Quemonster
2026
Eight years later, the design can be rebuilt with AI in days. The harder question is whether the business itself still makes sense — and what COVID changed forever.
01 — Context
A solid idea, a real technical wall.
The original Quemonster was built between 2017 and 2019 — a group tutoring platform designed to split the cost of one-on-one lessons across multiple students. The concept was straightforward, but the execution ran into a fundamental constraint: group video chat in 2018 was genuinely hard.
At the time, reliable video was mostly 1-on-1. Running a stable multi-user session required significant server infrastructure, and the costs and unpredictability of that load were a real barrier. Most companies we approached shared the same concern — group sessions meant server overloads, dropped connections, and buffering mid-lesson. It wasn't a fringe issue. It was the core problem we couldn't confidently solve.
02 — What's Changed
The problem we couldn't solve was solved for free.
In early 2019, the decision was made to stop. The infrastructure costs were too high, reliability wasn't there, and without stable group video, the platform's core promise broke down. Quemonster was shelved.
Then 2020 arrived. COVID-19 forced the entire world online. Businesses, schools, and individuals all needed remote communication overnight — and the market responded at scale. Zoom grew to 300 million daily participants. Google Meet became free. Microsoft Teams shipped to everyone with an Office account.
The group video problem that stopped Quemonster in 2019 was solved for us — for free — by companies with the infrastructure to do it globally. The technical barrier was gone. But so was the differentiation that came from solving it.
03 — The Bigger Question
What if it had launched? What would it look like today?
This is the question this lab project keeps returning to. If Quemonster had shipped in 2019 — even a rough version with all its instability — what would have happened when COVID hit in 2020? A group tutoring platform, already live, already with users, at exactly the moment the entire world was looking for ways to learn and teach remotely. The timing might have been everything.
But there's a harder question underneath that one: does the concept still make sense in 2026? Anyone can host a free group video call. The infrastructure advantage is gone. So what would Quemonster need to be today — not a video infrastructure play, but something built on top of what already exists? AI-powered tutor matching, adaptive session tools, smarter cost-splitting. The design can be rebuilt in days with AI. The product direction is the real challenge.
04 — Prototype
Live redesign — work in progress.
The interactive prototype will be embedded here once the first flow is complete.
05 — Process Notes
How this was built with AI as a collaborator.
This section will document the process behind the redesign — how prompts were structured, which decisions were AI-assisted vs. human-directed, and what the iterative loop between designer and AI actually looked like in practice.
Not a tutorial. More of a design diary — the decisions made, the dead ends hit, and what it actually feels like to revisit a project you once believed in, years later, with completely different tools.