Case Study: Elevation Publishing Group

Results

$12,480

Annual SaaS Savings

$5/mo

New Running Cost

11

Pages Built

2 weeks

Build Time

The Challenge

A growing publishing company with no digital infrastructure

Elevation Publishing Group is a hybrid publishing company serving executive authors, physicians, and thought leaders. They had a basic website on Squarespace, no CRM, no automated intake process, and no visibility into their pipeline or finances.

Their team was tracking leads in spreadsheets, manually sending follow-up emails, and had no dashboard to see business health. Marketing activities were untracked. They were considering HubSpot ($800/month) plus multiple other tools.

What They Were Paying (or About To)

Squarespace (website)$33/mo HubSpot (CRM)$800/mo Mailchimp (email)$50/mo Smartsheet (project tracking)$35/mo Databox (dashboard)$72/mo Typeform + Zapier (forms/automation)$50/mo Total $1,040/month

What We Built

One platform. Everything connected.

We designed and deployed a complete digital operations platform on AWS that handles everything the SaaS stack would have done, plus features they didn't know they needed.

Platform Components

Premium Marketing Website

11 pages. Responsive. Custom burgundy/gold brand aesthetic. Physician-specific landing page. Mobile navigation. Newsletter capture on every page.

Author CRM

Automated lead capture from website intake form. Pipeline tracking (prospect to signed to active to completed). Instant team notifications. No per-seat fees.

Executive Dashboard

Real-time KPIs: total pipeline value, active projects, monthly revenue, overdue payments, campaign performance. Password-protected. Updated live.

Admin Panel

Full CRUD for authors, finances, and marketing activities. Campaign tracking with named campaigns. Payment status management. Activity logging.

Email Automation

Newsletter signup with instant capture. Confirmation emails to prospects. Team notification on new leads. 50,000 emails/day capacity. $0.10 per 1,000 sends.

Marketing Playbook

Built-in daily/weekly execution guide. Outreach templates. Campaign planning framework. Accessible by the whole team without leaving the platform.

Infrastructure

Enterprise architecture. Startup cost.

FrontendS3 + CloudFront (global CDN, HTTPS) BackendAWS Lambda (Python, serverless) APIAPI Gateway (4 routes) DatabaseDynamoDB (5 tables, auto-backup) EmailSES (production mode, 50K/day) SecuritySSL, IAM, encrypted at rest MonitoringCloudWatch + billing alerts

The entire platform auto-scales. It can handle 10 visitors or 10,000 without any configuration changes. Running cost stays under $5/month at normal usage levels and scales linearly with traffic.

Before and After

The numbers

Before

$1,040/mo

6 disconnected tools
No CRM
No dashboard
Manual everything

After