Case Study — Coaching Platform
Brave Horizon: a coaching platform
that runs itself.
An independent coaching business supporting men through separation, divorce and family court needed more than a website — it needed a system. Three different client journeys, each collecting payment correctly, booking the right calendar slot, and quietly triggering the right follow-up emails, without the founder tracking a single contact by hand.
The Brief
Three journeys, one system
Brave Horizon needed to route visitors toward whichever offer fit them: a free Discovery Call, the structured Solid Ground package, or the ongoing Resilient Path subscription. Every one of those journeys needed to collect payment correctly, book the right calendar slot, and quietly trigger the right follow-up emails.
The goal was simple to state and hard to deliver — a client should be able to book, pay, and start receiving the right emails automatically, from the moment they land on the site.
The Approach
Four systems, wired as one
Built on a custom WordPress FSE block theme with no page builder. Behind the scenes, four tools were connected to work as a single pipeline.
The Challenge
When the automations went silent
Midway through integration, every automation stopped working — FluentCRM's API was silently rejecting every request. Tracing the fault meant ruling out server configuration, IP restrictions, and authentication headers before isolating the real cause.
A credential mix-up between WordPress's regular login system and its Application Password feature — two similar-looking but functionally distinct forms of authentication.
Once resolved, each automation was rebuilt and tested against real sandbox transactions rather than assumptions — surfacing a second issue, where Solid Ground's £5,888 package had no payment collection configured at all. This led to configuring Calendly's native Meeting Package feature, which solved both the payment problem and the client's session-tracking needs natively, with no custom code required.
The Result
A pipeline that runs itself
- Free guide downloads trigger a 6-email nurture sequence — contacts who go on to book a call automatically stop receiving further nurture emails, while those who don't get one final, low-pressure check-in.
- Discovery Call bookings are automatically tagged, distinguishing them from other booking types across the funnel.
- Solid Ground purchases collect payment natively through Calendly, track session usage automatically, and tag the contact for future follow-up.
- Resilient Path subscriptions trigger an immediate welcome sequence the moment payment succeeds.
Every automation was tested end-to-end — real webhook data, real sandbox transactions, real contact records confirmed in the CRM — before being switched live.
"What looked like a simple connect a few apps together task turned into a genuine debugging exercise — patience to isolate root causes rather than patch symptoms. The result is a platform that runs quietly in the background, so the client can focus on coaching rather than admin."