Website Case Study: 85 Leads in 4 Months for a Motorcycle Touring startup

Client

Grinning Monkeys — a motorcycle touring company that takes riders to biker-loved destinations across the world. They handle everything: the motorcycle, the route, the logistics, and the guiding — led by founders with 10 years of riding and tour guiding experience.

Industry

Adventure Travel / Motorcycle Tourism

Outcome

85 leads in 4 months post-launch from a standing start — no prior web presence

Scope

End-to-end website design and development — discovery, Figma design, client feedback, iteration, and build. Delivered in 2 months.

Grinning Monkeys came to us with something that’s actually harder to work with than it sounds: a great product, deep founder credibility, and no website. The founders had spent a decade riding and guiding motorcycle tours across the world. They knew their stuff. The problem was that nobody else could tell that from the outside.

For a business like this — where trust is everything and the purchase decision involves handing over your travel plans and your safety to a group of strangers — the website isn’t just a brochure. It’s the moment a potential customer decides whether these are people worth riding with. That first impression had to do a lot of work.

They weren’t looking for online bookings yet. They wanted something that could establish the brand, communicate the founders’ expertise, showcase upcoming tours, and give interested riders a clear way to reach out. Simple in theory. A lot to get right in practice.

Problem

  • No web presence — Grinning Monkeys was starting up, which meant no web presence, no searchability, and no way for interested riders join their tours
  • The business relied entirely on the founders’ credibility and experience, but that story wasn’t being told anywhere — there was no way for a prospective customer to understand why riding with these specific people was worth it
  • Tour listings needed to be flexible by design — dates for tours planned months out are often tentative, so the site had to handle both confirmed dates and month-only placeholders without looking unfinished
  • The team needed to be able to manage tour listings themselves without relying on a developer every time something changed — a non-negotiable for a startup moving fast
  • No online booking was expected at launch, but the site still needed to convert interest into leads — a contact form that actually got filled out, not just existed on the page
  • The itinerary download feature needed to capture contact details before handing over the PDF — turning a passive asset into an active lead generation tool

Solution

We ran the project in two clear phases: design first, build second. Nothing went into development until the client had signed off on the Figma mockups — copy, design, and functionality all reviewed and iterated on before a single line of code was written.

Discovery and requirements

  • Worked closely with the Grinning Monkeys team to understand the brand — the aesthetic, the tone, the kind of rider they’re speaking to, and what “epic motorcycle tours” actually means to their audience
  • Mapped out the full site architecture across five pages: Home, Tour Calendar with individual Tour Detail pages, About Us, Blog (scoped for future use), and Contact Us
  • Defined the CMS requirements upfront so the backend was built for a non-technical team to manage independently — adding, editing, and removing tour listings without developer involvement

Design — Figma first

  • Designed the full site in Figma before touching development — responsive layouts across desktop and mobile, aligned to the brand’s visual identity and color palette
  • Shared the first draft with the client for a structured round of feedback covering copy, design, and functionality — everything in one pass, not scattered across emails
  • Implemented feedback and got sign-off on the revised Figma before moving to build, which kept the development phase clean and significantly reduced back-and-forth

Build

  • Home page built around imagery and video — designed to land the brand’s personality immediately and make a prospective rider feel the experience before they’ve even read a word
  • Tour Calendar built as a dynamic listing page with individual tour detail pages — each one featuring full descriptions, images and video, a gated PDF itinerary download that collects contact info before delivery, and a contact form CTA for booking enquiries
  • Tour dates built to support month-only entries that can be updated to specific dates later — no awkward “TBD” placeholders, just clean flexible fields the team controls from the backend
  • About Us page built to do the trust work — individual founder profiles, riding history, years of experience, and the story of why Grinning Monkeys exists
  • Blog infrastructure set up and ready to activate — not a priority at launch, but fully built so the team can start publishing without any additional development work
  • Contact page with a straightforward interest form — low friction, clear next step, designed to convert curiosity into a conversation
  • Full CMS integration so the Grinning Monkeys team can manage everything themselves — tour listings, dates, descriptions, images — without touching a developer

Outcomes

  • 85 leads in 4 months post-launch — from a business that had no web presence whatsoever before this project
  • A website that earns trust before a single conversation happens — the founders’ credibility is front and centre, and the design reflects the quality of the experience they deliver
  • The itinerary download turned a passive content asset into an active lead capture tool — giving the team a warm contact before the first email is even sent
  • The team can fully manage the site independently — tour listings go live, get updated, and come down without any developer dependency
  • Blog infrastructure in place and ready to activate whenever the team is ready — no rebuild needed
  • Delivered in 2 months, on scope, with a design-first process that kept revisions predictable and the build phase efficient

The brief here was deceptively simple — build us a website. But for an early-stage business where the founders are the product, getting the story right matters as much as getting the functionality right. A technically sound website that doesn’t communicate trust wouldn’t have generated 85 leads. Both things had to work together.

The Figma-first process was a big part of why this project ran cleanly. When a client can see and react to the actual design before development starts, you avoid the most expensive kind of rework — the kind that happens after the code is already written.

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