The Actor's Lounge New Digital Platform

The Actor's Lounge is a small but growing acting school in London. I was brought in as sole engineer and consultant — a natural fit given my personal connection to the business as an actor and regular participant — with a brief to replace an outdated, third-party-dependent WordPress site and transform how the business operated digitally.

The engagement extended well beyond engineering. I worked directly with the business owners to define requirements, advised on brand identity and social media strategy, and acted as a trusted business partner throughout — bringing both technical and product instincts to every decision.

Platform and architecture

I designed and built a bespoke React/Next.js website with a Prismic headless CMS, giving the business full content ownership and autonomy for the first time. Previously, all website updates had to be requested from an unresponsive third-party developer. The new CMS empowered the owners to manage content independently without any engineering involvement.

Payments

One of the most transformative changes was the overhaul of payment collection. Previously, customers were given bank account details and expected to make manual transfers — a slow, error-prone process that required chasing payments manually. I replaced this entirely with automated Stripe subscription flows, complete with automated payment reminders and a Stripe-hosted self-service portal allowing customers to manage their own subscriptions with a single click.

Transactional emails

I integrated Mailjet to introduce a professional transactional email layer — welcoming new customers upon joining, confirming renewals, and handling other key customer communications that had previously been managed manually via Gmail.

CRM and admin automation

The business had been managing its customer base through a spreadsheet — manually logging new sign-ups, tracking renewals, and chasing lapsed customers. I introduced Pipedrive CRM and built a direct integration between the bespoke checkout flow and the CRM, so that new customer sign-ups and renewals were automatically logged and flagged without any manual intervention. This transformed the administrative efficiency of the business and freed significant operational capacity.

Outcome

The project replaced an entirely manual, third-party-dependent operation with a modern, autonomous digital infrastructure. Every major business process — content management, payment collection, customer communications, and CRM — was either introduced or automated for the first time.