# Purpose Academy ## Project Brief Purpose Academy is an in-house teaching and learning platform built to serve both national and international students, with everything a modern course platform needs: automated student registration, multiple session formats, and structured access to program content, all run through a dedicated admin system. The platform organizes learning into multiple modules and multiple cohorts, scheduled on a monthly or weekly basis, so different groups of students can move through the program on their own track. I lead the team building Purpose Academy — three people in total, covering everything from early idea-gathering through to development — and I own the overall system design and backend/admin flow, with the goal of shaping it into a fully-fledged SaaS product. ## Problem Statement Delivering structured, cohort-based teaching to a growing group of students — spread across different programs, schedules, and even countries — is hard to do without dedicated infrastructure. Registration, payments, session scheduling, and giving each student the right content at the right time all need to work together, or the experience falls apart, especially once more than one cohort is running at a time. Paid, course-style learning adds another layer of complexity: access has to be tied directly to payment, so a student only unlocks a cohort's sessions and resources once they've actually purchased it, with no manual gatekeeping needed on the admin side. And once students are in a cohort, they need a simple, familiar way to find and download everything relevant to their sessions, rather than hunting across scattered links or files. ## Solution Architecture Purpose Academy is built around cohorts as the core organizing unit. Each cohort belongs to a module, runs on a monthly or weekly cadence, and has its own set of sessions — some automatically scheduled through student self-registration, others set up directly by the admin for a particular user, including sessions designed for long-term, lifetime access. Getting into a cohort starts with payment: a student purchases the course they want, and as soon as that payment goes through, they're automatically granted full access to that cohort's sessions and materials, with no manual approval step required. From there, students land in a structured, table-style resource view for each session, where every idea, note, and resource for that session is laid out clearly and available to download, similar to how a platform like Udemy presents course content. On the back end, an admin system ties all of this together — managing modules, cohorts, sessions, registrations, and payments from one place, so the team running Purpose Academy can operate multiple cohorts at once without the process becoming unmanageable. ## Technical Execution - Built the platform as a full SaaS product, with a modern web frontend and a Python-based backend - Designed the cohort-and-module structure so programs can run on either a monthly or weekly cadence, with multiple cohorts active at the same time - Built both automatic, self-registration-based session scheduling and admin-scheduled sessions, including a lifetime-access seminar format - Integrated a payment gateway so cohort access unlocks automatically the moment a student's payment succeeds, with no manual admin step in between - Built a structured, table-formatted resource interface per session, giving students a single place to view and download all session materials — modeled on the experience of a platform like Udemy - Built the full admin system for managing modules, cohorts, sessions, registrations, and payments - Led a three-person team across idea-gathering and development, owning the overall system design and backend/admin architecture ## Results & Impact - Delivered a complete cohort-based learning SaaS product — from registration and payment through session delivery — covering multiple modules and multiple cohorts running on independent schedules - Built a fully automated purchase-to-access pipeline, so students get immediate access to a cohort the moment payment succeeds, with no manual admin work required per student - Gave students a Udemy-style resource experience, with session content laid out and downloadable in one consistent, structured view - Gave the admin team a single system to manage every module, cohort, session, and payment, rather than juggling registration, scheduling, and access separately The result is a platform where running a new cohort — and getting paying students into it, with the right content in front of them — no longer depends on manual coordination behind the scenes; the system handles registration, payment, access, and content delivery as one connected flow. ## Key Learnings - Tying access directly to payment status, rather than a manual approval step, removed an entire category of admin work and made the student experience feel instant rather than gated - Treating cohorts and modules as first-class, schedulable units, rather than a single flat course structure, made it possible to run multiple programs on different cadences without the system or the team managing it becoming overloaded - Borrowing a familiar pattern, resource view to students, for how students find and download session materials meant less time explaining the interface and more time spent actually learning - Leading a small, focused team through both the idea-gathering and build phases together, rather than handing off a finished spec, made it easier to adjust the system design as real requirements — like lifetime-access sessions or admin-scheduled sessions — surfaced along the way