A child's first days at school are scary. They are scarier for the parents, who spend the whole day wondering whether everything is all right.

That worry never really goes away. At some point every parent has to cut the umbilical cord and let the child face what comes next.

My team and I set out to shorten the distance between school, teachers, parents and students, so parents could follow the academic routine instead of guessing.

The hard part was never the idea. It was making the product simple enough that busy people would open it every single day.

We studied apps with a similar concept to check the market was real. It was. Our feature set matched what the competition offered, and the fit was there.

Before designing a single screen, I had to know the business model would hold. We were about to put our own money into this, so I validated it with three potential clients first.

With the model in place, we ran brainstorming sessions to decide what went into the MVP and what stayed out. When money is limited you cannot afford to be wrong. There is no recipe for success, but studying the data lets you predict a few factors and improve your odds.

This is my favourite part of the process. Prototyping is where ideas take shape and where you test every possible solution with colleagues and clients before committing to any of them.

We wanted a dynamic platform, so I designed around cards. Each component lives in its own card and can be added or removed straight from the admin.

With the design validated and adjusted, I moved to the high fidelity prototype: colours, shapes, typography and icons in their final form.

We had a deadline, because other projects were paying the bills. Time was against us, so we designed and coded the website at the same time.

The plan was a provisional site we would rebuild later. Everyone liked the result, so we never did. We added information and small improvements along the way, but the base is still the one we shipped that week.

I ran the research to understand who we were competing with, who we were serving and how to reach them.

Brazil had 50 million students in basic education, and only 20 percent of them were in São Paulo. The market was big enough to sustain a B2B product and spread out enough that no single player owned it. That was our opening.