How Brainie turned manual course delivery into a self-serve exam prep platform

The situation

Brainie is a Swiss company that prepares people for the CFA exams. Before the platform, the course was delivered by hand. Study material went out as files. Practice questions were sent and marked manually. Students asked questions by email and the tutor answered one at a time. Payment and access were tracked by a person.

Every new student added the same amount of work. The tutor spent hours a week on delivery instead of teaching, and adding a second course meant doubling the admin. The business could not grow past what one team could handle by hand.

What we decided to build

One product that does the delivery. A student signs up, pays, and works through the course on their own. The tutor’s time goes to the questions only a tutor can answer. The team adds courses and questions through an admin panel, and the platform handles the rest for every student at once.

How it works

Dashboard. The student sees the days left until their exam, their overall score, course progress and the chapters that need more work. The exam date can be rescheduled and the plan adjusts.

Chapters and practice. Each chapter has study material and a timed question session. The student sees their session time, the score per chapter and the best and worst topics, then reviews every answer with the explanation.

Timeline and study tips. A study plan lays out what to cover before the exam, with tips and summary notes as PDFs at each step.

Bookmarks and notes. Questions and pages can be bookmarked and come back in a review list.

Ask the Tutor. A question goes to the tutor through Intercom from inside the course, with the student’s context attached.

Payments and email. Stripe handles subscriptions and access. Sendgrid sends the account, progress and reminder emails.

The admin side is a Laravel Nova panel where the team manages the question bank, publishes new quizzes and sees student activity.

What changed

Delivery no longer depends on a person. A student can start on a Sunday night, pay, study and review their answers without anyone at Brainie touching it. The tutor answers the questions that need a tutor. A new course is a set of questions and material in the admin panel, and the same team runs it.

The platform launched ten months after the first call, built on Laravel and PostgreSQL with a GraphQL API, a React front end and hosting on AWS.