Teachable
(Acquired by Hotmart)
Case Study
After initially gaining traction, Teachable hired us as part of the founding team to rebuild the product in 6 months to scale to millions of users. Fun fact #1: Chris, the founder of Thoughtful, joined Teachable full time for a year afterwards. Fun fact #2: A few years later, they got acquired for $250M.
The Project
Teachable is an Ed Tech platform that allows customers to create and sell online courses. Teachable’s founder had built a proof-of-concept and was beginning to see enough traction in the form of paying users that it was time to rebuild the product in a way that could scale to millions of users and millions of dollars of transactions.
We worked alongside Teachable’s newly hired CTO and backend engineer to recreate the product from scratch in a robust and scalable way, focusing about 70% on frontend development and 30% backend development.
Challenges
- Rebuilding the entire product in just 6 months without disrupting service to a rapidly growing user base
- Creating a great UI/UX that allowed users to customize the look and feel of their online schools
- Optimizing school landing pages for SEO and performance
- Maintaining and migrating users from the legacy codebase to the new codebase
- Integrating with Stripe to process millions of dollars of payments
- Achieving a high test coverage that could recreate a mock database, including payment data, automatically
- Helping interview and hire the initial engineering team
- Creating a custom build process to compile and minify Javascript/CSS assets (this was pre-Webpack)