Building Sentuent

Sentuent Home Page

I've spent the past 1 and a half months building out a project, it's called Sentuent. It's designed to be an all-in-one solution to tutoring, a platform where tutors and students have their calendars, messages and billing all sorted out.

Originally, I got the idea to make a platform with an AI agent embedded within it, automating tasks such as scheduling, invoicing and notes/HW summaries. But, I've put that on hold for now, as I figure out the best way to move forward with the development of the platform.

Product

Currently, I have the core features working. There is a calendar to schedule lessons, with detailed event properties. There is a messaging feature to connect with tutors and send DMs there and then. There is an in-built meeting page to host meetings in the browser. There is a billing page for students to pay and tutors to track payments. There is a listings page for students to find and tutors to advertise.

I believe the product is in MVP form now.

Struggles

Alongside my work, there have been many struggles I've had to endure whilst building Sentuent. I'll try to detail them below.

Reflecting on it, I think most of these problems came from my inexperience as a "startup founder". There are processes and checks in place which I may not have done/known about and am just learning about right now.

Billing

Billing has been a struggle with Sentuent. Figuring out the revenue model especially has been quite difficult.

Notoriously, products for students and tutors are difficult to charge high prices to as they are relatively elastic consumers. Naturally, I had to figure out who would benefit the most from the platform first, and concluded it would be tutors. In the end, my idea for revenue was to take a percentage cut of what a tutor makes, ensuring students pay the same amount, whilst tutors "pay" for getting to use Sentuent.

PMF

This leads me on to product market fit. Now in the startup world, PMF is something you look for way before you start, ideally you'd be asking many people for their experiences and desires.

But as I originally started this as a fun idea (that would help me out), PMF was something that I did not naturally consider. Now, I'm slightly more nervous, especially considering the billing side of things, whether or not people would appreciate trying out Sentuent.

My intention is that given the simplicity of the website, tutors can easily bring onboard current students, which increases the tutor network and further increases the student network. But I need to work my ass off to get there.

Zoom

One of the things as one guy just building out a product is the need to rely on existing infrastructure. Now, existing infrastructure is great, especially as those people at Zoom have a great comparative advantage over me in building video streaming technology.

But, the restrictive nature of Zoom's SDKs, along side poorly maintained frameworks and ancient documentation, has really made the experience building the meetings into Sentuent a pain.

It took many goes, trying many features and functions and in the end, building an experience that is close to Zoom, but in my own style (though lacking a whiteboard feature), to arrive at a product which I'm able to use for teaching.

What is an agent

I've tried my best to understand what an agent is vs. what is just an LLM + API call. What I've learnt, is that agents are really just probabilistic machines making the decisions for you in terms of which API to call.

My original vision with Sentuent was to have an agentic AI underlying the platform (hence "sentient"), but now I'm considering the overkill nature of it, especially as rarely are there cases where decisions (not workflows) of API calls have to be made.

The only foreseeable agentic case I see is using an agent to transcribe meetings, summarise notes, upload meeting files and assign HW to a student automatically, although again, most of this would just be a series of API calls to make.

Future

So, that's all my experience with building Sentuent so far. It's been a tough, but enjoyable 1.5 months and I'm excited to see how far I can take this, whether that be just for myself, or for many others around me.

It's my first blog in quite a while, and I'll again be trying to keep this habit somewhat up.

You can try out Sentuent at: sentuent.com

If you have anything to report about Sentuent, email it to info@sentuent.com and I'll look into it.

Take care :)