Lemon.io turns Pirch’s broken MVP into a working product in 4 weeks

Pirch is an AI-powered curriculum builder that makes it easy for homeschool parents to create custom, one-off curricula tailored to their child’s needs. Built by homeschoolers for homeschoolers, it lets users create personalized lessons, book lists, projects, writing prompts, quizzes – even field trip itineraries – in seconds and save everything in an organized library.

Raven Van Stratten, Pirch’s founder, used ChatGPT for work and quickly saw its potential for homeschooling. After testing early lesson plans, she started to wonder: Why are homeschool families still buying off-the-shelf curriculum when they could design it specifically for their child with AI?

The more she thought about it, the more driven she became to build a platform that would let parents do just that. But she couldn’t bring it to life without technical help, so she hired a dev team through Fiverr.

Thousands of dollars and countless hours later, the product still didn’t work. Frustrated, Raven went through three agencies before landing on Lemon.io, who rebuilt the platform in four weeks.

Technically, the Fiverr team had gotten Raven’s app live. But after demoing it at a homeschool conference, she saw just how clunky and buggy it was – nowhere close to her vision.

Without a reliable dev team to fix it, she frantically searched Google, ChatGPT, and Gemini for other options. Every result kept leading her back to Lemon.io.

“I kept refining my search to say, ‘Well, are these people going to do X?’ or ‘Are their devs good at Y?’ Lemon.io kept appearing,” Raven recalls.

Intrigued, she figured she’d give them a shot.

Meeting a burned founder where she was

At first, Raven felt like hopping on another call to discuss her needs with Lemon.io was a chore. “I was thinking, ‘I don’t have time for a video call. Just find me a good developer.’”

But the conversation surprised her. Lemon.io’s head of talent wasn’t just there to scope out what Raven needed from a technical perspective. She read Raven’s personality and working style, factoring in everything Raven had been through with previous dev teams.

“I feel so bad now that I asked so many questions about delivery and timeline, but it really felt like I was leaving an abusive relationship, and I wanted to be super sure about who I was hiring next,” Raven explains.

“She understood what I needed on a deep level. There was nothing Lemon.io didn’t have the right answer for.” 

Lemon.io also adjusted the engagement model to meet Raven where she was: weekly deliverables, Friday check-ins, and payments only after each phase was reviewed.

“I thought, ‘I can’t go a full month just trusting somebody.’ When they said we could go to weekly, I found so much security in that,” Raven highlights.

Raven had seen the platform limp along for months with the Fiverr team. With Lemon.io, things were different from the start.

Lemon.io jumped in headfirst, understanding what was there, salvaging what made sense, and rebuilding the rest from the ground up – with a clean, stable, ready-for-real-users architecture.

Translating founder vision into a working tech stack

Raven didn’t come in with fully scoped feature requests, just a long list of things she knew weren’t right. Lemon.io reviewed everything and delivered a hard truth: the app needed to be rebuilt.

But they also knew exactly how to fix it.

Building trust while building the product

Lemon.io knew the roadmap they laid out would make sense to an engineer, but might feel too abstract for a non-technical founder.

“They told me upfront, ‘We’re planning to build this on the backend the proper way. And that means you won’t be able to test much at the beginning. The UI happens afterward.’”

For someone who’d been burned before, that was a tough pill to swallow. So Lemon.io made a point of sprinkling in some frontend work so Raven could visualize the progress.

“Looking back, I do think that increased the workload. But it made me feel so much more secure. By week two, I was like ‘Okay, wow, I’m seeing so much stuff,’ and by week four, I was like, ‘I would trust you with my child,’” Raven emphasizes.

Handing over a platform Raven could own

Not only did Lemon.io completely rebuild Pirch, they architected it in a way that let Raven keep making no-code changes. There was an admin panel she could use without touching the codebase, along with comprehensive documentation.

“Lemon.io built it so well and documented everything so clearly that I’ve been able to add features myself over the last 30 days,” she says.

For more complex updates to the app, she plans to bring Lemon.io back. But thanks to how they set things up, she’s got day-to-day tweaks covered.

Caring about the product after the contract ended

After the project wrapped, Lemon.io could’ve just moved on, but they truly cared about Pirch and Raven’s success.

For Raven, the technical win was huge – but it was only part of the story. What stood out to her almost as much was the human side of working with Lemon.io.

“By the end, I felt like I had a friend in the team,” she says. “Lemon.io was wishing me well, and you could tell he genuinely loved working with startups.”

She’s already referred another homeschool founder to Lemon.io and has offered to hop on calls with nervous clients to vouch for the experience firsthand.

Ready to go from stuck to shipped? Reach out to Lemon.io.