ReportCards.ai

Background

For my IB Computer Science class in highschool, we had to find a “client” and solve a problem for him by writing software. My client was my Business teacher and his problem was that writing feedback individually for every student is arduous. He followed a specific criteria for writing the feeback and used Google Sheets to organize it as much as he could, but it would still be arduous. I wrote some object-oriented python code with TK-Inter as the GUI. It was ugly and clunky, but it sort of worked. But, I knew that it was never going to be used. No teacher was going to run the python script and launch tk-inter. I knew, however, that if it was a website that they could just go to and use it, it had massive potential.

Learning Web Development.

I had to take a gap year after graduating highschool. The idea was still with me, so I decided to learn web development by myself to build this thing and make it a reality. I signed up for a Codecademy Pro membership and got to work.

After a couple months, I had learned enough to start building this idea. There was progress and the functionalities were working. But it was still very ugly. It didn’t look serious.

Getting Serious

I purchased a TailwindUI license which gave me access to pre-built UI components in React. I then rebuilt the app with it, and it looked much better. It looked like an app someone would actually use. I showed it to my teacher and he really liked it. I knew I was on the right path.

Getting more serious

After it was working, I added all the components of a professional app to it. Authentication with Google OAuth, Payments with Stripe webhooks, Automated emails with Resend. It took some time but it was now a complete, professional app.

Adding AI

ChatGPT was just starting to go viral and I thought it would be great if I added AI functionality to the app to make the process even easier and faster for teachers. That took some time to build, but it was really cool and it worked. The app now helped teachers write report cards with AI. So I bought the ReportCards.ai domain and deployed it.

Getting Users

To this day, I haven’t done any marketing around ReportCards.ai. I suppose Google started showing it in searches, people signed up, and then they told others about it. Now, ReportCards.ai has almost 10,000 users.

Making Money

Some of those users got enough value from the app that they decided to pay 10 euros a month for it. It is still one of my proudest accomplishments. I built something from scratch by myself and people who I don’t know use it enough to pay for it.

The Future

ReportCards.ai started as and still is a hobby project. It’s good for individual use but not anything more than that. I haven’t had much time to dedicate to it, but I hope I have the time to rebuild it from scratch into a much more comprehensive platform.