The education platform that avoided a costly mistake
An online learning company approached us in March 2025 wanting to add live video tutoring to their platform. They'd already spec'd out the technical requirements and were ready to start development.
We suggested building a prototype first. During user testing, we discovered that students didn't want live video – they wanted the ability to leave questions and get video responses later. The asynchronous format fit their schedules better.
The development cost for the asynchronous system was about 40% less than live video streaming. More importantly, it's what students actually wanted. The prototype revealed this in week two, before a single line of backend code was written.