EduHub Kazakhstan
Project Overview
EduHub is a unified marketplace connecting small educational businesses, tutors, learning centers, freelance instructors, with students across Kazakhstan. Built in 28 hours at the Atyrau regional hackathon as project lead and sole developer. The platform provides course discovery, provider profiles, ratings, and subscription tiers for education providers to boost their visibility.
The Challenge
Kazakhstan's education market is fragmented. Thousands of independent tutors and small learning centers operate through Instagram DMs and WhatsApp groups, with no centralized discovery platform. Students struggle to:
- Find qualified tutors outside their immediate social circle
- Compare pricing, qualifications, and reviews across providers
- Book trial lessons or verify credentials
- Discover learning centers beyond their city
Meanwhile, education providers have no affordable way to reach students beyond word-of-mouth.
The Solution
Built a two-sided marketplace with:
- Student-facing search: Filter by subject, location, price range, language, and rating
- Provider profiles: Detailed pages with qualifications, course offerings, reviews, and availability calendars
- Subscription tiers: Free listings with limited visibility, paid tiers for featured placement and analytics
- PWA support: Installable on mobile devices for app-like experience without app store overhead
- Real-time features: Supabase Realtime for live availability updates and instant messaging between students and tutors
Technical Implementation
Frontend
- Vite + React for fast development iteration (critical in a 28-hour build)
- TypeScript for catching bugs during rapid prototyping
- TailwindCSS for consistent, responsive UI built at speed
- PWA manifest and service worker for offline capability and home screen installation
Backend
- Supabase for auth, database, storage, and realtime subscriptions
- Row-level security policies for multi-tenant data isolation
- PostgreSQL full-text search for course and tutor discovery
- Edge Functions for subscription payment processing hooks
Data Model
- Providers (tutors, centers) with profile, credentials, and subscription tier
- Courses with subject tags, pricing, schedule, and capacity
- Reviews with verified enrollment checks
- Bookings with status tracking and calendar integration
Impact & Results
- Functional prototype delivered within 28 hours, demo-ready for judges
- Two-sided marketplace with working search, profiles, and booking flow
- PWA-ready, installable mobile experience from day one
- Concept validated, judges and audience feedback confirmed market demand in the region
- Currently being developed further toward a public launch
Lessons Learned
- Supabase is a hackathon superpower: Auth, database, storage, and realtime in one SDK meant I spent zero time on infrastructure. The entire backend was configured in under 3 hours, leaving 25 hours for features and polish.
- Two-sided marketplaces are hard to validate in 28 hours. I had a working product but no real users on either side. The chicken-and-egg problem (no students without tutors, no tutors without students) can't be solved with code alone. Next step requires targeted outreach.
- PWA over native was the right call. Building a React Native or Flutter app would have consumed 80% of the hackathon. PWA gave me "installable on phone" for essentially free, which was enough to demonstrate mobile viability to judges.
- Full-text search needs tuning even for prototypes. Supabase's pg_trgm search worked out of the box but returned irrelevant results for Kazakh/Russian course names. Proper search would need language-specific tokenization.