A members-only AI assistant for a podcast academy

Problem

The academy teaches coaches and consultants how to turn a podcast into a business, and sells that method through paid programs inside a Circle community. An AI assistant anyone could open would give the method away. One that could not produce the academy's own documents would be a novelty.

Approach

We built the service that sits behind the academy's custom GPT, with three jobs.

It verifies the member first: the assistant checks the email against Circle's admin API — space membership for the flagship program, plus tags for the higher tiers — and only then answers.

It produces the real document. The assistant fills the academy's official coaching worksheet by writing into the actual PDF form rather than generating a lookalike, embedding a Unicode font so French accents render correctly and leaving every field editable so the coach can keep working in it. The finished file is stored on Cloudflare R2 and returned as a download link.

It captures the public side too: the ROI calculator on the marketing site posts through the same service, which emails the prospect a branded breakdown and logs the lead to the team's sheet.

Outcome

First shipped in 2024 as the ROI calculator and its follow-up email, then extended in 2026 with membership checks and the worksheet generator. The academy's paid frameworks now run as an assistant only its members can use, and every worksheet comes back branded, filled in, and ready to work on. The service runs in Docker behind a Cloudflare Tunnel, so the endpoint stays stable no matter where it is hosted.

Stack

• Custom GPT actions over a Node and Express service
• Circle admin API for membership and tag checks
• pdf-lib form filling with embedded Unicode fonts
• Cloudflare R2 storage and Cloudflare Tunnel
• Google Apps Script and transactional email for lead capture