Your onboarding, at a glance
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Welcome to the founding team, Izaak.
Founding Partnerships ManagerYou're joining at the moment that matters most — before launch, when every decision still shapes what this company becomes. This hub is your map: what we're building, why it matters, and how the machinery behind it works, explained the way we wish someone had explained it to us.
What this job really is
HelgoIQ helps independent fitness and Pilates studios run their whole business — bookings, payments, websites, marketing, teachers, members — in one place. Your job is to be the human face of that: finding studios who need us, showing them life on the platform, and walking them through the door so smoothly they wonder why they waited.
You don't need to write code. Ever. But you'll be dramatically better at this job if you understand what the technology is and how the team behind it works — because studio owners will ask, and confident plain-English answers win trust.
How to use this hub
- Work through the tabs top to bottom once, without pressure to memorise anything.
- Follow the four-week learning path at your own pace.
- Come back to the glossary whenever a word in a meeting makes no sense — that's exactly what it's for.
What we're building, and why
Independent studios juggle five or six separate subscriptions — bookings, website, email marketing, payments, staff rotas — and none of them talk to each other. The owner spends evenings copying information between systems instead of teaching.
HelgoIQ replaces the pile with one platform. A studio's website, timetable, bookings, member payments, teacher payroll, marketing and door access live in one place and share one brain — the website always shows the real timetable, a booking instantly updates the teacher's register, and the owner sees their whole business on one screen.
The architecture, in plain English
The dining room — the "front end"
Everything a person sees and touches: the member's app, the teacher's app, the admin screens, and each studio's public website. Our quality bar for all of it: joyful, obvious, frictionless.
The kitchen — the "back end"
The invisible machinery: checking credits, charging cards, sending confirmations, making sure Studio A can never see Studio B's data.
The pantry — the "database"
One highly organised store of all information. Every studio's data is kept strictly separate inside it — tenant isolation, our most-tested promise.
Many restaurants, one building — "multi-tenant"
Hundreds of studios ("tenants") run on the same platform, each seeing only their own world. One building, many locked apartments.
What makes us different to sell
- The website is the business, not a brochure — timetable, prices and booking are live parts of the site, not clunky embedded boxes.
- We move them in — paste their old website address and we rebuild it inside HelgoIQ, protecting Google rankings for 30 days after the switch.
- Built by an operator — Declan runs four Pilates studios and three 24-hour gyms on this platform. We are our own first customer.
The toolbox
The outside services the platform is built with. For each: what it is, why we use it, and an everyday picture to hang it on.
GitHub
The shared home of all our code and the diary of every change ever made. Changes are proposed as pull requests — "here's my change, please review it" — and only join the product once a reviewer approves.
DigitalOcean
Whose computers actually run HelgoIQ, day and night. "Staging" and "production" are two copies there: staging is the rehearsal stage, production is the live show.
Clerk
Handles sign-in — passwords, codes, account security. Specialists, because getting security wrong is the one mistake you don't get back.
Cloudflare
Manages our web addresses and stands between the internet and the platform — speeding things up, blocking attacks. "Adding a DNS record" means updating the internet's address book here.
Google Cloud Console and Google Search Console
Two Googles. Search Console is the free report on how a website performs in Google search. Cloud Console is the workshop where apps register for official permission to talk to Google. We used Cloud Console once for HelgoIQ's "ID badge"; we use Search Console data daily to power studio SEO reports.
Twilio
Sends text messages — class reminders, waitlist alerts. Emails travel a different road (a service called Resend).
Stripe
Moves the money. Every card payment, subscription and refund flows through Stripe. We never see or store card numbers — Stripe keeps them in its vault.
The AI team
HelgoIQ is largely built and tested by AI agents, directed by Declan. Each has a distinct job; nothing any of them builds goes live unchecked.
Cursor — builder
Writes most of the product: screens, booking flows, the website editor. Strongest at the parts people see and touch.
Codex — builder and reviewer
Builds the deep machinery — security, payments plumbing, the tools that check the other tools — and reviews Cursor's work line by line.
Claude — advisor · Claude Code — analyst
Claude helps Declan direct the whole programme: instructions, reports, risks. Claude Code is a forensic specialist for deep diagnosis. Neither builds product.
Grok Bot — the customer who never gets tired
Uses the platform in a real browser exactly as a member, teacher or owner would — booking, paying with test cards, trying to break things — and files evidence-packed reports. Nothing is finished until Grok has walked it like a real person.
How a change becomes real
- Build — Cursor or Codex writes the change and proposes it on GitHub.
- Review — the other builder examines it and passes or fails it. A builder can never approve its own work.
- Walkthrough — Grok uses the finished feature like a real customer, on a real screen, with recorded evidence. Only then is it done.
Local vs cloud, once and for all
Local
Work on one person's own computer. Private, fast, invisible to everyone else — like cooking a new dish at home before it goes near the restaurant menu.
Cloud
Work running on rented computers on the internet (ours at DigitalOcean), available to everyone, always. When a change is finished and approved it's deployed — copied onto those machines. That's when it becomes real for users.
Your first four weeks
A gentle, deliberate ramp. None of it is a test; all of it compounds.
Speak the language
Read the Platform and Toolbox tabs twice. Watch the GitHub video. Skim the glossary once. Goal: recognise every noun in a meeting.
Watch the machine work
Shadow the week's pull requests on GitHub (read-only). Read one Grok QA report end to end. Goal: explain build → review → walkthrough to a friend in the pub.
Become the customer
Use the test studio yourself: sign up, book a class, buy a trial with a test card, browse the admin screens. Note everything that confuses you — your fresh eyes are QA gold.
Tell the story
Learn the why-move pitch and the savings calculator. Practise the demo: paste a studio's site, watch it import, show the timetable living inside the site. Goal: give the demo to Declan without notes.
Glossary
Refreshed September 2026 for today's stack. Search anything, filter by category, click a term to expand the HelgoIQ-specific detail.
The library
Outside voices worth your commute. Add freely — this shelf is meant to fill up.