Jaeha LeeNew York

Tutoring platform, part 1 of 2

I overbuilt it, and my students told me

I optimized for completeness, and it made the product harder to use.

2022 – 2024Builder

Context

To get the business off my live hours, I decided to build an online platform: recorded lessons, structured material, and a way for students to see their progress. I had no background in product design or engineering, and a hard deadline in the form of my first semester.

The problem

I approached it the way I would approach an exam: learn everything first. I worked through web development courses from start to finish, read UI and UX theory, and studied how platforms like this are put together. Then I built a first version with everything I thought a good platform should have.

When it launched, nothing happened. No revenue. Almost no users.

I seriously considered going back to full-time tutoring. It would have been the comfortable move, and it would have paid immediately. What stopped me was remembering why I had started: if I went back, the problem of my time being my revenue would still be there, and so would the extra year.

So I asked the students, directly and through anonymous surveys. The answer was blunt. It was complicated. It had features nobody needed. And the parts that mattered were hard to find.

What I did

  • Took the criticism. This was harder than it sounds. I was used to being the one teaching these students. Now they were telling me my work wasn’t good enough, and they were right.
  • Found the real mistake. The problem wasn’t any one feature. It was how I had approached the whole thing. I had optimized for completeness, not usefulness.
  • Cut to three things. Structured lesson content, a clear sense of progress, and simple access. Everything else came out.
  • Fixed the worst problems first. I didn’t have time to rebuild from scratch, so I ranked the problems by how much they hurt a student’s experience and fixed them in that order.

What I learned

Completeness and usefulness pull in different directions, and when you’re new to something, completeness is the one that feels safe. Building everything feels like diligence. Usually it’s a way of not deciding.

I also learned more from being on the receiving end of criticism than I had from years of giving feedback as a teacher. It’s a pattern I’ve seen again since: I overbuild, someone who has to use the thing tells me the truth, and I take things away until it works.