with a safety net, the managed stack was clearly better. Same skills, opposite decision, and knowing which one to reach for is kind of the actual skill.

But here's the thing I really want you to take away, especially in this community. Almost none of this was new. The local transcription, the research engine, the design tools, the GitHub and Vercel setup, the MCPs that connect Claude to Drive and GitHub, the way I turn a voice note into copy, all of that I'd already built and used separately on other projects. A project like this is where they stop being separate tricks and click together into one system for one person. That's the real unlock for me. You don't need the next shiny tool. You need to get comfortable enough with the ones you already have that you can assemble the right combination for whatever a real client actually needs. A build that would have taken me weeks a few months ago took days, because I wasn't really building, I was assembling.

And this is where it stops being a website. Using those same research skills, I also put together a report for him on video courses he could sell, mapped to the real pains people in his niche are actually posting about online, priced as a proper ladder from a cheap entry product up to a course that teaches other therapists his method. We're going to do a revenue split on those, and his new site becomes the funnel for them. On top of that we're going to reactivate his Meta ads properly this time, pointing at products a non local person can actually buy, so the money stops leaking. And he's got a whole client database just sitting there that we can turn into real campaigns later. So from this one partnership there are suddenly ten things worth building. I really don't want to treat it as a one off project. It's turned into a continuous, almost symbiotic thing, where I only win when he wins, and honestly I can't wait to see what else I can do for him.

So yeah, small win, but a meaningful one for me. The tools are easy enough to pick up one at a time. The real skill is combining the right ones for a real outcome, and staying in the upside while you do it. On to the next one.

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How I used the knowledge I gained from completing the 7-day challenge with a real client