The Systems Behind $10M+ in Revenue at Educate.io

Educate, Iman Gadzhi's education company, runs large-scale live events and webinars. Thousands of people registering at once, a 10+ person sales team closing deals in real time, and a revenue window measured in hours, not days.

The systems behind their operation, spanning 5+ major events, 80 leads per second at peak, and $10M+ in processed revenue, were designed and built from the ground up. None of it failed at the customer level.

The problem

The business was scaling faster than its infrastructure. Everything that worked fine at 100 registrations started falling apart at 1,000.

Zapier and Make were doing everything, and they couldn't handle it. All lead intake, CRM updates, cart abandonment triggers, speed-to-lead flows, it all ran through task-based automation platforms. During events, when thousands of people hit the Typeform at once, those platforms started choking. Rate limits, silently dropped tasks, workflows processing out of order or not at all. A lead who submitted at minute 2 of a live event might not get a CRM record, a Slack notification, or any follow-up until the window to close them was long gone.

And on top of that, every event burned thousands in task billing. The bigger the event, the bigger the bill, for a system that was actively failing under load.

The sales floor had no real structure. Leads were self-assigned. Reps cherry-picked the easy ones and buried the rest. Nobody had visibility into who was working what, there was no accountability, no leaderboard, nothing pushing performance. Leadership had to manually chase numbers just to know how an event was going.

Revenue was leaking everywhere. People dropped off mid-checkout with zero follow-up. Customers went quiet before churning and nothing caught it. Cart abandonment had no recovery flow at all.

Everything operational was manual. Discord community access was managed by hand, someone had to assign roles, verify purchases, remove access when people cancelled. Refunds required direct Stripe credentials. Support couldn't look up a customer's history without pulling in someone senior.

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What we built

Custom event infrastructure (replacing Zapier/Make)

The task-based automation layer got ripped out entirely and replaced with custom infrastructure built for actual event load.

At peak, the system was processing 80 Typeform submissions per second, and each submission kicked off a whole chain of things in real time: HubSpot CRM record creation or update, cart abandonment object save, round robin assignment, Slack notification to the assigned closer, speed-to-lead sequence enrollment. All of it running concurrently, in order, without dropping anything and without touching any other customer's experience.

The cost model flipped too. No more paying per task at a rate that scaled with event size. The "burn a few grand on automation during a big event" problem just stopped existing.

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Cart abandonment recovery

A full cart abandonment system, built from scratch. When someone dropped off mid-checkout, the system caught it automatically, validated whether it was a genuine abandonment, and routed it through a follow-up flow that got the right person on it fast.

Every step wrote back to HubSpot. The assigned closer got an immediate Slack message. Everything was tracked. The whole thing ran in seconds.

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Speed-to-lead: from hours to under 5 minutes

Before: leads just sat there. No notification system, no assignment logic, no urgency.

After: from the moment someone submitted a form, they had an assigned closer in HubSpot, a Slack ping to that closer with full context, and were enrolled in an outreach sequence, all within under 5 minutes, even at 80 submissions/second.

In high-ticket sales, the speed-to-lead window is one of the highest-leverage variables there is. Getting to someone in under 5 minutes versus a few hours is the difference between catching them while they're still in buying mode versus following up cold.

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Sales floor infrastructure: round robin, availability control, leaderboards

With 10+ closers and setters working simultaneously during live events, things needed structure.

Round robin assignment distributed leads systematically based on availability. No cherry-picking, no leads getting buried, no rep who happened to be watching Slack getting 3x the volume of someone who stepped away for 10 minutes.

Availability control via Slack. Sales reps could toggle themselves on or off lead assignment with a single Slack command. Going to sleep, stepping away, done for the day. One command and no leads get routed to them until they flip back on. This sounds simple but it solved a real problem: leads going to reps who weren't around and sitting unworked for hours.

Live leaderboards pushed real-time standings to the team Slack throughout every event. Deals closed, revenue generated, rep ranking, updated continuously.

When everyone can see the numbers in real time, the dynamic shifts. Reps behind pace can see it and respond. Top performers have public proof of it. Leadership has a live read on how the event is going without asking anyone for a report.

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Sales tracking and reporting

Every deal was tracked end-to-end across the full pipeline: which setter sourced it, which closer closed it, and what the payment looked like.

• Each sales rep had their own individual Stripe payment link so revenue was attributed correctly at the transaction level without any manual logging
• Setter to closer handoffs were tracked for every deal, giving clean data for commissions and performance reviews
• Calendar booking tracking connected inbound bookings to the setter who generated them and the closer who handled the call
• Everything aggregated into centralized dashboards: sales team performance, event revenue, setter activity, closer conversion rates, without anyone pulling or compiling data manually

This replaced a process that involved manually exporting CSVs, cross-referencing Stripe with HubSpot, and still ending up with gaps.

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Discord community management

Fully automated. Members got the right role and channel access based on their product tier and time in the program, synced in real time to their Stripe subscription.

When someone cancelled: access removed immediately, re-engagement sequence triggered. No manual work, no lag, no support tickets from people who cancelled but still had full access.

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Internal Slack tools for support

Support reps got a set of Slack slash commands so they never needed direct Stripe access:

• Pull a customer's full purchase and interaction history with one command
• Run a refund eligibility check against business rules before anything gets processed
• Submit a refund through an approved flow that logged the action and notified the right people

Every action was audited. The bottleneck of escalating every refund to someone with Stripe credentials was gone, and so was the risk of unreviewed refunds slipping through.

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What changed

Events stopped being moments of operational risk. The system handled peak load without anyone babysitting it. Revenue that was leaking through abandoned carts, slow follow-up, and unworked leads started getting captured. The sales team had accountability structures that ran themselves. Reporting that used to take hours of manual work just happened.

And the automation stack that was billing thousands per event and breaking under load was gone.

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The takeaway

None of these are exotic ideas. Round robin, cart abandonment recovery, speed-to-lead under 5 minutes, automated community access, rep-level tracking, most businesses know they should have these things. The gap is between knowing and having them actually running reliably at scale.

When your highest-leverage moments are live events where money is won or lost in a short window, the infrastructure either holds at 80 leads/second or it doesn't.

If your operation has gaps like these, book a strategy call and we'll map out where to start.