Birthday and new version of instudies

About a year ago, our team announced the launch of a new educational project, designed to become an indispensable assistant for each student. Since then, instudies has changed a lot and we can’t look at the first version of the service without a smile :) However, even this raw product came to many people who formed the first user nucleolus. Today we want to talk about what we went through in the development of the project over the previous year and what it is like to do an educational startup.

Briefly about the facts

• September 2011 - version 1.0 service launched;
• November 2011 - we presented a project in Silicon Valley ;
• January 2012 - the project attracts angel business investments ;
• March 2012 - version 2.0 of the service was launched (design was changed, full refactoring was performed);
• June 2012 - September 2012 - development of a completely new version 3.0
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Summer period

Spring was coming to an end, and with it the school year. This meant that we had time to take on the improvement of service by all means.

The main problem of the service at that time was the existing concept: after registration, the user had to either create or join a closed study group whose name needed to be known. I think that it was at this moment that we lost most of the users and attention to our service. In addition, an unregistered user in no way could look “inside” the service, that is, see what awaits him after registration. Also, we were not satisfied with the fact that the user does not see anything further than his group.

Ultimately, it was decided to expand the visible boundaries within the service itself, putting the user, and not the group, at the center of everything. Simply put - we started to think about how to socialize the service. Ahead of us were three summer working months, and we planned to release a new instudies 3.0 on September 3, just with the start of the school year. To do this, we even rented an office space, from which we are now writing data lines.



June. We spent the whole of June discussing the future version of the product, or rather, what new features it should include. The difficulty was that all members of the team + investor should have come together in a single opinion. Sometimes there was a feeling that the days were flying in vain, despite the fact that it was impossible to speed up this process, and it was pointless to sit down to develop an uncertain concept. By the end of the month we had a huge pile of ideas, some tasks began to be distributed, but we were not able to cope with such volumes of information. To our happiness, it was at this time that a project management specialist appeared in the team. In just a few days, with its help, we decided on the methods of task distribution, cleaned up all the rubble and prescribed the necessary stages of work.



July. Finally managed to start developing a new version. First of all, as before, the design was drawn, which we decided not to change and leave the spirit of the second version of the service. However, fate had its own plans for this, and on one of the sleepless nights, our web designer completely shoveled the existing design. In the end, we got a qualitatively new result, while losing the previous two weeks of time. By this time, our main and only at that time programmer, waved his hand to us and went to conquer Elbrus. The rest of the month we designed and designed layouts so that by the arrival of the developer we have a huge pile of work for him :)

August. Work began to boil in all respects. There was only a month left before the launch, while not all layouts were drawn, not everything was put together and practically nothing was programmed. It was August that showed us what the team is capable of doing, squeezed in such a short time. The code was written in the waiting rooms of airports, on the way to Odessa in the train (we went to a business meeting), waiting for a queue to take a shower in the hostel where they lived. Nobody needed to be motivated, and all that was missing was a couple of extra hours in a day.


Having gone on business to Odessa, our friends joined us. Unfortunately, we spent only a few hours at sea.

September 3 We did not start :)

September 17th Being late for 2 weeks, adding all the necessary functionality and fixing 194 caught bugs, we finally started up!

New instudies 3.0

What has changed in the project itself?

1. Naturally, a new interface design, the main page and a tour of the site.
2. It has become possible to create study groups or communities of interest , while making them open or closed.
3. The user was at the center of the service. Now you can add each other as friends, subscribe to certain users, subscribe and join the right groups. At the same time, all information will be concentrated in the User activity feed .
4. Public blogs are open, where anyone can optionally write a post and share their unique experience or knowledge with others.
5. When creating a group, you can select only the necessary Tools (for example, only homework and notes, excluding everything else). However, if necessary, the settings of the group, of course, change.
6. The “E-mail Group” tool appeared (each group receives an address of the type group@instudies.com , to which teachers can send assignments or materials). All letters are displayed directly in the service interface, and participants can discuss them in the comments if they wish.

Thus, our service is now fully able to use not only schoolchildren and students, but also teachers with tutors. That is, the service can be configured in such a way that it fits almost any educational needs.

At the moment, the work does not stop for a second. We are working hard to make the tools for students impeccable. That is why we will be happy to hear any ideas for improving the service, as well as suggestions for possible cooperation.

PS And we interview those who study abroad and publish them in the appropriate category .
PPS Secret link that shows how the main page of the version instudies 1.0 looked :)