Ask HN: Who the Hell Do We Need to Hire?
My startup just had an angel round and we basically want to spend it on a critical hire. I’m torn on what it is. We’ve built a unique, gamified intelligent tutoring system, essentially a video game for learning the MCAT. Our platform is an intelligent tutoring system which diagnoses student weaknesses, assigns them content and videos in fun games, and then uses AI to tutor them on topics they struggle with. It’s been a pretty scrappy few months: I was about to go to medical school but pivoted to coding and design (with cursor, it's like giving a monkey a machine gun); my cofounder is full stack and does backend and set up early analytics; and we’ve have two-three interns to help us with other stuff.
But here’s what we need a hire for:
The most fascinating part about our service is that it's built like a sensor network: from the beginning to the end, every interaction with our website is tracked and used to update the model's understanding of student knowledge. Every interaction on our platform is a data point – highlights, answer changes, even the coins they earn. This gives us unprecedented insight into how top performers master complex material. We're capturing the real-time cognitive processes of the highest achievers, not just their scores. We are leveraging insights from behavioral economics to optimize learning through a proprietary coin system – what students prioritize, and how they respond to incentives. For example, we learned that higher-performing students on MCAT CARs reading passages actually highlight less rather than more, turning theory of excellent test-taking into data-driven insights.
However, we need an elite hire NOW. We got a lot of traction early on but the market for MCAT prep peaks from March-September as 86% of people take the MCAT then. We’re in a discord with a few hundred users basically iterating and building as fast as possible but if the data systems above are set up VERY well we can learn a ton from this market peak and gain a critical lead in ITS architecture by EOY.
I’ve settled on “Software Engineer, Data & Learning Systems” but I feel like that’s incorrect. Our weaknesses are a lack of experience, our code is kinda meh, we're shipping so fast things break constantly, and we’ve basically been running on scraps for months (and will continue to do so). Other devs will go wide. We need someone to go DEEP here, as this is the most valuable part of our website: learning how top students learn.
Who are we searching for?
WEBSITE: mymcat.ai THEORY: mymcat.ai/blog/weakness-finding-algorithm