CASE FILE

MODERN MARKETING SYSTEM · EMAIL-MARKETING EDUCATION

How we rebuilt everything without breaking anything.

THE ENGAGEMENT

CLIENT
Modern Marketing SystemFormerly Tiny Little Businesses — premium email-marketing education, lineage of Andre Chaperon’s “Auto-Responder Madness”
FIELD
Email-marketing education & e-learningA decade-old authority brand selling advanced courses to serious marketers and business owners
BROUGHT US IN FOR
A complete re-platformA fragile, organically-grown WordPress install had become the constraint on future growth
METHOD
Rebuild component by component — validate each before going live
ENGAGEMENT
OngoingA system we keep running with them, not a one-shot project we shipped and left

SCOPE

  • Brand Positioning & Identity
  • E-Learning Platform Development
  • Full-Stack Web Development
  • UI/UX Design
  • Strategic Technical Architecture
  • Complete Infrastructure Migration
  • SEO Preservation & Enhancement

STACK

  • WordPress
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • HTML5
  • CSS3
  • LearnDash
  • BuddyBoss
  • WishList Member
  • ThriveCart
  • Stripe
  • Kit
  • Google Analytics

WHO THEY ARE

A quiet authority that serious marketers sought out.

Andre Chaperon’s “Auto-Responder Madness” wasn’t supposed to become legendary — but created in 2009, it fundamentally changed how marketers think about email and spawned an entire industry of sophisticated email-marketing education. When Shawn Twing joined as partner, bringing world-class paid-traffic expertise, Tiny Little Businesses became the quiet authority that serious marketers sought out.

When Shawn acquired the company from Andre, he faced a reality many successful businesses encounter: the systems that enabled initial growth had become the constraints preventing future expansion. A decade of organic success had left them with infrastructure that showed it — and a name that no longer reflected the market authority they’d become.

THE MARKET

A premium education brand can’t afford to look like its back end.

Modern Marketing System’s students are serious marketing professionals and business owners seeking advanced education. They value depth over surface-level content and expect a sophisticated learning experience that matches the premium nature of the courses — reliable access to materials, clear progress tracking, and a seam-free path from learning to implementation.

That set the bar for the rebuild: a company that teaches systematic marketing efficiency to thousands of professionals can’t carry a back end that contradicts the lesson. The external brand had to match the internal reality of a company that had grown from startup to industry leader.

PLATE 01

Changing engines on an airplane in flight.

Thousands of active students, a decade of content and SEO authority, and complex integrations grown over years — none of it could go dark during the rebuild. Shawn’s own phrase for the task: like changing engines on an airplane in flight.

THE CHALLENGE

Success debt: the cost of building as fast as growth demands.

Our initial technical audit revealed what we called “success debt” — the accumulated complexity that comes from building solutions as fast as the business needs them. Shawn and his team had their own name for it: “the messy middle,” the chaotic phase where the systems that enabled early success become tangled webs of workarounds, patches, and temporary fixes. The challenge was three-layered.

THE REAL CONSTRAINTS

  • Technical reality. Years of rapid growth had produced a fragile WordPress install threatening business continuity. Routine content publishing required technical help, and marketing, commerce, and learning platforms ran as independent silos.
  • Strategic misalignment. The “Tiny Little Businesses” brand no longer reflected their authority, and the infrastructure couldn’t support rapid testing of new course formats — manual bottlenecks, ironic for a company teaching systematic efficiency.
  • Migration risk. Thousands of active students who couldn’t experience disruption, a decade of SEO authority that couldn’t be sacrificed, and organically-evolved integrations that all had to survive the move.

OUR APPROACH

No big bang. Validate every component before it goes live.

Rather than a risky “big bang” migration that could disrupt active operations, we rebuilt the entire infrastructure component by component. A validation-first strategy treated each system component as a separate hypothesis — tested and proven in a parallel environment before it was allowed to replace its predecessor.

HOW IT RAN

  • Phase 1 — Discovery & brand evolution. Technical audit, deep student research, a modern design system, and the rebrand from Tiny Little Businesses to Modern Marketing System.
  • Phase 2 — Stabilization & implementation. Systematic refactor of the chaotic WordPress install, the new visual identity rolled across every touchpoint, fragile dependencies eliminated, performance hardened.
  • Phase 3 — Migration & integration. A full parallel test environment, validated transfer of student accounts and progress, strategic URL mapping to preserve SEO, and a zero-downtime production cutover.
  • Phase 4 — Enhancement & optimization. A modern learning interface, independent content publishing for authors, seamless marketing-commerce-education integration, and ongoing performance monitoring.

ON THE CRAFT

Why the type does the quiet work.

“To enhance the visual appeal of the platform we selected Figtree — open letter forms, generous width, sharp edges, excellent readability. Given the abundance of copy on a given page, we combined font weights deliberately: the heavy 800 weight for titles to emphasise key elements, the lighter 400 weight for body copy to optimise readability.”

— David

PLATE 02

One system instead of three silos.

We architected seamless integration across marketing, commerce, and course delivery — automatic data flow through the whole customer journey, from purchase to completion to ongoing communication — so routine operations no longer needed manual intervention.

THE OUTCOME

A foundation that now enables growth instead of constraining it.

  • 100%

    Student account migration success — no one fell through the cracks during the cutover

  • 75%

    Reduction in content-publishing time — the team ships course material without technical help

WHAT IT BECAME

A strategic asset that keeps running with them.

The transformation eliminated the technical constraints and created new capabilities: the integrated architecture now supports rapid testing of new offers, automatic customer-journey management, and independent content creation. Most importantly, the new system functions as an extension of the team’s existing workflow rather than an obstacle to it — what was once a limiting factor is now a strategic asset that enables growth rather than capping it.

And because the engagement is ongoing, this isn’t a system we shipped and walked away from. We keep it running with them as the business keeps evolving — the foundation is built to be extended, not replaced again.

CLIENT ON RECORD

In their own words.

“I kicked off 2024 by spending three months completely rebuilding our website, Learning Academy, and e-commerce system. I couldn’t have done it without Wabbit’s patience, guidance, and hard work. If you’re looking for someone to build (or rebuild) your web presence, the Wabbits have my highest recommendation.”

— Shawn Twing, Founder, The Modern Marketing System

MORE FROM THE FIELD

See the rest of the work.

WHERE THIS STARTS

Book the Architecture Sprint

Modern Marketing System didn’t need a bigger team — they needed their foundation rebuilt without the business going dark. The Sprint is how we figure out which system actually matters for you, and how to rebuild it without breaking what already works — before anyone spends a dollar building it.