An edtech platform built for creatives in Tunisia (dancers, artists, freelancers) who didn't yet know that teaching was a viable income stream.
| My role | Solo PM + builder |
| Stage | 0 to 1 |
| Budget | Zero |
| Stack | WordPress + LMS |
| Market | Tunisia / MENA |
The Problem
Existing edtech platforms in Tunisia were built around coding bootcamps and finance courses. They weren't designed for artists, dancers, or visual creatives, so creatives never showed up on them, neither as teachers nor as students. The market wasn't just underserved. It was unaware it existed.
This meant the product challenge was double-sided: build a platform that felt native to creative work, and simultaneously convince a new type of creator that monetizing their skills through teaching was actually possible.
What I Owned
Everything. This was 0-to-1 founder mode. No team, no blueprint, no budget. What that actually looked like:
User discovery Called dancers directly. Listened to how they thought about their skills, their students, their content, before writing a single line of code.
Product decisions Designed the platform structure around what creatives actually needed, not what generic LMS templates assumed they needed.
Platform build Built the full site on WordPress with LMS and payment infrastructure. My first project of this complexity.
Content production Coordinated filming sessions, edited course videos and promotional content end-to-end.
Go-to-market Planned and ran the Meta ad campaign to drive first traffic and validate purchase intent.
The Key Tradeoff
Online payments hit a regulatory wall. Incorporating a company was required. Rather than stall the project on a legal blocker, I made a conscious call: deprioritize payment automation, ship the core experience, and handle transactions manually. Not elegant, but it let us validate the market without waiting months for paperwork. The frontend met real visual standards. The backend was rough. An intentional tradeoff.
Outcomes
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Courses shipped at launch | 2 |
| First paying customers | 3 |
| Financing unlocked from incubator | 30,000 TND |
| Startup Tunisia prelabel | Earned |
The numbers look small on their own. But those 3 sales and 2 courses were enough proof-of-concept to unlock 30,000 TND in incubator financing and a government startup prelabel. The real output wasn't the courses. It was proof that creatives would pay to learn from other creatives in Tunisia.
What killed it, and what I learned
The incubator's financing collapsed due to internal budget issues. The prelabel expired after 6 months because without incorporation funds, we couldn't upgrade to the full label. The project stopped.
Never build on a single point of failure Our entire runway depended on one external funding source. When it fell, there was no plan B. The idea was validated. The market was real. The dependency structure is what killed it.
Build cashflow independently of the product Survival and building are two separate problems. You need to solve both simultaneously, not sequentially.
Launch faster, iterate faster Time spent perfecting before shipping is runway burned. The market gave us real signal quickly. More cycles would have meant more options.