Our Bumpy Ride to Creating Aptree LMS
Tags: laravel, php, opensource, learning
Published: 2023-10-17 17:29:14

## Hello, dev.to!

Hey everyone! I’m new around here (and to development) but have found this site helpful so I wanted to share my story and shamelessly plug my app at the end:) 

My journey kicked off during those long, dull COVID lockdown days. In my day job as a physician, I have to do a lot of boring corporate training, and I got a little consumed with how awful the platforms we were forced to use were. It got me thinking – there must be a way to improve these, right?

**The Ambitious Beginning**
So, armed with zero development experience but a lot of enthusiasm, my team and I landed a six-figure investment to bring our vision to life. We had this grand idea, got some designs ready, and went shopping for outsourcing companies. The one we went with promised to build our dream for $65,000. Spoiler alert: it didn’t, and we blew through over double our initial budget before we scrapped it (and them)

**A Series of Unfortunate Events**
Fast forward two years. Our budget had more than doubled, the app was a mess, and we were nearly broke. The whole thing was like a car that costs a fortune but can’t make it down the driveway without breaking down. We had heard the “just two more weeks” line so many times it stopped being funny. Looking back, it was a mix of our lack of knowledge and our partnership with a company that could take a small feature like adding an icon picker to a form and turn it into a $10,000 bill. Our other mistake was choosing a complicated tech stack. Django/Reactjs. Many people would tell us this is a reasonable choice (and it is ), but what we didn't realize was how much technical debt we would take on to get it across the finish line. We were essentially paying for two teams, one for the front and one for the back, and a full-time project manager to help them understand each other. If we weren't on a reasonably tight budget, this could have worked-- but for smaller budgets and non-coding founders, we found this to be too slow and expensive.  Having Python in the back and React JS up front was like hiring two different bands to play the same concert.

**A Glimmer of Hope**
We stumbled upon the TALL stack when we were about to throw in the towel. It was a game-changer. We got quotes from PHP companies that were a fraction of what we paid before. Ultimately, we spent a small fraction of our initial budget using the TALL stack to reach a working application we were happy to show people.  With the TALL stack, we decided to do things differently. We meticulously planned our project and hired freelancers on upwork for small, specific tasks, paying them by the week or even by the day. If they nailed it, great, they got another assignment. If not, we moved on and only lost a few hundred dollars instead of thousands. 

## That’s how Aptree LMS came to life.
After about four months of development with php, we had something we were very proud to show off. It's far from perfect, but it is a great start to what we feel is a desperately needed alternative to over-priced SAAS learning platforms. It’s a learning platform that’s fun to use, with a neat authoring experience and cool features like ChatGPT and live video recording. --all thanks to the TALL stack, which let us work quickly with just 1-2 developers in just a few months. I'm slowly learning PHP myself and am starting to make contributions to the code as I am able. 

Feel free to check out our repository

[https://aptreelearning.com](https://aptreelearning.com)
[https://github.com/Aptree-Learning/Community_Edition](https://github.com/Aptree-Learning/Community_Edition)