In early 2020, I launched Get Psyched, a bootstrapped business with zero funding or product experience. Just a girl and her laptop during COVID lockdown…

What started as a simple tutoring service with a small team, soon gained huge traction. But rapid success brought its own growing pains: Manual operations were becoming unsustainable with 90 regular customers.

I faced a clear choice: limit growth or transform the business through automated systems. With no technical background, I embarked on an ambitious project to build a fully automated self-service tutoring marketplace that could scale without daily operational maintenance.

Fast forward to 2025 and Get Psyched is still turning revenue with minimal maintenance, despite me working full time. The results speak to the power of designing self-service products that solve the right problems.

This case study reflects over 5 years of product development:

• Dual marketplace for students and tutors (2021)
• AI powered tutoring app (2025)

DESIGN BY NECESSITY

Imagine this. You’re working full time and working long hours before and after your day job to manage daily operations for a fast-growing B2C tutoring service, handling manual processes in Monday.com, Gmail and a Facebook page. And the business was hitting its manual limits:

• Customer acquisition was growing but unsustainable
• Revenue was constrained by operational capacity
• Operations were entirely manual
• Scaling meant increasing workload proportionally

The Challenge

SCALE WITHOUT BREAKING

Our goal was clear but daunting: transform a manually-operated tutoring services into a self-service marketplace that could scale efficiently. This meant replacing human touch-points with automated systems while maintaining the personal touch that made Get Psyched successful in the first place.

Key objectives were to: