How it started
Dani came to me with a problem that didn't sound like a problem at first. Her website worked. Her audience was growing. Her courses were selling. But every time something needed to change, even a title, even a date, even a comma, she had to ask someone. Every piece of momentum got slowed down by a small technical detour, and those small detours were starting to add up.
What she wanted was so deeply hers that no off the shelf tool was going to feel right. A portfolio that showcased her work as a creative director. A space for her growing line of AI and creativity courses. A CMS that didn't make her translate her ideas into someone else's grammar. We started talking in late 2025. The plan was to drop the new site in July 2026, and that date became the rhythm of everything that followed.
What we are building
The site is a Next.js 15 app sitting on top of a custom CMS we designed around Dani's actual workflow. Not a generic dashboard with twenty tabs she doesn't need. A few clean surfaces that map directly to the moves she makes every week: post a project, announce a course, drop a lesson, publish a thought.
The courses live in the same house as the portfolio on purpose. People don't separate the artist from the teacher when they follow her, so the site doesn't either. Visitors arrive for the work and leave with a course in their inbox, or arrive for the course and end up scrolling through three years of projects.
Behind the scenes we run a simple toolkit: Supabase handles auth, data, and media; n8n orchestrates the inbound flows like waitlists, launch sequences, and welcome emails; Stripe is wired up for course purchases. None of that is visible to her. From her side it just looks like a beautiful place to publish her work.
What the build felt like
The thing I want to remember about this project is how much of it was talking. Long calls about how a section should feel before we ever wrote a line of CSS. Voice notes about a course launch six months out. Mood references pulled from books, films, and a couple of obscure Argentine magazines from the eighties. The technical plan was secondary to making sure the site felt unmistakably like her.
That's also where the CMS turned into the centerpiece. Most creative people end up resenting their CMS within a year because it forces them to think like a developer. We built this one in the opposite direction. The words on the buttons are her words. The order of the fields follows the order she actually fills them in. There's no "metadata" tab. There's no "SEO panel." There's a place to write, a place to publish, and a place to schedule.
The July drop
We're aiming the launch at July 2026. The first wave goes out with the new portfolio, the first round of AI and creativity courses ready to enroll, and a small set of pieces that have been waiting for a worthy home. By then, Dani will already have spent weeks inside the CMS, publishing without me touching anything.
That's the part I care about most. Not the launch, but the day after. The day she ships a new course because she felt like it on a Tuesday morning, no Slack, no developer, no waiting. That's what this whole project is for.
What we left out, on purpose
No headless CMS bolted on. No five vendor stack. No social login, no community forum, no app. Every feature she didn't need is a feature she doesn't have to maintain, explain, or pay for. The site does exactly what it should do, and not one thing more.