Steele

Google Classroom already knows what's due, what's late and what got turned in. Parents usually find out last.

Steele reads Classroom and Calendar for each kid and texts the parent: what's due, what's late, what's done. The details are on the web when they want more.

The student version

Steele started as a personal copilot students text over iMessage. Classes, deadlines, goals and routines in one thread, with memory that carries across weeks.

It grew into a full product: an iOS app, a web dashboard, reminders it decides on its own, and a voice agent that calls you over FaceTime.

What paying users told me

The first subscribers paid $9.99 or $19.99 a month. Most of them left. By mid-June, 4 of the 7 who canceled or said they would pointed to the same thing: it cost too much for what it did.

A general assistant over text competes with the best general assistants in the world. Steele needed a job only it could do.

Too young for Apple

Apple won't let anyone under 18 hold a developer account, and the same wall shows up at Stripe and the bank. So I formed Steele Labs LLC in Wyoming, with a parent as the account holder, and got a D-U-N-S number so the Apple developer account belongs to the company.

The first TestFlight build crashed on launch. I traced it to mismatched Expo native modules and shipped a fixed build the same day. The public beta opened on August 2.

Rebuilt for parents

I locked the product to one customer: parents. The kid is the subject, not the user. Parents connect Google Classroom and Calendar, add each kid, and get texts about what's due, late and done. $20 a month per kid.

I kept the Google permissions to Classroom and Calendar on purpose. No Gmail, no Drive. That keeps the product out of Google's restricted-scope security audit.

How it's built

I build it myself, with AI coding agents doing a lot of the typing. The work is deciding what to build, reviewing what the agents write, and owning what breaks.

Messaging

iMessage and SMS

Backend

FastAPI, background workers and a scheduler on Fly.io

Data

Postgres, including the job queue

Clients

Next.js web, Expo iOS app

Payments

Stripe

Integrations

Google Classroom, Google Calendar, iCal

Bugs that reach users get a written incident report: 44 so far. Product decisions get a decision record: 29 so far. Pull requests go through an automated review bot before they merge.

Some screens start as sketches.

The parent product is live. The work now is the hardest part: getting it in front of parents and finding out if they'll pay.

Visit steelelabs.co