The Challenge
Sina Balouch had spent five seasons and 50+ episodes building You're Not Alone into a mental health podcast that reached listeners in 90+ countries and 1,700+ cities — a 5.0 rating on Apple Podcasts and a deeply loyal audience. But the website holding it all together was a generic Shopify Dawn theme. The shop, the podcast, the guests, the fundraiser, and the community lived in disconnected fragments. New visitors landed on a storefront that looked like every other Shopify site, with no sense of the mission or the depth of content behind it.
Sina needed a single home that matched the quality of the podcast — somewhere fans could browse every episode with search and filters, support the mission through merch, learn about guests and the fundraiser, and ultimately become part of the community. He also needed it built without sacrificing the Shopify checkout his audience already trusted, and ready to scale into auth, comments, and community features later. Off-the-shelf templates couldn't do it. The site had to be custom.
Solutions
Custom Next.js + Sanity build
Replaced the Shopify Dawn theme with a fully custom Next.js 16 site backed by Sanity CMS — Sina manages 50+ episodes and merch independently, no developer needed.
Headless Shopify integration
Browsing, product pages, and cart live on the new branded site; checkout still runs on Shopify. Trusted payment flow, premium experience.
Episode + guest discovery
Search, season filters, and tag filters across every episode and guest. New listeners can find their entry point in seconds.
SEO + AEO foundation
Per-page canonicals, schema.org for podcast/organization/FAQ, dynamic sitemap, llms.txt for AI agents, GA4. Built so Google and ChatGPT can both surface the show.
We replaced the Shopify Dawn theme with a custom Next.js 16 site that pulls together every part of the YNA brand — podcast, shop, guests, fundraiser, and community — into a single experience. Sina manages content himself through Sanity (episodes auto-import from Spotify), while Shopify still handles the checkout his audience already trusts. The result feels like a real media company, not a storefront.
On the SEO side, every page now has its own canonical URL, structured data for organization, podcast series, FAQ, and reviews, plus an llms.txt file so AI agents like ChatGPT and Perplexity can cite the show directly. The site is designed to compound: as Sina adds episodes, blog posts, and merch, the architecture is already in place to surface them in search, social, and AI results.
“The new site finally feels like the podcast. Everything is in one place, it loads fast, and I can update episodes and merch myself without touching code. It's exactly what I pictured when I started YNA.”
— Sina Balouch, Host & Founder, You’re Not Alone
Key Outcomes
- Custom branded experience replacing the generic Shopify storefront
- All 50+ episodes searchable and filterable by season and category
- Sanity CMS handoff — Sina manages episodes and products independently
- Headless Shopify checkout preserves trust without locking the design
- SEO + AEO foundation: per-page canonicals, schema.org, sitemap, llms.txt, GA4
- Architecture ready for Phase 2 community features (auth, comments, likes)