Visions

Developing the initial proof-of-concept for Revel wasn’t anything excruciatingly painful, since we already had a decent idea of where to start. Before our first meeting, Mr Chan (our teacher-mentor) had already shown us a rudimentary RAG¹ app for chemistry notes, which he painstakingly clobbered together out of his own free time. The bare-bones HTML app, whilst lacking much visual appeal and utility, gave us the first taste of the value a RAG app tailored to students could provide.

Chasing this vision we built our first prototype of Revel, implementing dozens of new features every week. From creating various UI/UX design boards, striking artworks, building a safely integrated backend pipeline and wrestling with cloud providers… we could yap on and on.

After a couple months of building, Revel was ready for its first experimental (or “Beta”) launch, just in time for the upcoming A Levels season.

Launch

On November 11th 2024, we officially opened our Beta launch to the Year 6 students whilst they were in the midst of the A Levels. Prior to this, we had been frantically preparing for the worst: securing endpoints behind rate limits, user authentication, logging, and so on. The timing wasn’t ideal, but better late than never.

Unfortunately, we ran into issues as soon as new users started coming in. A critical bug in our backend, which only emerged in production, caused all users to be rate limited after only a single search. Only after a few hours of downtime and several panic commits² was the issue resolved.

Despite the hiccups, our beta launch was generally well-received by the Year 6 students. To our surprise, many of them found it useful for revision during their final days before the A Levels. Interestingly, we found a correlation between the number of active users on the site and the number of days remaining before the A Levels.

What now?

After A Levels, our active users naturally dropped to zero, as the outgoing Year 6s were free of their academic obligations. At the end of our beta release, we realised that there was still much left to do.

Using feedback from our beta users as the starting ground, we began a long process through December of improving Revel on all fronts. To cope with this heavy backlog, Mitul (our UI/UX designer) stepped up to take the role of the primary frontend dev, which allowed our other devs (Samuel and Wesley) to concentrate on the backend. In hindsight this shift in roles greatly sped up our rate of development, as it not only split the workload among more devs, but also allowed Mitul to freely work on the UI/UX codebase without needing to communicate his ideas to the devs via Figma designs. Simultaneously, Isaac and Mr Chan visited multiple startup events to pitch Revel and obtain feedback.

By February 2025, we felt our new changes to Revel were mostly complete. Conveniently, during this time the team got the rare opportunity to showcase Revel in front of a cohort of ~1000 incoming students. We decided it would be a good time for an “early release” to our juniors before the official launch in early April.

Surprisingly, Revel began picking up popularity, with word-of-mouth spreading to the Year 6s too (inferred from the sudden influx of Year 6 users). Over the course of the following week, we gained over 250 new users! Today, Revel is closing in on nearly 500 signed up users, averaging 40 searches a day over the last month.

As our official launch campaign for Revel grows closer, the team is gearing up for yet another influx of new faces. We thank all our users — current and past — for giving Revel the opportunity to grow.

See you at launch! 🚀🚀🚀