Unstuck: a coaching and publishing platform.
Matt Bagwell needed his platform live before his book published. There was no specification and no time to write one, so the conversation became the specification instead.
“You have literally moved my business forward by at least 3 months, maybe more, in 3 days.”
Matt Bagwell, coach and author of Unstuck
The brief
Matt Bagwell is a coach and author. His book, Unstuck, publishes this autumn, and his platform had to be live before it. He needed a public site, a product ladder running from a free assessment to a paid programme, a bookable coaching system with real payments, live video sessions, and an admin workspace to run all of it. There was no specification, no backlog and no time to write either.
What happened
So we talked, and I recorded it. The transcript became the specification, the specification became the build, and 3 days later Matt ran a real coaching session through his own platform: 2 signed-in accounts, a live video call, a session record, and the transcript captured against it automatically when he ended the call.
Nothing in that first version was mocked. The payments were real Stripe checkouts, the video was a real room created through the Daily API, and the booking picker was spending real session credits against a real availability calendar. That mattered more than polish: it meant the thing could be judged on whether it worked, not on whether it looked like it might.
What shipped
- Public marketing site and book landing page
- Life Audit assessment tool with saved, revisitable results
- Product ladder with Stripe checkout and entitlements
- Coaching bookings against a real availability calendar
- Live video sessions with automatic transcription
- Member app and admin workspace on one hostname, switched by role
“You didn’t need what I would traditionally identify as a backlog. You used intuition, your own intelligence, guesswork, transcript and observations. Because some engineers will go: unless you describe it in quite a lot of detail, I don’t know what to build.”
Matt Bagwell, coach and author of Unstuck