Silly Goose Social Club

01 The story

A children's play business finding its market in real time, with software keeping pace. Version one validated bookings, version two became a studio membership platform, and version three shipped as a mobile visit service within days. The fourth model, a weekly social club, became the most complete product in the family: memberships billed on each family's own anniversary date, paid Friday seats held for thirty minutes during checkout and released automatically if unpaid, a webhook that builds and frees the roster from Stripe events, a signable waiver with versioned terms, and a Club Desk where every inquiry arrives already classified by Claude, with an age-fit check and a drafted reply waiting for a human to send. When the family put the business on hold, one environment switch replaced the public site with a coming-soon page while the admin, data, and billing stayed intact for a restart. The lesson on the wall: when iteration costs days instead of quarters, pivots stop being scary.

02 What went into it

• Anniversary-billed memberships and paid single-visit seats on Stripe, with idempotent webhook handling
• Thirty-minute checkout holds that release themselves, plus a daily hold-sweeping cron
• Seat caps enforced on the server, with a separate cap for single visits
• Club Desk admin: requests, Fridays, roster, waitlist, waivers, and sessions, with per-date close and reopen
• Claude inquiry triage: eight intent classes, age fit, flags, summary, next step, and a draft reply
• Signable waiver with typed and drawn signature, versioned agreement, and an emailed signed copy
• An inquiry-first in-home offering alongside the club
• One-switch pause: coming-soon page for the public while admin and APIs stay live
• Four product models on one codebase lineage

03 Claude in production

Every AI call runs server-side under the Lumen governance layer: no client keys, cost telemetry on every call, and a human confirming every consequential write.

04 Stack and capabilities