Introduction
This series is the true story of how a private tutor with absolutely zero programming experience built and launched a SaaS product called "Kagemusha System" with the help of AI.
"You can't build a product if you can't code."
I want this story to reach everyone who thinks that way.
The Reality of Being a Private Tutor for Six Years
Before I knew it, six or seven years had passed since I started working as a private tutor.
I had multiple students. Each family had different days and times for lessons. Extra sessions popped up before exams, and rescheduled lessons were a constant. That part was perfectly normal.
The problem was that I had to manage all of it myself.
Reviewed my calendar and manually counted lesson sessions
Typed dates and times into Excel by hand
Created invoices for each student
Calculated totals and double-checked for errors
Sent invoices to parents via email
About 15–20 minutes per student
Scaled proportionally with every new student
Lost 2–3 hours every month-end evening
Finding mistakes meant even more time for corrections and resends
The Day "This Is Too Tedious" Hit Its Breaking Point
I'll be honest — the first year or two were manageable.
When you only have three or four students, you can still handle things manually. But as the numbers grow, the story changes.
This happened every month. Every single month.
I love teaching itself. Seeing a student's face light up when their grades improve — that's the best feeling in the world.
But the month-end paperwork just got harder to bear with each passing year.
"I Want to Delegate This" — But There Are No Options
There are all sorts of business management tools out there. Systems designed for tutoring schools exist, too.
But nothing fits the needs of an independent private tutor.
- Tutoring school systems → Built for scale. Way too many features for one person, and the monthly fees are steep
- General attendance management → Doesn't support "lessons" as a unit of work
- Excel → Still manual at its core. Nothing is automated
- Notepads and planners → Out of the question. Yet surprisingly, many tutors still use them
"I want a system built just for me."
The thought started forming in my mind. But I had never done any programming. I barely even knew what HTML was.
Then I Discovered AI
One day, I saw a post on social media.
Someone claiming they had "built an app by having AI write the code."
I was skeptical at first. Could AI-generated code actually work? Could someone like me — a complete amateur — really use it?
But then I thought:
I've been thinking "this is too tedious" for six straight years. It's worth a shot.
And I never could have imagined at that moment that this decision would lead me all the way to launching my own SaaS product.
Next Time
Part 2: Discovering AI — My fateful encounter with Claude Code. A look back at the very first step, which started with: "Wait… it actually writes code for you?"
Still managing tutor attendance manually?
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