In May 2023, my best friend, Alonso, and I released a mobile application called "Dudda" on the App Store. During our launch week, we peaked at number 60 on the App Store, surpassing major players in the EdTech sector like Khan Academy. We almost surpassed Udemy as well.

Dudda was my first serious business venture. Our mission was to simplify the process of booking private tutoring lessons. The idea was conceived after my experience teaching math as a private tutor for a local agency during my freshman and sophomore years of college.

I worked independently during high school and acquired most of my students through parent referrals. After graduation, I decided to work for an agency to increase my student base more quickly. A friend of mine, who was already affiliated with the agency, recommended me. I worked there for almost a year. During that time, I identified three main problems in their operations:

These three problems inspired me to build Dudda with Alonso. If you want to read more about how we built it, visit here. It took us almost a year and a half to launch the app. During that period, we went into stealth mode. Looking back, that was a bad decision, but it demonstrated firsthand how crucial it is to engage with users from the start and to define a marketing and sales strategy, especially when targeting consumers.

I handled the technical aspects while Alonso managed the design and operations. Mentioning our roles like CEO, CTO, or COO is irrelevant because when a company is small (and we were), you do everything. So, even though Alonso focused on design, I sometimes intervened in the Figma template, and although I handled the coding, Alonso occasionally proposed technical changes for the mobile app. The problem was that no one was focused on sales, and a business must make money; otherwise, it's just a hobby.

After Dudda launched in mid-2023, we started questioning for the first time how we were going to acquire users. Obviously, we had discussed it a few times before, but we were overly optimistic, naive, and delusional. We were so focused on building the product that we believed if the product met our standards, users would naturally follow. Experience taught us a harsh lesson: they don't come naturally. Coding isn't enough, no matter how challenging it might be; reaching product-market fit is ten or a hundred times harder. So, we began testing some growth strategies for the very first time. That is what this essay is about.

Facebook Groups was our most effective channel of acquisition in regards to tutors. Almost a thousand tutors signed up thanks to our promotional posts. We would search for any relevant group that could be somehow related to our niche and make a post encouraging them to try; we had a strong offer: teach from home and get paid $10 per hour. It was a very attractive proposal, and I believe that’s what made it work and stand out. Although this worked very well for tutors, it didn’t move the needle when it came to acquiring students. We had to test other strategies for that. Below is an example of one of the first posts we made a month prior to our launch.

Our first class was booked thanks to this. A student's mom messaged a friend who worked as a private tutor, asking if he could help her daughter prepare for an upcoming test. My friend replied that he was busy with his new internship, so he referred her to us. She messaged us on Instagram, and we booked a lesson for her daughter with one of our tutors. During the months Dudda was active, this was the most effective strategy to get students. In the education niche, trust is indispensable. Most parents will go beyond themselves just so their kids can get the best help possible. The downside is that building that trust takes a lot of time and hence requires patience.

When it came to our social media handles, we focused on Reels. The two platforms where we were most active were Instagram and TikTok. Before launching, Alonso designed some covers for our pre-launch promo. Since most of our friends are around our age, in their early twenties, they had many followers on these platforms. We asked them to repost the cover on their stories, and thanks to that, almost two hundred professors signed up on Dudda.

Once some tutors had enrolled, we asked one of our friends, who is very eloquent, to help us record a video where she explained how Dudda worked. We boosted the post with paid ads. Also, we asked tutors to record themselves introducing their credentials so we could promote them. Most of our tutors were very accomplished students. We thought that if they stated their name, major, and university in a short video, people would recognize their talent. Both types of videos helped us gain many followers.

Even though we posted multiple videos on TikTok and Instagram, it never significantly moved the needle in terms of getting more classes booked. Looking back, I believe we actually didn’t post a significant number of videos, but at the time, it felt like we did, so we became complacent. Additionally, we followed no marketing strategy; we simply posted because we thought it was the best way to reach our customers. However, we later considered that maybe our customers (parents) were not active on these platforms. We will never know, but if you want to watch all our Instagram Reels, here is our account.

Before Dudda, I completely rejected the idea of building an online persona. I felt it wasn't useful for my goals and wouldn't help Dudda at all. However, after talking with an advisor, I opened up to him, admitting that I was a bit insecure about doing it because others could copy us. He said to me:

"In Silicon Valley, where the big players are, Jeff Bezos is not building Amazon from the shadows. Steve Jobs is not launching the Mac without talking to anyone about it. Mark Zuckerberg is not coding Facebook, scared that some other genius programmer from Harvard could copy them. They promote their idea from the start. They embrace exposing it because they know that’s how a big business is built."

That conversation shifted my paradigm completely. I realized he was right. If I wanted to build something big, I would need to expose myself and be vulnerable. It’s impossible to think that people won’t copy us. They most likely will, but only our execution will differentiate us, not the idea. After that conversation, I decided to start posting on LinkedIn. In less than a year, I've gone from having less than three hundred followers to more than a thousand by the time I'm writing this, and I don’t have plans to stop.

I encouraged Alonso to do the same, so we began posting about Dudda. We decided to build in public, sharing everything from the beginning, including our logo, our story, and our weekly activities. After Dudda failed, I felt embarrassed and ashamed, so I deleted all my posts. However, a few months later, I decided to share the stories I had experienced, regardless of the size of my accomplishments. This newsletter is a step towards that goal. One step at a time, I’m amassing a small number of followers.

make my LinkedIn posts more attention-grabbing, I decided to accompany them with videos. Essentially, the post was a written update of what we were building, and the video featured me discussing our accomplishments during the week. Whenever I didn't have an update to share, I would tell stories about our journey with Dudda.

At the time of writing this, the channel has 50 subscribers (mostly my friends), and the video with the most views has around 200 views. It never significantly impacted our ability to attract more tutors or students, but it certainly helped grab people's attention, lose my fear of talking in front of a camera, and start gaining traction in building an audience.

If you want to watch the videos on my channel, click here.

The only traditional form of marketing we tested was handing out flyers at universities and schools. We would print flyers and T-shirts with Dudda’s logo and go to Alonso’s university, my university, and any other universities we could to hand them out to students so they could enroll in Dudda. We never recorded the medium through which professors found out about Dudda, but we could see a small increase in tutors when we visited a particular university. However, it never amounted to something significant.

To attract students, we would wear our Dudda-logo T-shirts and go to houses near our neighborhood, schools, and even malls to hand out flyers to anyone we could. Even though tutors did sign up after we handed out flyers, students never signed up, and we never saw an increase in student registrations when we tested this marketing strategy, no matter how many miles we walked or how many flyers we handed out. People simply didn’t sign up or book a class through this form of marketing.

The three reasons behind Dudda’s eventual downfall were:

We experienced a paradigm shift in our approach to marketing. Initially, we thought we didn't need it at all. Then, we realized we did need it. Finally, after acknowledging our desperate need, we realized we knew nothing about it. When you have no clue how to solve a problem you're facing, it can overwhelm you if you don’t have the right mindset. I believe that's what happened to us.

Despite this, we tested all the marketing strategies I've mentioned before. Some worked to a small extent, while others did not. However, we never managed to achieve exponential growth. Currently, I’m educating myself about marketing and sales to prepare for my next project, and I'm testing things slowly. I know this will be a lengthy process, but once I master both areas, I’m sure traction will naturally follow.

Building Dudda took almost a year and a half. We went from knowing nothing about coding to publishing two mobile apps on the App Store and Play Store. Without a doubt, the learning curve was very steep and required a lot of patience from us to master everything that was required.

Unfortunately, we didn’t apply the same mindset when it came time to promote our product. We believed Dudda was so good because we had spent a lot of time building it and convincing ourselves that it was amazing. We couldn't understand how people were not seeing the value in it and rushing to book their first classes.

We had everything: good tutors, a smooth app, and all the willingness to help as many people as possible, but we lacked one thing: the patience to market it effectively. Just as it took almost two years to build the app, it could have taken us two years or even more to achieve a significant number of concurrent classes. We were not willing to wait that long; we felt entitled to immediate success, and that was a big mistake.

Every adult has responsibilities they must handle. We started Dudda when we were twenty years old, but by the time we were trying to get customers, we were already twenty-two. We had to choose between getting a job and leaving Dudda, or trying to keep going. Unfortunately, we chose the former.

Alonso found a job and continued studying in Peru, while I decided to transfer to the US to complete my studies. I asked my parents to help pay for school, and I promised to handle my living expenses after the first semester. By the time I’m writing this, I’ve managed to secure a job as a remote software developer, fulfilling my promise. If you want to learn more about how I transferred from Peru to the US, click here.

Our decision was based on what was happening in our lives at that time. After trying different ways to grow our business for a few months, we quit. We couldn’t keep relying on our parents for money; we needed to earn our own. Although Dudda didn’t make much money, it had many users who used it regularly, but we didn’t deliver the value they hoped for.

Looking back, I wish I had understood the importance of considering all variables in your life when making a commitment. I once read that building a startup requires that all parts of the puzzle are synchronized, and I couldn’t agree more. You must have a good product, a solid marketing strategy, and effective customer support. These things cannot be overlooked. If you take only one thing from this essay, know that users won’t come just because you build it.

I would also advise myself to be patient with the process. Things won’t happen overnight. You must stick to the grind. I wish I had realized sooner that just as coding took me a lot of time, I also needed to spend significant time learning about marketing, team building, and sales—skills that are also crucial for success. But I simply didn’t. Anyway, everything happens for a reason.