How a 16-Year-Old Built an App for Teacher Burnout
Jan 2022
Do you remember being a student? Were you the one who made your teacher explode, or the quiet studious type? I was the second one (I still am—I was 17 when I wrote this). But the first type, along with other reasons, caused a problem that Fabricio and I noticed: teacher anxiety.
Yes, anxiety and depression. According to the U.S. National Institute of Education (IES), more than 57% of university professors said they had felt anxiety or depression because of their work.
Prototype → MVP → Product
Starting from the problem, we decided as non-rushed entrepreneurs to validate it without writing a single line of code. So I built a prototype in Figma.
User > Customer
After sketching some wireframes on the whiteboard of one of our teachers while he was out at lunch, we quickly defined what could help teachers (still during the Covid pandemic) get organized and move past the archetype of the teacher buried in books and pens. We created the first prototype of Studently: an all-in-one system for teacher organization.
It wasn’t just about seeing the next classes or external Zoom links. We integrated a calendar system connected to the students’ calendars, where filtering made it easy to quickly see what needed to be done.
For a teacher, having all their pending tasks, thoughts, and documents in one place wouldn’t just reduce the bureaucracy inside the institution. It would also create a kind of collective catharsis for the teachers, and therefore for the students—we didn’t leave them behind.
We built the prototype connected to four important groups:
- Teachers
- Students
- Parents
- Administrators
We were aware that the money only came from one group—the administrators. But we were more aware that our users (teachers, students, and parents) would use our product more than our direct customer. We decided to focus on that.
Besides a nice calendar with different view types, we added a chat so parents, students, and teachers could communicate more quickly. Or do you want to keep getting calls from your students in the middle of the night?
A modern but simple document system with the premise “less is more,” so students could edit documents together (as a group and live) and manage education as a team. Without forgetting comments so teachers could review and evaluate.
UX Research
Don’t spend on marketing before validating three things:
- The problem
- The market
- Your product
To validate our problem we decided to talk to users. A market study, you say? No—talk to users. Send forms to teachers? No—talk to users. Ask them for a one-on-one meeting and actually talk to them? Yes—talk to your users directly. Watch how they express themselves, dig into the why behind their problems, identify real needs.
We did this with Studently. We noticed the problem we wanted to solve was real: 4 out of 6 teachers interviewed said they felt anxiety/stress because of their work, and 6 out of 6 would be willing to pay for our product to use it.
Unfortunately, at just 16 years old, I had a meeting with an important executive from Argentina who told us a painful truth: “Don’t look at where the ball is—look at where it’s going to be.”
Even though I felt bad, along with my partner, we decided to take his feedback.
Studently wouldn’t just compete with Google Classroom or Microsoft. It would also compete with other big startups and companies like ClassDojo, which had almost 90% of the U.S. market.
We started looking at where the ball would be, not in 1 year, but in 5 or 10. We ran into web3 and everything changed.