Arvid Kahl and Danielle Simpson Turned Teachers' Repetitive Work into a Subscription Business

FeedbackPanda: Turning a Teacher's Repetitive Work into a Subscription Business

FeedbackPanda was a SaaS product that helped online English teachers keep class records and write feedback for parents. Arvid Kahl and Danielle Simpson started the business in 2017 and grew it to $55,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) without outside investment or hiring employees, then sold it to SureSwift Capital in 2019. That figure is the company's revenue at the time and does not mean the founders' personal income or net profit. It was a two-person business built by a teacher who knew the work firsthand and a software developer, and it is a case of solving one occupation's repetitive work with precision.

The Problem Online English Teachers Faced

Simpson, who majored in vocal performance, juggled several jobs while preparing for a career as an opera singer in Germany, and she started teaching English online to cover her living costs. Teaching Chinese children could be done from home, but writing the feedback to send to parents after each class took about two extra hours a day. She was not paid separately for that time, and as she took on more classes the administrative work grew along with them.

She organized student and class information in Excel and kept writing similar evaluation sentences over and over. Saving the explanations common to every class and adding student-specific observations on top could have saved time, but managing that across several documents and records was a hassle. The needed feature was clear: gather class-by-class feedback templates and student information in one place and pull them up easily for the next class.

Connecting the Product to the Screen Teachers Already Worked In

The customer segment the two chose was freelance English teachers working on Chinese online education platforms. Because they also set individual teachers as the sales target, they did not go through contracting with education companies or waiting for an institution's purchasing approval. It was a structure that reached directly the people who repeated the same work every day and could buy their own work tools.

Kahl, who was working in industrial IoT at the time, built the early product in the evenings and on weekends. He used Elixir and Vue.js, which he was already using at work, and in about a month he built a system that let Simpson manage students and write feedback from saved templates. A short improvement cycle followed: Simpson used it in real classes, reported what was inconvenient, and Kahl fixed it.

What made the product more practical was a browser extension that connected to the education platforms. Teachers could call up FeedbackPanda from the class screen and prepare feedback suited to that student and that class. In a later interview, Kahl explained that it mattered for the product to fit naturally into the customer's existing workflow. If using the tool required learning a separate, complicated procedure, it could recreate the very work it was meant to reduce.

The template-sharing feature called "Cloud" added community value to a personal tool. Teachers could publish the feedback templates they had made, pull in another teacher's template, edit it, and share it again. As the material accumulated, new subscribers had less need to write every sentence from scratch, and existing users' activity made things easier for the next user. It effectively moved into the product a culture of sharing materials that already existed among teachers.

The First Customers Came from a Teacher Community

The first customers came from a Facebook group where teachers gathered. Simpson, who used the product herself, introduced FeedbackPanda while answering posts that asked about the feedback-writing problem. Her firsthand experience let her explain the product to people doing the same work. Teachers who found the product began passing on their experience to the next customer.

Market expansion also gave this growth a push. At the time, Chinese online English education companies were rapidly recruiting overseas teachers, so the pool of potential customers who had to handle the same administrative work kept growing. Kahl acknowledged that they benefited from this trend. Their execution in pinpointing where the customers gathered lined up with a period when that customer base itself was growing.

The revenue model was monthly and annual subscriptions, with a 30-day trial and no full free plan. During the trial, a teacher could apply the product to their own classes and build up templates. Once personal templates accumulated, there was a reason to keep using the tool in the next class. It was a structure used alongside the teacher's class records rather than being only sentence generation.

Pricing was adjusted during operations. In December 2018, the two announced that starting the following month they would raise the monthly price from $10 to $15 and the annual price from $110 to $150. Subscriptions already active kept the old price, and the new prices applied to subscriptions created afterward. It was a choice to raise prices as the product's value grew while holding down the burden on existing customers.

Advance notice of the increase also affected when people signed up. As customers rushed to lock in the lower price, 500 new subscriptions came in during December, but that fell to 140 the following month. Simpson recalled that she read this as the effect of customers who would have waited until the trial ended paying early, yet she still worried about the slowdown in growth. Along with the price increase, they set up a program giving discounts to referrers and referred customers, but word-of-mouth growth had already been underway before that program appeared.

The product expanded in the direction of widening how teachers doing the same work could use it. After VIPKID, they made the extension usable on other education platforms such as Magic Ears, Landi English, and ALO7. For teachers working across multiple platforms, they split dashboards by school and separated student, class, template, and feedback records to match each school. Keeping one job at the center, they supported the environment customers actually moved between.

How the Two Handled Revenue and Operations

According to the founders' recollections, the business became profitable within a few weeks of launch, and about nine months in it reached $20,000 in MRR. Around the time of the sale, it had about 5,000 customers. Charging a subscription fee an individual teacher could afford while securing thousands of recurring payments, it grew into an independent business owned by the two founders.

External services and documentation were important to keeping the operating scale small. They used Stripe for payments, Auth0 for user authentication, and Intercom for customer communication. When answering a new customer question for the first time, they turned the content straight into a help document, reducing repeated responses to the same question. What they learned through direct conversation accumulated into material the next customer could use to solve it themselves.

They also made the division of work concrete from early on. Following a method Kahl took from "The E-Myth," he and Simpson drew up an org chart for the future company and assigned an owner to each needed role. It was work that surfaced distinct responsibilities like product development, customer support, and management. Even with two people running it, they could make clear what work existed and who was responsible for it.

Automation, however, did not remove the operating stress. The small German hosting company they chose early on had repeated outages, and once the service went down for nearly a full day. While dealing with infrastructure problems he could not control directly, Kahl was continuously exposed to customer inquiries and monitoring alerts. He recalled that the tension from that time stayed with him so strongly that even after the sale he reacted physically to the sound of a notification.

The record of hiring zero employees also included an operational price. Kahl said he thought that if the workload did not add up to one full-time person, he could just handle it himself, and he put off hiring even when Simpson proposed it. He later acknowledged that they could have used part-time customer support or technical operations help. Separate from the total volume of work to handle, the responsibility of having to respond at any moment pressed on the founder's life.

The Sale and What Came After

Behind the decision to consider a sale were both accumulated strain and asset concentration. The better the business did, the larger FeedbackPanda's share of the two founders' assets became, and cashing it out could improve the financial stability of their lives. In 2019 they handed the business to SureSwift Capital. They did not disclose the specific sale price, but the acquisition-focused outlet They Got Acquired reported it as a seven-figure deal in dollars.

After the sale came relief and a sense of loss at the same time. In his 2024 piece "Forever Business or Exit?", Kahl wrote that the business had been deeply tied to his identity, and that when he handed over access and the payment income stopped, part of what made him up seemed to disappear. While acknowledging the value of a sale that brought financial stability, he came to consider alongside it the option of keeping ownership while hiring people or delegating operations.

That experience led to later writing and a book. Kahl organized his founding and operating experience on The Bootstrapped Founder, and in 2020 he self-published "Zero to Sold." According to his public account, the book sold about 1,000 copies in its first week for roughly $8,500 in revenue. The knowledge gained from building and running FeedbackPanda became the foundation of a new content business.

After the acquisition, a separate operations team was formed at FeedbackPanda. A February 2022 report described it as a business with seven full-time employees. The service then shut down on January 24, 2023. The product's history, which continued after the founders' sale, includes these later developments. The published shutdown record alone does not allow us to conclude what caused the closure.

What Other Businesses Can Take from This

What is worth taking from FeedbackPanda for other businesses is the way they observed repetitive work customers were already spending time on. Simpson's firsthand experience set the product's scope, Kahl's development ability turned it into a tool usable in the existing work screen, and the teacher community became the sales channel. The two founders' recollections also show that business design should include dividing operating responsibility as revenue grows and protecting the founder's time.