Teaching as a business, without the WhatsApp groups.
Lurnnet is a platform for independent teachers and tutoring centres in Egypt and the GCC. I founded it and I'm its only engineer. Here is the problem it solves, the product, and the calls that shaped it.
- Role
- Founder & sole engineer
- Since
- 2024
- Markets
- Egypt & the GCC
- Status
- Pre-launch · founding places open
- Website
- lurnnet.com
01The problem
The week goes to everything around the teaching.
Private tutoring in the region runs on WhatsApp groups, paper registers and spreadsheets. The teacher is the business: they schedule, mark, chase payments and report to parents. The more students they take on, the less time is left for the part that actually matters.
02The product
One place to run the class
Classes, sessions, attendance, materials, video lessons and a grading queue, with assistants sharing the load under the teacher's control.
Practice with feedback
Quizzes, assignments, a gradebook and progress for each class, with AI explanations when they're stuck.
Progress without the chasing
Clear reports on how their child is doing, so the teacher stops answering the same message twenty times a week.
AI drafts, the teacher decides · nothing AI-marked reaches a student until the teacher releases it
03The decisions that shaped it
The date moved, the standard didn't
Lurnnet handles minors' data under Egypt's data protection law and its Gulf equivalents. The decision was not to submit to the app stores until the legal and consent work was done, even though that meant giving up the original launch date.
Guardian consent for every under-18
The age of consent differs across the markets. Rather than different rules for each country, every student under 18 needs a guardian's consent everywhere, with checks that stop a student from approving themselves.
The teacher pays, families don't
Teachers and centres are the customers. Students and parents never see a checkout, so nothing stands between a teacher inviting a class and the class showing up.
Launch when teachers actually switch
Teachers don't change platforms mid-term, so the launch is timed to the start of a term, with founding places for the teachers who join early.
One of these, written up in full: the guardian-consent decision record →
04Run like a company, built by one
commits, every one from a team of one.
automated test files, run on every change.
runbooks covering releases, incidents and recovery.
fixes from pre-launch self-audits, each one logged with a date.
Alongside the numbers there's a published vulnerability-disclosure policy, written incident playbooks (one of them for child safeguarding), accessibility and right-to-left audits on web and mobile, and a record of every significant decision and why it was made.
05Where it is now
Built, tested, audited, and not rushed.
Lurnnet is pre-launch, with founding places open for teachers. Before it opens up there's still an independent security test and a lawyer's review of the consent and privacy documents. Those aren't optional, so they're done before launch rather than after it.