I Tried Building an Online Teaching Setup, Here’s What Broke

I went down a rabbit hole recently trying to understand how people are actually running online teaching setups.

Not theory Real setup
So, I tried piecing one together myself

The simple setup I started with

I thought it would be straightforward:

1. Zoom for classes
2. Google Sheets for tracking students
3. Stripe for payments
4. Google Drive for content

Looks clean on paper but in reality ? Not that much.

What broke (very quickly)
After trying to simulate even a small setup, issues started showing up,

1.Everything was disconnected No single source of truth

• Student data in Sheets
• Payments in Stripe
• Sessions in Zoom Nothing talked to each other.

1. Manual work everywhere

Every action triggered another manual step.

Confirm payment → update sheet
Schedule class → send link manually
Track progress → update again

It felt like running cron jobs… manually.

1. No scalability

Even imagining 20–30 students felt messy.

At 50+?

It becomes a system problem, not a teaching problem.

The realization (this felt familiar)

This whole setup started to feel like:

A microservices architecture with zero orchestration

Too many tools
No coordination
Too much glue code (manual work)
What actually matters

Teaching wasn’t the hard part.

System design was.

If your system is:

fragmented → you burn out
manual → you slow down
unscalable → you quit
So what’s the alternative?

Instead of stitching tools together, some people are using platforms that act like a monolith for teaching — everything in one place:

classes
students
content
tracking

While exploring this, I came across Wayvida

Not saying it’s the best or only solution — just an example of how people are avoiding the “DIY system chaos.”

Final takeaway

As developers, we tend to overbuild or overconnect things.

But sometimes the better approach is:

reduce moving parts
simplify the system
focus on the core function

In this case, that core function is simple:

Teaching.

Everything else should support it — not complicate it.

Curious if anyone here has tried building something similar.
Did you go full DIY stack, or did you simplify it early?