The Challenge
Athlete discounts already exist. A recovery brand runs a student athlete rate, a local clinic gives coaches a deal, a wearable company has a programme nobody has heard of. The offers are real and they are scattered across a hundred places, which means most athletes never find them and most brands never reach the people they built them for.
Jack wanted to put those in one place as a membership. That is a different problem to a review site. A blog earns when someone clicks away. A membership has to give people a reason to come back every week, and a reason to pay for the tier above free. It also needed a way to confirm that a member is actually an athlete, because no brand hands over athlete pricing to an open signup form.
What We Built
Deals were built as their own content type rather than as blog posts, split across six categories: Recovery, Perform, Fuel & Nutrition, Tech & Wearables, Lifestyle & Essentials, and Memberships & Services. Each category has its own archive at its own address, so a member looking for recovery goes straight there instead of scrolling a feed, and every category is a page that can be linked, shared or indexed on its own.
All six sit in the header dropdown. On a platform that grows by adding offers rather than by adding pages, the navigation has to show the shape of the catalogue on day one, before there are enough deals to make it obvious.
Verification became step two of the signup flow rather than a checkbox buried in a form. Sign up, confirm athlete status, then the offers open. That single step is what the partner relationships depend on, so the site treats it as part of joining rather than as an obstacle inside it.
Partner logos sit high on the page for the same reason. A new membership platform has no reputation of its own yet, so it borrows one. WHOOP, Momentous and Restore appearing above the pricing does more convincing than any paragraph about trust could.
The vault handles the retention problem. Deals expire and rotate, which makes them a reason to visit but a weak reason to stay subscribed. Guides do not expire, so the membership includes a library of them, including NIL material for college athletes now allowed to earn from their own name. Weekly performance and business drops keep the newsletter worth opening.
Testimonials were cast to match the three audiences the platform sells to rather than three generic happy customers: a college athlete, a fitness coach and a professional trainer. Whoever lands on the page sees a version of themselves already inside.
Built to Scale
The whole site is structured so growth means adding entries, never rebuilding sections. A new deal is a post in a category. A new category is a term with an archive that inherits the same layout. Three hundred offers look exactly like six, and the client adds them without touching Elementor.
Free and premium tiers run through the same join flow, so pricing can change without the signup path being rebuilt around it.
