For a while, EBO had a strange problem.
I knew what I wanted it to become.
I had written about it. I had redesigned the idea multiple times. I had thought through the student side, the coaching side, accountability, privacy, squads, study sessions, progress, rewards and probably far too many edge cases.
But if I showed EBO to someone else, they still had to use their imagination.
That bothered me.
A product can make perfect sense inside your head and still sound incredibly vague when you try explaining it.
“It's a productivity system for students.”
Okay.
So is Forest.
So is YPT.
So are dozens of habit trackers, timers and study apps.
Adding another paragraph doesn't necessarily fix that.
At some point I realised I needed to stop describing EBO and actually make people see it.
So that's what I worked on.
The gap between an idea and a product
My earlier work on EBO was mostly about figuring out what the product should actually be.
That meant asking uncomfortable questions.
Why would students use this instead of an existing tracker?
Why would a coaching institute care?
How much information should teachers be able to see?
How do you create accountability without turning the product into surveillance?
What happens when someone's friends stop using it?
Should studying feel competitive?
What should happen after a focus session?
What does the student open first every day?
Those questions mattered more than making pretty screens.
But eventually the opposite problem appeared.
I had a lot of product thinking and almost no good way of communicating it visually.
There were documents.
There were feature lists.
There were diagrams in my head.
There were old versions of EBO that no longer represented what I wanted to build.
None of those were the product I was imagining anymore.
So I started building a proper showcase.
I didn't want a landing page full of promises
This part was important to me.
It would have been very easy to make the website look like EBO was already a finished SaaS product with thousands of users, perfectly functioning dashboards and every feature ready to go.
That would also be dishonest.
EBO is still being built.
Some parts exist.
Some are being redesigned.
Some are planned.
Some will probably change again once real students and institutes start using them.
So instead of disguising that, the showcase labels the experience for what it is:
Planned experience · interactive concept.
I actually like that more.
The purpose isn't to convince someone that I've magically finished everything.
The purpose is to show what I'm building clearly enough that they can react to something concrete.
Because feedback on an abstract idea sounds like:
“Yeah, seems useful.”
Feedback on an actual interface sounds like:
“I wouldn't click that.”
Much more useful.
The product finally has a shape
The new experience revolves around a few areas that now feel like parts of the same system rather than random features.
There's Today — the place that should answer the simplest question possible:
What should I do now?
There's Plan, because focus without knowing what you're supposed to focus on isn't particularly useful.
There's Focus, where the actual work happens.
There's Squad, because one of the main ideas behind EBO has always been that consistency becomes easier when you're not doing everything alone.
And there's Progress, because I don't want studying to disappear into a meaningless number like:
4h 37m
Time matters.
But it isn't the whole story.
Eventually I want EBO to help answer better questions.
What did you work on?
Were you solving questions or just reading?
How accurate were you?
What kinds of mistakes did you make?
Are you becoming more consistent?
Are you actually getting closer to your exam goals?
That's much more interesting than a timer.
Study Together became much clearer
One feature that became much easier to understand visually was Study Together.
The idea isn't to build another public social network for students.
No follower counts.
No random people messaging you.
No giant public feed begging for attention inside a productivity app.
Instead, the current direction is much smaller and more intentional.
You can create a private room.
Share the code.
Study with people you actually want there.
The same thinking applies to squads.
I like the social side of productivity when it creates accountability.
I don't like it when it creates another place to perform.
Those are very different things.
A student opening EBO should ideally feel:
“My people are studying. I should probably start too.”
Not:
“I need to maintain another online identity.”
Gamification, but not just decoration
This is another area I wanted the showcase to communicate properly.
EBO has XP.
It has coins.
It has streaks.
It can have achievements, squad goals and larger events.
Taken individually, none of those ideas are revolutionary.
The interesting part is what they're attached to.
I've been thinking about XP as permanent personal progression.
Coins can be more flexible — something earned through activity and potentially connected to rewards, squad systems or other mechanics later.
Shared goals make progress collective instead of purely individual.
The point isn't to throw confetti every time someone studies for twenty minutes.
The point is to make consistency feel visible.
Studying has a weird feedback problem.
You can work seriously for three hours and still end the day feeling like you accomplished nothing because the actual reward — the exam result — might be months away.
Games are extremely good at solving that problem.
They constantly show progression.
Studying usually doesn't.
I think there is something worth exploring there.
The coaching side still changes the equation
EBO isn't only becoming a student app.
That decision makes almost every feature harder.
If it were purely personal, I could optimise everything around what feels motivating to one student.
But if coaching institutes eventually use it too, the system has to work for two very different people.
The student wants:
privacy, motivation, simplicity and control.
The institute wants:
visibility, consistency and useful information.
Those interests overlap, but they aren't identical.
And that's where I think the product gets interesting.
I don't want a teacher staring at a live surveillance dashboard showing every second of a student's day.
I also don't think an institute will pay for software that tells them absolutely nothing useful.
So the challenge is finding the middle.
Useful reporting without creepy monitoring.
Accountability without constant observation.
Enough information for a teacher to notice problems without turning studying into employee tracking.
I don't have every answer yet.
That's partly why I'm building the product this way.
Building the showcase changed my own thinking
This was probably the most useful part.
Designing something forces decisions that writing documents doesn't.
A document can say:
“Students will have progress tracking.”
A screen immediately asks:
What progress?
Compared to what?
Over what time period?
Shown where?
What deserves the most visual weight?
What happens when there is no data?
What happens on day one?
Suddenly a vague feature becomes twenty smaller decisions.
The same happened with squads.
And rooms.
And rewards.
And the dashboard.
And basically everything else.
There were things I thought were clear until I actually had to place them on a screen.
They weren't.
That's why I no longer think of this showcase as just marketing.
It's part of designing EBO itself.
It finally feels real
EBO has existed in some form for a long time now.
First as something I wanted for myself.
Then as a rough project.
Then as an idea that might actually solve a larger problem.
Then as research documents, surveys, product decisions and far too many notes.
This is the first time the newer version has started to feel visually coherent.
Not finished.
Not validated.
Not something I'm going to pretend is ready for thousands of students tomorrow.
But real enough to point at.
Real enough to test.
Real enough for someone to disagree with.
And I think that's an important transition.
Because the next stage of EBO isn't me sitting alone and inventing another fifty features.
It's putting increasingly real versions of the product in front of students, teachers and coaching institutes and seeing which parts survive contact with reality.
Some ideas probably won't.
Some will change completely.
There will almost certainly be things I'm currently convinced about that turn out to be stupid.
That's fine.
I'd rather discover that from something people can actually interact with than from another beautifully written document explaining why my idea should work.
For the first time, when somebody asks me:
“Okay, but what exactly is EBO?”
I don't have to answer with a five-minute explanation.
I can show them.