why i dropped out with 2 classes left

it was 5am. i was telling my friends about how i dont see the point of the degree and want to drop out. this was my first semester.

ive probably since then told this to all of my closest friends and family a dozen times. but anyways, where am i going with this… i guess the point is, it didn't make sense for me to dropout without something going for me or a plan that would be better than where i currently am.

this isn't the only way. you can definitely drop out without a plan then figure something out, and that free time allows you to do so. but i guess that's personal preference.

so, i decided, i need to be able to sustain myself to drop out.

that summer, the one after freshman year, i did an internship at a yc company. towards the end of it, i prepared a pitch for me to be full time and earn $75k. i decided against it, not being brave enough to pitch the idea, and thinking that my work that summer was decent but i felt like i could've tried harder.

during my next 2 years, i did a remote gig for scale ai, consulted for 5 startups, built 2 startups, marketed for the largest family office network, and interned at a vc firm in tel aviv.

something was missing.

it wasn't the same to do this and that.

i was doing too many things. so i was kind of doing nothing. nothing too well at least. oh well we learn.

in 2023 i spent a lot of time on late night calls with two friends of mine. we talked a lot on calls in general in the years prior, but more so that year. towards the end of that year we decided to start exploring an idea we had earlier in january, a community for students to prep for the sat.

we've known each other since 6th grade… and im getting a bit off topic. oops. itll tie back in i promise.

so during winter break that year, i called around 100 tutors and asked them about their experience with tutoring for the sat. this is one of those things that our competitors definitely won't do because they dont have the time to. there will be more of these.

i learned the hardest part of their job is motivation. wait, tutoring sessions cot $70/hr on average and that's what they solve for? it makes sense for those who can afford it and want to spend that much, but for others.. surely there's an alternative?

that's where we built a new model of tutoring. one that moves live tutoring over call to tutors you can text 24/7. as we started doing this, i figured that people must've tried this before. so, i reached to a few tutoring firm owners who are experienced and asked if they ever tried a "text-tutoring" model. they said they did but it wasn't scalable or very profitable.

there are two things that change that completely. one is… okay wait back to it.

so basically we found this new model of tutoring and made that into what is now crackd - which is our website that is a platform + human tutors that you text + live group seminars + an ai chatbot that solves questions.

in april of 2024 we incorporated and in summer of 2024 we started building. we wrote hundreds of sat questions. sitting at our local joe and the juice and writing and reviewing sat questions with the help of chatgpt. it was far from easy. actually it was incredibly tedious. we wanted to move faster for the lowest cost possible, so we tried building a team using fiverr. the quality wasn't there.

people (aka me) underestimate the nuance and difficulty of making high quality sat questions. our thought process was, if one question is wrong, then nobody will trust any question (which we saw happen to some other test prep sites on reddit).

we ended up finding a few high quality people through linkedin, but still had to write most of the questions ourselves and go through several reviews of questions and mock exams before they went live, with lots of editing. we soon got the most credentialed sat question writers we could find, but still there were minor errors that needed reviews from us.

this is one of those things that is literally only solved by care. especially since everyone uses ai to help, then goes back and edits them, but misses a few things every time.

the person who cares about the business the most are us. nobody else, at the time, was able to provide the quality we needed. so it became a process, but we got it done.

now, the point. why did i drop out?

this was the fourth thing i had ever done that i fully put my heart into (the first 3 being chess, video games, and a startup in high school which we dissolved when going to college).

everything i have put my heart into has worked out in one way or another.

that's what made me so confident. in august, we launched. we had our first sale 2 days before launch. in november we hit 15k mrr.

that was my last semester on campus, and i had 2 classes left which i decided to do remotely to focus more on crackd.

i signed up for them, but i never did them. obviously there was guilt and pressure. i had enough credits to walk at graduation in may given that i was in progress to finish it. im glad i did walk. that was important. i talked about it a bit more in my intro.

after some conversations, and a lot of back and forth, i was advised to do it in summer. or sometime later. i had said yes to summer, but didn't sign up this time.

i know i am very close to finishing it. i know it sounds silly.

i genuinely believe there is 0 benefit in me finishing it, and i've already received the value from my time there. i genuinely believe my hours are better spent on my startup or hanging out with people i care about.

oh but why didn't you dropout earlier?

with crackd doing well and my full passion into something.

this is the right decision for me. at this moment.

if i have to make this useful for the person reading it, i would say it makes sense to dropout if you find something that sustains your lifestyle and you are driven by.