Solo · PRD to CI · 2026
A student fills in an academic invitation on a proper template, publishes it to a link that will not go stale, and exports a Story Card to announce it to their campus. I am building it for final-year students, which is exactly where I am sitting right now.
The invitations between a thesis proposal and graduation are made by hand, one at a time, in whatever tool the student has open. Nobody designs for this part of university, and this is the first project where the engineering was the easy half. Pricing, distribution and figuring out who actually pays turned out to be the harder problem.
I am building it end to end to learn the whole cycle rather than only the engineering half: spotting the pain point, gathering requirements, building, then pricing, marketing, and selling it. Guest pages are server-side rendered so a shared link loads fast and previews properly. Media goes to Cloudflare R2 with cache purge on write. Sign-in is Google, and an anonymous draft gets claimed into an account when someone signs in, so nobody loses work behind a login wall.
The MVP is built and holding together, roughly 80% through the first release. I have not put it in front of real users yet, and that is the honest gap: the remaining work is user testing, the template library, and actually taking it to market.
How to think about a moat instead of a feature list. Starting with IPB students is deliberate, because I understand that environment well enough to fit the product to it, and that familiarity is the part a competitor cannot copy quickly. From there it expands campus by campus. The version I am building toward is closer to Canva than a template shop: a platform where students sell the assets and templates they make themselves.