How Fauzaan made a SaaS for lesson planning

Meet Fauzaan Gasim.

Fauzaan is a self-taught developer from the Maldives. He started programming when he was 13 years old. With the help of resources like Codecademy and W3Schools, he started learning how to code.

This story will zoom in on Fauzaan’s learnings from building and promoting Lessonfuse - A tool to help teachers create lesson plans.

The story told by Fauzaan Gasim

Starting out

The first service I provided was related to programming, developing Forex indicators and trading robots.

To build my skills, I provided free services on forums like Forexfactory.com, which helped me connect with many traders and gain experience and tap into an initial audience. I learned a lot from reading other people's code, Coursera, FrontendMasters and reading the docs too.

One of my standout projects was Stalkboard, a trading dashboard for traders using the Market Maker Method. While my dashboard was copied and sold by others, I chose to keep it free on Gumroad.

The beginning of Lessonfuse

In April 2023, I met my current business partner, Javaad.

Javaad had these Excel templates (example below) for lesson planning that he wanted to turn into an application to make lesson planning easier and more effective for teachers in the Maldives.

The Excel template really simplified development for me as normally in all my projects I have to go through a whole planning phase and thinking on how to structure the application, but in this case everything was right infront of me.

Due to this our product - Lessonfuse - with all the testing and everything took just 4 months to reach full release.

While working on Lessofuse I also take on freelance software development projects. Javaad is working as a full time leading teacher at Maavashu School. I do think this is great because due to Javaad being a fulltime user of our app for his day to day lesson planning we dont miss a single point of context and the connection we need to have with our customers who are also teachers like Javaad.

Our vision

We saw a unique opportunity to create something that would streamline the lesson planning process but also adhere to the Maldivian Curriculum Framework. This became Lessonfuse.

It was not our initial plan to use AI generated assistance, because by making it easy to just pick the outcomes and indicators is already quite a lot of help for teachers as the alternative was to copy paste these outcomes and indicators per lesson and there is a lesson per every single class teachers take.

As Javaad was a teacher he understood this pain point exactly. We did add AI assistance later on and currently Lessonfuse can be used to complete the whole lesson plan instead of just the outcomes and indicators.

How it works

Lessonfuse is different from other lesson planning tools because it integrates directly with the curriculum. Teachers can choose outcomes, indicators, and strands from the curriculum, and our system uses LLMs like Claude-Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 to generate tailored lesson plans.

We have a detailed review and rating system and we do it in multiple prompts each of them focused on the specific section of the lesson plan.

Most AI lesson plan generators generate a very basic lesson plan because they are not really approaching it like we approach (by digitizing a curriculum). That is a level of effort most people don't really want to go through in building a product I believe, but it makes quite a difference in quality.

Launching 🚀

We launched the first version of Lessonfuse on August 1st, 2023. Before the official launch, we conducted tests with around 120 users who provided feedback that helped us refine the product.

On launch day, we were thrilled to welcome 172+ paid customers, and our user base has since grown to about 900 teachers from across 187 different public schools in the Maldives.

We only bill yearly for our product. A customer paying for a whole year gets unlimited generations for any combination of grades, subjects. The whole Maldivian curriculum is digitized and present within the platform, so its a straightforward way to generate a lesson plan quickly without requiring to open any other documents for reference (like the curriculum docs).

The curriculum also goes through changes every year or so, so you can become a Lessonfuse contributor and get free lifetime access. You would just need to help with the data entry for the updates in the curriculum.

Marketing Lessonfuse

How did we get close to 200 paying customers on launch could be an interesting question.

It was mainly a principal in Maldives who we showed our product to. He simply shared it on his Facebook page. Not paid and we didn't even ask for it to be shared. Because of this share our waitlist got 300+ users organically.

It is also worth noting that there were a lot of teachers who contributed to digitizing the curriculum for us. Mainly friends of my partner Javaad from his school. And because these teachers were actively involved with the product this created even more word of mouth I believe.

The teachers who helped digitize the Maldivian curriculum were given free access to the platform forever. It's a unique situation and may not apply to most products but this is essentially how we got quite a lot of customers on day 0.

Promoting Lessonfuse has been both challenging and rewarding. While we tried various marketing strategies, we found that word of mouth has been the most effective.

Google Ads didn’t work as well for us but Facebook Ads proved to be more successful.

I think our marketing efforts are really low compared to other products because we had that initial customers to get started with.

We also have several affiliate deals with people who conduct teacher training programs. Teachers who conduct training programs contact us directly.

So in short we do no paid marketing currently, but rely on affiliates and word of mouth.

Completely bootstrapped

Lessonfuse is completely bootstrapped, we have no investors or loans or even high expenses. The initial expenses we had at the time of starting was less than $50 and we covered it all on day 1 as we got those customers.

Lessonfuse is sustainable without any additional revenue for the next 12 years at least and we feel great knowing that it is sustainable. Sustainability is something we focus a lot about when adding new features even today.

Lessonfuse has no employees, we run everything on our own with my partner Javaad handling most of the teaching related bits, ideas and talking to customers while I focus on the technical bits, design and infrastructure.

Our MRR is 1059$ (no monthly plan - only yearly).

What is next for Lessonfuse?

Lessonfuse has been a rewarding journey, and we’re excited about the future.

While our focus remains on the Maldivian market as it is the only curriculum we have direct access to, we’re open to exploring opportunities globally if there’s interest. As far as we know such a solution does not exist even globally.

Our goal is to make lesson planning as seamless and effective as possible for teachers, and we believe that by focusing on quality and continuous improvement, we’ll keep growing and making a positive impact.