Recon Analytics

Recon Analytics is the independent research firm the U.S. telecom industry quotes when it wants a number it can trust, and I was the engineer who rebuilt their website, turned their podcast into a self-publishing content engine, and stood up the Stripe storefront that sells their research directly.

Key Takeaways

  • Gave a five-person research firm a publishing, commerce and marketing platform that would normally take a department.
  • Turned a 248-episode podcast back catalog into a searchable, indexed content library, transcribed with speaker diarization and published automatically as new episodes arrive.
  • Built direct report sales on Stripe with per-page watermarked PDF delivery, purchases served only to the logged-in buyer from a protected directory.
  • Made checkout create the account: a logged-out buyer lands on the confirmation page already signed in, with purchase history, invoices and receipts in a custom account area.
  • Stood up an analytics warehouse with daily sync, giving the firm answers the standard GA4 interface cannot provide.
  • Launched the redesigned site with zero downtime after six months of design iteration.

Organization

Recon Analytics is a small, senior telecom research firm whose syndicated work is consumed by the largest wireless carriers, cable operators, satellite providers and device manufacturers. Alongside the research sits a long-running weekly podcast and a family of related properties, each with its own domain.

Challenge

The firm's most valuable assets, a decade of survey research, a large podcast library and a distinctive market point of view, were either invisible to search or trapped in formats nobody could browse, and reports were sold entirely by hand: invoice, email, attachment. The brand needed a platform that could publish, sell and measure without adding headcount.

Solution

  • A hand-built theme on a deliberately minimal plugin stack, with a restored classic editing experience styled to match the front end.
  • A transcript pipeline: the back catalog transcribed and diarized, ongoing episodes processed automatically, recurring telecom-specific transcription errors corrected sitewide, all served through a server-side cache.
  • Stripe Checkout with programmatic pricing, per-page watermarking on every purchased PDF, protected delivery, and account creation woven into the purchase flow.
  • Purchase notifications built around how the founder actually pays authors, with order details threaded by day.
  • Full observability on the commerce path, with payment and email activity logged and readable in the admin.
  • A MotherDuck analytics warehouse fed by a batched daily ETL, with test and live data separated.

Results

  • A 24/7 buying window replacing hand-delivered report sales.
  • Indexable page count up 5 to 10x through the transcript library.
  • 20 to 40 analyst hours a month returned.
  • Zero-downtime launch after a six-month redesign.
  • Hosting billing corrected to the right model for the site's traffic profile.