The coach who changed my life, and why I built Coachstack

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Peter, the founder of Coachstack and the person behind this newsletter. If we haven’t met yet, let me introduce myself starting with a story.

We all have a story about a coach who changed something in us.

Mine starts when I was nine, trying baseball for the first time. My coach, Moises, had played semi-pro back in Puerto Rico, and from the very first session he seemed to see something in me that I couldn't see in myself. Four years later, I'd gone from a complete beginner to the top-ranked player in my league in Chicago.

That was the first time I understood what a great coach can do. It wasn't the last.

I've spent the last decade-plus at fast-growing B2B SaaS startups, and I care about two things more than almost anything: developing the next generation of leaders, and widening access to great coaching.

In the fall of 2023, I was frustrated and unsure of my next move, so I hired an executive coach. My goal had always been to start my own company, but I never felt ready. Working through a long-term plan with my coach changed that. For the first time, I felt ready to take the leap. Then, almost on cue, I got laid off. I'd reached a real inflection point.

Here's the part that became Coachstack. While I worked with my coach, I kept noticing that they ran their entire business on a pile of disconnected tools, one each for their website, email, scheduling, payments, and agreements. They had the expertise of a seasoned professional and a back office held together with tape.

I went looking for the simple, all-in-one platform they should have been using. It didn't exist. The big names are built for selling courses, not for coaches doing the deep, one-to-one work that actually changes lives.

So I set out to build it.

I interviewed dozens of coaches, built the first wireframes, and started building it myself. When I hit the complex parts, I brought in a developer to get it to a real MVP, and last year I ran a pilot with a group of coaches. They loved how simple it was, and they wanted more of it. That's the classic all-in-one trap: there's always one more feature to add.

I kept building. But at my pace, finishing it the way I wanted was still six to nine months out.

Then, early this year, I finally tried Claude Code, one of the new AI tools everyone had been talking about. In a single afternoon, I built a couple of coaching websites from scratch. It stopped me cold. This changes everything.

I've used it every day since. Landing pages became full websites, which became real software, including a Newsletter Wizard that now writes my own newsletter in minutes. A few weeks ago, the math got impossible to ignore: I asked my developer to estimate the next feature, he said three months, and I scoped it myself in Claude Code and realized I could build it myself in three days.

So I made the hard call. I'm retiring the original Coachstack app, the one we built on a no-code tool and ran the pilot on, and rebuilding the whole thing myself, from the ground up.

Here's the part I'm most excited about. This time, I'm building it in a different order. Coaches told me the real pain was never the back office. It was getting clients. So the growth engine comes first: your website, your newsletter, your lead magnet, your LinkedIn. Scheduling and a lightweight CRM are coming next. The rest will follow.

What this means for you: I'm putting the Coaching Flywheel on a short pause, likely a couple of weeks, while I get the new version ready. When it comes back, it'll be different, and I think better:

• Shorter. A five-minute read or less, instead of ten.

• One useful tip per issue, whether that's your website, your newsletter, your offer, or your pipeline.

• Sent from Coachstack's own platform, the one I've been building, instead of Beehiiv.

I know why you got into coaching. To help others. To build the life you wanted. To make a difference for your clients. You got into coaching to support people. Let me support you.

If any of this resonates, I'd love to connect. Book a call and I'll show you what I'm building, walk you through the Newsletter Wizard, or even put together a quick mockup of what your new coaching website could look like.

And if you'd rather just reply, tell me what you've made of the Coaching Flywheel so far. I read every response.

Thank you for being here in the early days of this. I'll see you on the other side.

Peter

P.S. The Coaching Flywheel is a free newsletter from Coachstack. It isn't going anywhere. It's just getting sharper.