Digital product business, built end to end

What it is

Every guide starts as a subject: an AWS exam, a caregiver certification, an OSHA course. It gets researched, written, laid out and packaged as a branded PDF with a cover, a cheatsheet and a cribsheet. Then it moves through an automated pipeline: content build, PDF generation, catalog sync, storefront.

The storefront has been built twice. A static generator came first. Then a full headless commerce system with digital order fulfillment, which is what runs now. Transactional mail spans six domains with rotating DKIM selectors.

Under the hood

• One command per guide takes it from a source folder to a purchasable product. The build pipeline handles covers, cheatsheets, cribsheets and bundles.
• Medusa headless commerce with a Next.js storefront, digital order fulfillment and Stripe checkout.
• Two storefront generations: a Jinja2 static generator, then the headless rebuild. The first is still the fallback.
• Transactional mail infrastructure across six domains: DKIM with daily-rotating selectors, SPF, catch-all forwarding.
• A complete brand system: identity, voice rules, pricing strategy, category architecture and an affiliate program.

What was hard

The pipeline, not the page. Writing one study guide is a content problem. Shipping 359 of them means every step has to be mechanical: research structure, PDF layout, catalog entries, storefront rendering. The storefront took two attempts. The static version worked, but digital fulfillment, bundles and order handling pushed the rebuild into a real commerce engine.

Stack