Building The Balanced Horse: A Video Learning Platform for Equestrian Training
How I built a custom video course platform for equestrian trainer Rebecca Duke. Subscriptions, one-off purchases, content dripping, and progress tracking.
The Brief
Rebecca Duke runs The Balanced Horse, an equestrian training business built around structured video courses for horse owners. She needed a platform to sell and deliver that content online, with proper subscription billing, the ability to sell individual courses as one-off purchases, and full control over the experience her students get.
This one felt like a natural fit for me. I’m a farrier as well as a developer, so I already understand the equestrian world. I know how horse people think, what they expect from training content, and how they consume it (mostly on their phones, often standing in a yard with one bar of signal). That context matters when you’re building something for a specific audience.
Rebecca’s requirements were clear:
- A branded video learning platform she owns completely
- Monthly subscription plans and one-off course purchases
- Structured content: courses, modules, and individual lessons
- Content dripping so lessons unlock gradually after purchase
- An admin dashboard where she manages everything herself
- Progress tracking so students pick up where they left off
- Mobile-first, because that’s how her audience learns
- A native app for the App Store and Google Play
What I Built
A complete video learning platform, custom-coded from the ground up. No WordPress, no third-party LMS, nothing bolted together. Everything purpose-built for how Rebecca teaches and how her students learn.
The content structure is clean and logical:
- Courses are the top level, each covering a specific topic or skill
- Modules break courses into focused sections
- Lessons are the actual content: video, optional written guidance, and downloadable resources
Access works through memberships. A student subscribes to a plan, that plan unlocks specific courses, and drip rules control which lessons become available over time. Subscribe today, get the first few lessons immediately, more unlock each week. It keeps students engaged and gives the content a sense of progression rather than dumping everything at once.
Video That Works Everywhere
The video delivery was built to work reliably regardless of where someone is watching. The platform uses adaptive streaming, which means the video quality adjusts automatically based on the viewer’s connection speed. Good Wi-Fi at home gets full HD. Patchy 4G at the yard gets a lower resolution that still plays smoothly without buffering.
Every video session is authenticated, so content is protected. Nobody watches without a valid subscription or purchase. And for Rebecca, uploading large training videos is straightforward, with the system handling files of any size reliably, even on a slower connection.
Two Ways to Buy
Rebecca needed flexibility in how she sells:
Monthly subscriptions give ongoing access to course libraries. Students sign up, get billed monthly, and can manage their own subscription (upgrade, cancel, view invoices) without Rebecca needing to get involved.
One-off purchases let students buy individual courses outright. Pay once, access forever. This works well for standalone workshops or specialist topics that sit outside the main subscription offering.
Both models work together in the same system. Rebecca can also create discount codes for promotions, which is useful for launches and seasonal offers.
What Rebecca Controls
The admin dashboard puts Rebecca in charge of everything:
- Upload and organise video content with drag-and-drop ordering
- Create and edit courses, modules, and lessons
- Set up subscription plans and one-off pricing
- View analytics: active subscribers, revenue, popular courses, completion rates
- Manage students: see individual progress, grant or revoke access
- Create discount codes for promotions
- Track where students are completing courses and where they’re dropping off
She runs all of this herself, day to day, without needing to ask me for help. That was always the goal: build something she genuinely owns and operates.
The Native App
The platform is packaged and live as a native app on iOS and Android. Students can download it from the App Store and Google Play. It gives that polished, app-like experience while keeping all the content and functionality of the web platform. Payments are handled in a way that avoids the App Store’s 30% transaction fee, which makes a real difference to Rebecca’s margins.
Why This Matters
Off-the-shelf course platforms charge monthly fees and take a cut of every sale. For someone building a content business, those costs compound quickly. Rebecca’s platform costs her a fraction of what a Teachable or Thinkific subscription would, and she owns every part of it. No revenue share, no per-student pricing, no risk of a platform changing its terms or increasing its fees.
The equestrian training space is full of talented people sharing knowledge through social media or generic course platforms. A purpose-built platform gives Rebecca a professional edge and a direct relationship with her students that no third-party marketplace can match.
If you’re building a training business, a membership site, or any kind of content platform, a custom build might cost less than you think, especially when you factor in what you’d pay in platform fees over a year or two. Have a chat with me about it and I’ll give you an honest comparison.