My role: Product Founder (2019-2022)

Light - tutor calendar

Mobile application for private tutors that helps to keep track of payments from students, project income and organise schedule

Intro

I'd spent years designing for established companies. I wanted to know what it took to build a product from zero — so I did. Goal was to create product that really helps people on a daily basis. And make it fast and cheap.

With very limited resources, we have managed to create a helpful product for more than 4,000 paying users in total, who used the product daily for at least half a year. But let's start from the beginning.

Sure, so how it started?

Discovery phase

As usual it starts with...

Problem

Average private tutor has up to 20 students

Students pay in irregular chunks — a block upfront, then catch-up after missed lessons — so tutors lose track of what's actually been paid.

There is a constant student turnover; some are enrolling while others discontinue their studies, leading to an ever-changing client base.

Tutors can't say with confidence what they earn — which makes planning their finances close to guesswork..

After short initial research basically I've just spoken with few people.

I created the simplest landing page using a website builder, launched advertising, and collected 50 emails. I conducted 15 interviews with a detailed analysis of the tutors' workflow and the emotions this process evokes.

So how do they deal with it?

Personas

Vicky is a student who tutors part-time — 4-6 lessons a week with 2-3 students. She doesn't track payments or scheduling carefully; she just relies on memory. She sometimes makes notes in a notebook. Students occasionally pay in advance or owe lessons. Often after lessons, students will ask how much they owe or how many prepaid lessons they have left, and she check payments in her banking app, although this is quite infrequent. She is willing to pay for app subscriptions if they are beneficial to her, and she currently has 2-3 active subscriptions. She doesn't associate her future life with tutoring, but if she acquires 2-4 more students, she will look for a way to organize the process with some solutions.

Maria is an experienced tutor with around 8 students and has other sources of income too. She expects her students to keep track of their own payments, so she doesn't worry about it too much. For her, the money from tutoring just goes into her spending pot and isn't something she focuses on. She's looking to change careers eventually, although she's aware it might take some time and isn't sure if it will work out. Maria organizes her schedule using a free app, where it's handy to set up lessons, and she can assign a different color for each student.

Oleh's been giving lessons for over five years and his students like him so much, they often tell their friends about him. He's serious about his work and keeps his stuff in order. He's tried to keep track of who's paid and who hasn't using Excel and calendar apps, but it turned out to be too much hassle, so now he just jots it all down in a notebook where he can see everything at a glance. Every now and then, he'll sit down and figure out how much he's made that month. The money comes in a bit randomly – some students pay ahead for a bunch of lessons, and others might be a bit behind. This makes it pretty tricky for Igor to sort out his savings and handle his money smoothly.

What is your solution?

MVP

What we proposed

Add your lessons

Weekly income forecast — Forecast income

Student payment balances — Track the payments

Main value is to have schedule and payments together

During the first week, I created a clickable prototype and conducted several sessions with tutors I could find.

Within the first month, we developed an MVP and let our fellow tutors try out the app. They immediately started using it every day, despite bugs and issues.

The core principles

Simplicity

The application should be simple, bright, and light.

Speed of Development

With very few resources, we must only do what is necessary.

Contact with users

Regularly conduct surveys and interviews, collect feedback, create community.

After the initial validation, we launched advertising and created a chat for users.

How did the launch go?

Our hypotheses that users had such a problem were confirmed. We launched advertising in Ukraine and confirmed interest. Users often wrote that this was exactly what they had been looking for a long time.

Metrics of the first phase

Install to Activation (10 added lessons) 48%

7day Retention 41%

Light app promo: track payments and schedule together

First experiment

Now we needed to check if they would pay. We added a subscription with 1 month free trial. The initial price was quite affordable at $1.50 per month and $12 for the year.

At launch, the install-to-trial rate was 18%. I decided that this was the metric we could significantly improve by enhancing the onboarding process and communicating the trial effectively. I conducted a rapid test of the current onboarding to identify how it could be improved.

Did you manage to improve it?

Onboarding experiment

After initial research I come up with 3 hypothesis how we can improve onboarding

Main hypothesis

1 Trial value

Most of our users don't use to pay for app subscription so our main goal was to Convince users to try the app for a month and see whether it makes their life easier..

2 Understanding trial

Users don't trust the trial because they don't know how cancellation works. Spell it out in onboarding: cancel any time before the trial ends and you won't be charged. that they can use app for 30 days without any obligations.

3 First impression

Beside that creating impressive UI for app wasn't our priority we realised that onboarding should be a bit more fancy as a part of aquisition funnel.

Initial oboarding

Onboarding redesign

Results

Install to trial improved by 8%

22%30%

A few months later, we doubled the price and the install-to-trial rate dropped to 25 %. This was still a decent unit economy, and the next step I wanted to take was to improve user activation. I saw that the "aha moment" was the creation of 10 events; after reaching this point 70% of users purchase the subscription. The challenge was to improve user activation in the most cost-effective way.

Activation improvement

I conducted a series of interviews with community members to understand what constitutes successful activation. I asked users to describe their first use experience and when they realized the value Light provides. Based on this, I created a simple user guide in a web builder, and we added a modal with a link to it in the app. The goal was to briefly and clearly convey how the app works to interested users.

Results

Trial to activation improved by 8%

45%52%

View guide modal to open guide convertion

45%

In-app modal inviting the user to open the guide

Community building

At the next stage, we decided to focus more on user acquisition. I created a community for tutors on Instagram, where we brainstormed content categories. A key hypothesis was that we could engage tutors in creating content for the community. We launched the "Light Stories" type of posts, where tutors shared how they started working or gave advice on working with children or adult students.

As a result, the most interesting part of the content was generated by the members themselves.

The community helped work with influencers and attract organic growth, as well as acquire users during the summer when tutors typically have lower work activity but activate them in September.

Instagram content

Instagram post: Impostor Syndrome — tutor stories

Instagram post: How I started to use Light

Instagram post: How to motivate students?

Originally written in Ukrainian. Translated for this portfolio.

How did the project evolve further?

Project outcomes

We realized the market we were operating in might be too small and the business model unattractive for investments. We tested several pivot hypotheses:

Could we somehow hack the market for tutoring platforms (like Preply)?
Could we sell something to students?
Could we scale the current solution to other countries by translating the app into several languages and conducting experiments in various countries, but we didn't achieve sustainable numbers.

We conducted user interviews, I made about 10 different pitch decks, and we passed the initial selection in the Ukrainian Startup Fund. However, after that, the war began, and we decided to stop working in the Russian market, and the Ukrainian market became smaller.

App Store

App Store screenshot: Track customers balances

How did it all end up?

We see that users love the product, even though it has a lot of bugs, lacks super fancy animations, and essentially has a very simple interface with not many necessary functions. Many people who started using it back in 2021 continue to do so, and we have a small but steady organic growth, which means they recommend Light to friends. But we are not interested in further development due to the small market.

I've learned a lot about product development, user acquisition, customer research, usage of analytics systems to setup hypothesis and conduct experiments

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