Jack Devine's Snax Skool
Jack Devine’s Snax Skool: A Bespoke Teaching Platform with an AI Lesson Engine
A bespoke, members-only teaching platform for a 45-year Grateful Dead guitarist, with an AI pipeline that turns lesson videos into structured study guides, passwordless sign-in, and per-course access control.
Visit the live site
At a glance
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300+
Lessons rebuilt as study pages
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7
Course tiers, gated by entitlement
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0
Passwords (magic-link sign-in)
Jack Devine has played Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia guitar for more than 45 years. By his own cheerful admission, he is a self-described "Luddite" who had been running his entire teaching business from a cell phone. His school, Snax Skool, lived inside a third-party community platform, with a flat, unsearchable archive of hundreds of lesson videos buried in a classroom view. The teaching was world-class. The infrastructure around it was holding it back.
I built him a bespoke website that does the part Jack does not want to do, so he can keep doing the part only he can. It is a real front door for the business, a genuinely useful study hall for members, and a membership engine with real authentication behind it, wrapped in a design that sounds like Jack rather than like software.
One site doing three jobs
A front door
A full set of marketing pages, home, about, and a page per class offering, written in Jack's warm, anti-corporate voice so prospective students understand the school before they ever pay.
A study hub
A members-only library of 300+ lessons, each rebuilt from its source video into a click-through table of contents and a transcript-derived study guide, with multi-axis filtering and full-text search.
A membership engine
Passwordless sign-in and per-course access control, so the right members see the right lessons, while the community itself stays where it already lives.
Turning teaching videos into a real curriculum
The differentiator is the study hub. Each lesson started life as a long, single-take teaching video. A build pipeline transcribes every video, then uses AI to derive a structured, timestamped table of contents and a "core concepts" study guide for each one, which a build step renders into a static study page.
The result is that a two-hour video becomes navigable. A student can jump straight to "chord-tone soloing and theory" at 08:18, filter every lesson down to a single technique, and read the key ideas as text before they play a note. This is the work that takes "another teacher posting videos" and turns it into a teaching business with real infrastructure, the kind a working musician could never hand-build alone.
300+ lessons, made searchable
The old archive was a flat list. The new study hub indexes every lesson across song, class, lesson type, and skill level, with full-text search over the transcript-derived guides. A student can move from "show me everything" to one Garcia-course beginner lesson on a specific song in two clicks.
Passwordless sign-in, per-course access
There are no passwords. A member enters their email, receives a magic link, and lands in a 30-day session, all on a serverless backend that sends and verifies the links. Access then has two independent dimensions, both sourced from the school's own membership data: a library subscription unlocks the main archive, while each premium course unlocks its own subset of lessons.
| Entitlement | Unlocks |
|---|---|
library | The full lesson archive and study hub |
garcia-1, garcia-2 | The Garcia Course deep dives |
bobweir-1, bobweir-2 | The Bob Weir Master Class |
masterclass-1, masterclass-2 | Topical masterclass sessions |
"The bespoke site is the natural next step, Jack focuses on the teaching, and the technical and marketing presence is handled for him."
A front door, not a replacement
Snax Skool's community already lived on a platform the members knew. The goal was never to rebuild a forum, a feed, or a notification system. The bespoke site is the front door and the study hall; the existing community stays the living room, with a clear path between them.
The visual direction follows the same restraint. A confident serif, a clean reading sans, an occasional hand-lettered accent, cream and deep-navy with disciplined red, blue, and brass. It reads like a great independent music school, which is exactly what Jack wanted: a site he is proud to share, that sounds like him.
The stack
The whole site is static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on a serverless edge, fast, cheap to run, and simple to hand off. The only moving server-side part is the authentication function. There is no heavyweight CMS to maintain, because the lessons are generated from data.
A Luddite's school, finally built like a business
Jack now has a real marketing presence he is proud to send people to, a study hub that is a genuine reason to become and stay a member, and an access system that quietly does the right thing without a password in sight. The teaching is still entirely his. Everything around it, the front door, the study hall, the plumbing, is handled, so the next launch is a matter of adding content rather than rebuilding infrastructure.