When you start building a product, you naturally think about the competition as another company. You look at who else is solving the problem, what they offer, how much they charge, what they do well, and where you think your product can be better. That is still useful, but after spending the last several months building and operating PassPaperOnes, I have started to think that some of the hardest competition has very little to do with another company.
Sometimes your biggest competitor is not another product. It is doing nothing.
People liking the product is not enough
This has probably been one of the more uncomfortable parts of building a real product. You can create something that works well, people can tell you they like it, teachers can immediately see how it can help them, and students can enjoy it when they are actually using it. None of that guarantees that they will come back tomorrow, next week, or even remember that the product exists when they have free time.
There is a big difference between someone liking a product and that product becoming part of how they behave. I understood that in theory before, but running PassPaperOnes has made it much more obvious. A good product still has to fight for a place in someone's routine, and the routine is usually much stronger than whatever you just launched.
The mythical daily student
I think founders can easily imagine a user who does not really exist at scale. In education, that user is the student who wakes up, opens an exam-preparation platform and decides to spend an hour doing practice questions simply because studying sounds like a good use of free time.
There are students like that, but they are not the average CSEC student. A student can genuinely care about passing exams and still choose TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, a game, a conversation with friends, or just lying down and doing absolutely nothing. That does not mean they are unserious about school. It means they are normal teenagers and you are competing for their attention against things that are easier, more entertaining and require almost no effort.
You are competing with every easier thing the user could do instead.
That has changed how I think about engagement. The question is not only whether PassPaperOnes is useful or whether students like it when they use it. The more important question is what causes a student to actually open it on a normal Tuesday when nobody is standing over them telling them to study.
Schools change the behaviour equation
One thing that has become clearer is that student behaviour changes when a teacher is involved. Students may not independently decide that they are going to complete practice questions every week, but they are much more likely to use a platform when it becomes part of a class, an assignment, revision before a test, or simply something the teacher regularly brings into the lesson.
That matters because it changes what the product has to do. It may not be enough to build a large bank of good questions and make them available. The product also has to create reasons to return and make it easy for the people around the student to reinforce that usage. That could mean teacher-directed practice, weekly challenges, reminders, visible progress, deadlines or classroom routines.
The broader lesson is that the product has to fit into behaviour that already exists or help create a new behaviour strong enough to compete with everything else demanding attention. In education, schools and teachers already create structure, so fighting that structure makes less sense than using it.
Great software can still require distribution pressure
There is also a very attractive idea in software that if you build something great, people will naturally spread it and keep coming back. Sometimes that happens, but I think founders can overestimate how automatic it is. Even good software can require repeated exposure, reminders, institutional support and a lot of distribution before it becomes part of normal behaviour.
This has shifted how I think about the actual job of building a product. I used to think getting the product right was most of the battle. I now think there are at least three separate problems: building something valuable, getting people to try it, and getting them to incorporate it into their routine. Solving the first one does not automatically solve the other two.
Engagement is partly a product problem
It would be easy to look at low usage and say students should study more, teachers should use the tools available to them, or people should simply make better choices. Maybe all of that is true, but it is not especially useful when you are the person building the product. Users are going to behave like users, and the product has to deal with the behaviour that actually exists rather than the behaviour you wish existed.
How do I design the product around the behaviour that actually exists instead of the behaviour I wish existed?
For PassPaperOnes, that could mean shorter sessions, better reminders, stronger teacher involvement or simply accepting that exam preparation is seasonal. A student in September does not feel the same urgency as a student in March, no matter how much I would like usage to look the same throughout the year. The better product decision may be to design around that cycle rather than pretending it does not exist.
This is the point where product building becomes much more interesting than adding another feature. You start asking why people behave the way they do, where the friction actually is, and what needs to happen around the product for the product itself to become useful.
Usage is the harder truth
Compliments, sign-ups and successful demos all matter, especially when you are early, but usage is harder to argue with. It forces you to confront whether the product has become useful enough, timely enough and integrated enough to earn a place in someone's routine. Someone telling you they love the idea is not the same thing as seeing them return and use it.
At the same time, I do not think every product needs to be forced into a daily-active-user framework. Exam preparation is seasonal, school behaviour is structured, and student motivation changes throughout the year. The goal is not necessarily to make a CSEC student use PassPaperOnes every day for twelve months. The goal is to make sure they use it often enough, and at the right times, for it to genuinely improve their preparation.
The lesson I am taking forward
Building software people love is still important, but I no longer think that is the final test. A product has to earn behaviour. It has to find a place among routines, distractions, obligations and habits that were there long before you arrived.
For PassPaperOnes, that means the real competition is not simply another exam-preparation platform. It is TikTok and Instagram. It is homework from another class. It is a student deciding they will start studying properly next week. It is the lack of urgency in September when CSEC still feels far away. Sometimes it is simply doing nothing.
That has made me rethink what the founder's job actually is. It is not only to build something worth using. It is to understand what has to happen around that product for people to actually use it, return to it and eventually make it part of how they solve the problem.
A good product still has to earn a place in people's behaviour.
Increasingly, that is the problem I am interested in solving.