A custom-built, paywalled, async course platform for your full heirloom workflow — built into the Troveman brand site, branded to feel like Troveman, and structured so you can scale beyond trading your time for shoots.
A custom-built, paywalled, async course platform for the Troveman Heirloom Method — your full heirloom workflow turned into a self-paced course your students can take anytime, from anywhere, without you having to be on Zoom.
Built into the Troveman brand site at course.troveman.com (or wherever fits Matt's site architecture). Branded to feel like the rest of Troveman — not a generic Kajabi page that looks like every other course on the internet.
Two tiers, mirroring what you described:
(Prices are placeholders — we'll lock these together based on what you want to anchor on. $300–500 and $850–925 are both within the range you mentioned.)
You can see what this looks and feels like at the mockup — that's the v0 so you have something to react to before we build for real.
Built from your PDFs + all eight cohort recordings (I pulled and transcribed the remaining 5 this week — see the addendum at the bottom). Tightened into ~35 short lessons (5–10 min each) across six core modules plus two bonus modules for premium:
Plus, on the premium tier:
Full module-by-module breakdown in the curriculum doc. Designed so the existing live demos from your zoom recordings can be cut down and reused — you don't have to re-record everything from scratch. We film fresh for the welcome, module intros, the new Module 2 client-communication content, and the edge-of-softbox demo (it's not captured well in the existing recordings). Everything else: clip + caption + drop in.
Static-first, custom-built. Astro for the marketing/sales pages (the same stack I built rccquesta.org and matthewbaileycounseling.com on). Cloudflare Pages for hosting (no monthly hosting bill — Cloudflare's free tier covers you for tens of thousands of visitors).
For the paywall + course delivery, my recommendation is to keep the marketing site fully static and run a thin auth + Stripe + member layer behind it. That gives you:
Video: Cloudflare Stream (where the video files actually live). Pennies per GB stored, fractions of a penny per minute watched. Built-in adaptive streaming so it works on slow connections. The cost scales with usage — no fixed fee.
Payments: Stripe Checkout. Standard 2.9% + $0.30 per sale, no monthly fee.
Auth: Clerk — handles magic-link emails (no passwords to forget), social login, and account UI. Free tier covers up to 10,000 monthly active users, which we'll be well under for years. Saves 20–30 hours of custom-auth code that would otherwise have to be written, tested, and maintained — and auth is famously where bespoke code goes wrong. Drop-in components, battle-tested by tens of thousands of apps.
Email (receipts, magic links, future drip campaigns): Resend, ~$20/mo for 50,000 emails. Modern API, excellent deliverability.
| Scale | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| At launch | ~$0/month (everything on free tiers) |
| 50 active students | ~$25/month (Cloudflare Stream + Resend) |
| 200 active students | ~$80–100/month |
| 500 active students | ~$200–250/month |
Compare: Kajabi starts at $89/mo Kickstarter and jumps to $199/mo Growth. Teachable Pro is $99/mo before scale fees kick in. We're meaningfully cheaper at every scale, with no per-sale platform fees on top.
Working backwards from your Troveman launch:
| Phase | Window | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Setup + design lock | Late May–early June | Kick off, finalize brand with Matt + your designer, deploy v1 of the mockup at philip.ezrajacksonbailey.com for real, you give the green light on direction |
| Course recording | Mid June–mid July | You record the fresh segments (welcome, module intros, Module 2 content) with friends-as-audience over 2–3 sessions. I cut down the existing zoom recordings in parallel. |
| Platform build | Mid June–end of August | Auth, Stripe paywall, video player, downloads, dashboard. Mostly invisible to you — you'll see weekly progress demos. |
| Content load + QA | Early–mid August | All lessons uploaded, PDFs in place, email templates wired. You walk through as a student, redline anything off. |
| Soft launch | End of August | Invite-only — 5–10 friends/past students get free access to find bugs. |
| Public launch | September 2026 | Live with Troveman site launch. Insta announcement. Last-cohort-graduates email blast. |
I want us aligned. I don't want you fronting cash you don't have to, and I want my upside tied to your upside.
Half on kickoff, half on launch. Covers the platform build, the course structuring, the mockup-to-real-site work, all the content load, QA, and going live.
Being honest about what that number is: it's well below what I or anyone else would normally charge for this scope. At the hours this'll take, it works out to something like $20–25 an hour — which is not a market rate for custom software. It's a friend rate, and it's a bet on you. I'd rather be financially in the project with you than collect a fat retainer for work that doesn't compound. The real money for me is in the rev share if we knock it out of the park, and in the door this opens to the Google Ads + workflow automation work down the line. So: small upfront, big alignment.
"Gross course revenue" = anything that sells from the Troveman education line (this course, the future senior-portraits course, any other async products built on this platform). Specifically NOT your shoot bookings, the Troveman brand site, or any physical-product line.
For as long as the platform runs. Covers hosting, security patches, Adobe-changes-its-menus updates, light feature additions. If you ever want a bigger upgrade, that's a separate quote.
If total course sales are under $5,000 in the first 6 months post-launch, either of us can walk. You keep the platform + content. I keep what I've earned to date. No hard feelings.
Pure rev share with no fee would be the easiest "yes" — but it'd leave me building for 3 months unpaid, then unpaid for another 3–4 months as we ramp to break-even. That makes me less reliable, not more.
A normal flat fee ($8–15k for this scope) would price me out of being your friend on this project. You'd get a great product and a transactional relationship.
The hybrid lets us both win when the course wins. At $500 average ticket × 25% = $125 to me per sale. If we sell 30 courses in year one, I make ~$3.75k on top of the build fee. If we sell 200, I make ~$25k. You're not paying more per sale than you would on Kajabi (their fees + your time managing it). And we're both pulling in the same direction the whole time.
If anything in here lands wrong, tell me — I'd rather find out now than after we're in motion.
Excited about this.
— Ezra
You said each cohort was different. After you sent me the other 5 YouTube videos this week, I transcribed all of them and diffed every session against the outline I'd already drafted. Here's what shifted:
Two assets I'd love to add to the build list while you're thinking about it: