Case Summary

During my time as a university student of Mathematics and Actuarial Sciences, I would ease my financial burden by offering math tutoring services to fellow students pursuing other careers. I would help them understand algebra and calculus concepts such as solving for x and derivatives, respectively. I would do so by arranging tutoring sessions a couple times a week, depending on the need, on an hourly rate.

While doing so, I noticed that some students found me through other people but had no clue where to find help if needed. In the same way, people that would be up for providing tutoring services had a hard time finding students that needed their services.

Observing this, I thought that perhaps we are all just missing a tutor-student online marketplace. So I paired up with a friend of mine, and we built Tuto. We used React js, Node JS, Express JS, and MongoDB. We chose those technologies because at the time we were both learning javascript so we wanted to build something with our learnings. We then deployed it to heroku which offered free hosting of small scale JS web applications, and the required backing services.

We didn't manage to take the project to a production-ready state, and so we never launched. Nevertheless, we learned so much about building something from scratch, speaking to potential customers, and contributing to the same code base in an organized way.

My Take

This project is one of my two entreprenurial attempts at building a business. At first, I actually gathered a team of 4 people - one designer, one ios developer, one react native developer, and one backend developer - and we were all ready and excited to move the project forward as I talked to them about the possibilities and opportunities of it. They found it to be a potentially good addition their individual portfolios, so we embarked in working on the project.

At the time, I had no idea what I was doing. I only wanted for this platform to become a reality. I had read this book called Sprint: How to solve big probelms and test new ideas in just five days, and it presented me a way forward, which I took.

Having organized the team and its efforts in a common direction, I naturally became seen as the leader of the project - naturally as in without any explicit consensus. The team would look up to me for guidance when taking technical decisions in order to choose trade-offs that would help us best fulfill our commmon goal. Since I was unfamiliar with design and development, I had a hard time understanding the trade-offs and thus providing proper guidance. This taught me a great deal about the nature of leadership.

Eventually, the team got demotivated, and the project died. In the face of this, I decided to build it myself. So I started learning web development with the resources I could find online. I would go to my call center job in the morning, then university in the evening, and then learn about software development online for an hour or two at home before going to bed. In this time, I rediscovered my love for building computer programs, which I had a taste of when I took programming classes as part of my studies in Mathematics. After a couple months, I called a friend of mine that was learning as well, and pitched him the idea. And that is when we started building the unfinished POC we ended up deploying to Heroku but never launching.

This project was definitely not a zero to one, but it did get me closer to one than zero. At the same time, it allowed me to first-hand experience challenges relating to leadership, versioning, deployments, and product building.

I have learned so much since then. Soon realizing that programming - regardless of language - is just the tip of the software engineering iceberg. Today I am currently able to build and launch such a product by myself without too much hastle. Probably in less than a month if I go at it full time, and leverage existing open source code bases related to online marketplaces. Who knows? At some point I may even pick it up once more, brush it up, and link to it from this website.

Though the programming classes I took during my Math studies were the most enjoyable classes to me, this project remains as the experience that truly gave birth to my passion for building computer programs. Five years later, in 2023, I have four years of professional software engineering experience well beyond just writing code. I will always be grateful for that naive leap of faith that ended up teaching me so much.