Independent venture · 2025–2026
Stravo Media
An independent project I run in my own time. It has no clients and no revenue to report, and I make no claims about either. Its value to me has been the practice: defining a service, pricing it, writing the outreach, and building the system to manage it.
Stravo Media is the name I work under, and the reason StravoOS exists. Setting it up meant doing the parts of a business that are not code — deciding what the offer actually is, who it is for, how to describe it in a sentence, what a first email says — and then building the operational system behind it. It is the project that taught me most about the commercial side, precisely because none of it was assigned to me.
Screenshot to be added
A capture of the live site goes here once it is provided.
Objective
What the problem was
- Define a service offer specifically enough to write a cold email about it.
- Build the process end to end — how a lead arrives, what happens next, and how the state of every deal stays visible.
- Learn where the real friction sits in running a small operation, and automate that rather than the parts that look impressive.
My role
Everything, and there is nobody to hand any of it to. Positioning, copy, the website, the sales process, the outreach materials and the internal software.
What I built
- The positioning and service definition, and the public site at stravomedia.co.uk.
- A repeatable sales process — how a prospect is researched, contacted, followed up and either progressed or closed out — which is what StravoOS was built to run.
- Cold outreach materials and the qualification criteria that decide who is worth contacting.
- The automation that connects the two: a website enquiry posts to a webhook, is scored, becomes a CRM lead with a follow-up already scheduled.
Tools
Commercial
- Positioning
- Service definition
- Cold outreach
- Lead qualification
- Process design
Build
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- Netlify
- Custom domain
Challenges
The decisions worth explaining
Writing the sentence
Describing what a service does, to someone who owes you no attention, in one sentence, is much harder than building the page it goes on. Most of the early drafts described what I could do rather than what a business would get, and that is the difference between an email that gets a reply and one that does not.
Automating the right step
The instinct is to automate the visible parts. The step that actually leaked was the gap between an enquiry arriving and a follow-up being scheduled — unglamorous, and the one worth removing.
What I learned
- The commercial work is the harder half. Anyone can add a feature; deciding what a business is for, and saying it in a sentence, took far longer.
- Running the process manually first is what tells you which parts are worth automating. I built the CRM after I had felt the problem, not before.
- Doing this without a brief, a deadline or a client is a different skill from doing assigned work, and it is the one I would bring to an internship.