Three days to build a ballet website

My fiancée had room for more ballet students. Most people found her through word of mouth, which meant someone looking for lessons in San Diego usually needed a connection to her before they knew she existed.

She’s a professional ballerina. The teaching was already there. I wanted to give people a way to find it.

I’d been experimenting with Claude Code, an AI coding agent, for months when I saw a post from James Dickerson, who goes by the Boring Marketer on Twitter. He’d built a website for a business called Diesel Dudes, helping someone in his life who needed one.

I had someone in mind, too.

I started building Valle Ballet in August. The site needed to explain her lessons, show where she taught, and give someone interested a way to get in touch. I knew what I wanted those pages to do, and with Claude Code, I could work on getting them made.

The pages worked on the first try. I was enjoying myself. One evening after dinner, I kept going, setting up the email forms so someone could actually ask about a lesson.

Three days after I started, the site was live.

I’d also connected the inquiries to Slack. If someone wrote in, I’d get a notification. There was no reason to keep opening the site to check, so I left it running.

For weeks, nothing came through.

By then, I was working on another website.

I managed advertising for Born Simple, a food brand whose Squarespace site I didn’t think much of. I already knew the business through its ads, and I wanted to see what I could do with the website.

That was a different kind of project to take on for a client. They knew me as the person managing their advertising. Building a replacement site meant doing work they hadn’t originally brought me in to do.

But I’d just got Valle Ballet live in three days. I wanted to keep going.

I started the Born Simple build later that same August, before anyone had booked a ballet lesson through the first site. Getting something built and working had been enough to make me try the next project.

There was more to work through this time: meals and flavors, recipes, nutrition information, and ways to find a retailer. Through the advertising work, I’d been thinking about how to get someone interested in the brand. Now I was also working on what they could find once they arrived.

Born Simple eventually replaced its Squarespace site with the one I built. Organic traffic rose, and the client began to see me as an engineer as well as a media buyer.

That felt good. I’d had an opinion about their website, acted on it, and made something they chose to use.

Meanwhile, I’d more or less forgotten about the ballet site.

It was still there, explaining the lessons and giving people a way to ask about them. Eventually, the Slack notifications started coming through.

The first inquiry didn’t become a booking. Neither did the next four.

Then the sixth one did.

My fiancée was going to teach someone who had found her through the website. Months earlier, I’d wanted a person searching for ballet lessons to be able to find her without an introduction. Now that person had booked a lesson.

At the start, the student wouldn’t let go of her dad’s hand.

An hour later, she didn’t want to leave.