Owning a Fender
Owning a Fender is a content-driven resource for Fender guitar owners — a blog that grew into a product. What started as setup guides is now a site with interactive tools used by thousands of guitarists a month, selling digital products through a fully automated checkout, and running on serverless infrastructure that costs almost nothing to operate. I designed, built, wrote and grew it end to end.
A blog that became a product
Content, interactive tools and digital products on one static site — live at owningafender.com.
What I built
Serial-number decoders for 20+ guitar brands (Fender, Squier, PRS, ESP, Martin and more) plus setup-spec lookups. These are the site’s growth engine: the PRS, Squier and ESP decoders each rank around position 5–6 on Google and pull in hundreds of clicks a month each.
Premium setup guides sold as PDF reports through Stripe Checkout, with automated fulfilment — a purchase triggers a Lambda that generates and delivers the report, no manual steps. Affiliate product recommendations add a second revenue stream.
Keyword-researched content pipeline (Search Console data drives the editorial calendar), Article/HowTo/FAQ structured data, sitemap and internal-linking system. Result: roughly 16,000 clicks a month across all search engines (~78,000 impressions a month on Google alone).
AWS Lambda + API Gateway + DynamoDB, defined as CDK infrastructure-as-code: purchase fulfilment, a server-side event analytics pipeline, and a traffic census that classifies AI-bot vs human visits from CloudFront logs.
Results, not just deliverables
Around 16,000 clicks per month across all search engines — ~78,000 impressions a month on Google alone, with no paid acquisition.
Serial-number decoders rank on page one (positions ~5–6) for competitive queries across 20+ guitar brands.
Digital products sell and fulfil automatically through Stripe + Lambda — zero manual delivery.
Near-zero marginal running cost: static hosting on S3 + CloudFront, serverless backend.
What it runs on
Gatsby v5 + React 18 (TypeScript) static site
AWS S3 + CloudFront hosting
AWS CDK v2 (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB)
Stripe Checkout + Billing
Playwright e2e suite (60+ specs) and Vitest unit tests
Ephemeral full-stack preview environment per pull request
Sentry, Umami + GA4 analytics
Want a site that brings in business?
If you're an independent business outgrowing your current website, I can help. I handle strategy, design, build, hosting, SEO and analytics — so you get a site that looks the part and actually converts visitors into customers.
Start a projectOr email me directly at nickolastheodoulou@hotmail.com