About a year ago I tried launching a small online booking system for local tutors—nothing fancy, just a basic setup where clients could reserve slots and pay through a simple interface. It actually grew faster than I expected, which should’ve been a win, but instead it turned into this daily stress cycle. I was using cheap tools pieced together with connectors and when stuff started overlapping (user logins, schedules, admin access), it all got real messy, real fast. The final straw was when a parent got access to a teacher’s internal notes through some glitch I couldn’t trace. At that point I realized I had no idea how secure anything really was. So I shut the whole thing down before someone got hurt or sued. Took me a while to build back up the motivation, but I knew if I gave it another shot, I needed to do it properly this time. Not bigger—just smarter and safer.