Learning Hub is the product I have worked on the longest and probably the one I learned most from. I came in at a time when the company was in shambles. They had a ton of tech debt, only one paying customer, their infrastructure couldn’t scale and their revenue per user was in the negative.

Here is the kicker. Their product didn’t even have SSL. Crazy, right? I know. And if you know me, you know I love a challenge.

I came in to replace the previous engineering team. They were an outsourced team but they weren’t very good. I immediately took over everything.

Here is what I did to turn the product around:

1. I immediately switched them from a standard shared hosting server to EC2 on AWS. We had the same cost but better hardware.
2. I upgraded their tech stack and other software to the latest version. I modernized the UI a bit. Of course, I installed a damn SSL certificate!
3. They were using an off-the-shelf solution to stream video content to users. This was costing the company too much. I built a custom video encoding and streaming pipeline using Linux, FFmpeg, Node.js and AWS SQS. This made the company actually have a positive revenue per user.
4. Another major issue was that their clients were adamant they didn’t want any content pirated. I configured and enabled DRM-enabled video streaming to ensure no content gets pirated.

After all of this, (and so, so much more work) the company actually turned profitable and they had 4x growth in a single year.

Screenshots of the product: