Projects /
Pirate Skool
Web and growth systems for a kids' bike school — lead capture, email automation, review capture, and positioning that supported a ~3× pricing increase.
Overview
Pirate Skool is a bike school that teaches children to ride — including children with a range of special needs, who often get left out of standard learn-to-ride programs. I’ve built both the previous and current websites and the growth systems around them: how parents find the school, evaluate it, sign up, and tell other parents about it.
The problem
Two problems, really.
For parents: choosing someone to teach your child — especially a child with special needs — to ride a bike is a trust decision made with thin information. The school was wonderful and mostly invisible: hard to evaluate online, with little visible proof that it delivers.
For the business: demand existed, but pricing didn’t reflect the value of what the founder had built. When your positioning says “kids’ bike lessons” you compete on price; when it says “the school that gets your child riding” you don’t.
What I did
- Built the previous and current websites
- Lead capture — a clear path from “curious parent” to “in conversation”
- Email automation and lesson signup campaigns
- Review capture — systematically asking satisfied families for reviews instead of hoping it happened
- Surfacing social proof — putting those reviews and real outcomes where evaluating parents would see them
- Pricing strategy and product positioning support
- Referral support — making it easy for happy families to spread it
The system
The loop is deliberately unglamorous: deliver a great lesson → capture the review → surface the proof → strengthen the positioning → support the price → repeat.
Each piece feeds the next. Reviews make the positioning credible; credible positioning justifies pricing; healthier margins fund the capacity to deliver more lessons, which produce more reviews. The website is the connective tissue — the place where a parent can see, in five minutes, whether this school is right for their child.
Outcome
Being precise about cause and effect, because it matters: the website did not raise prices. What happened is that the system — review capture, visible social proof, clearer positioning, a better evaluation experience for parents, and pricing strategy support — strengthened the business’s perceived value. The founder subsequently increased prices approximately 3× and was able to hire additional help.
That’s a business outcome the systems supported, not a metric the website alone produced.
What I learned
- Proof compounds. A review captured today works for you for years. Most small businesses leave their best marketing — their satisfied customers — uncollected.
- Positioning precedes pricing. You can’t charge 3× for the same story. The price change became possible when the story changed.
- Honest attribution is part of the work. “The business grew” and “my work contributed to the conditions for growth” are different sentences, and clients deserve the second one when it’s the truth.