Jai Verma

Self-funding my start-up work by tutoring GCSE/IGCSE maths (Foundation and Higher), using lessons as a testbed for better methods rather than just more practice questions.

• Work with students who are anxious about maths as well as those chasing top grades, focusing on clear, repeatable methods they can trust under exam pressure.
• Developed Peel & Solve, a structured way to teach solving linear equations by always 'peeling' from the outermost operation inwards, which significantly reduced common algebra errors in my students.
• Published Peel & Solve as a paper and interactive tool and shared it with the wider maths community to get real-world feedback rather than keeping it as a private trick.

Building Step One, a fitness product for self-directed lifters who want to know whether their muscle gain, fat loss, recomp or maintenance plan is actually working.

• Started with Telegram accountability groups, then moved to a PWA to test whether social pressure, public rankings and consequences improved training and habit completion. Shut that direction down and pivoted when the data showed it helped some users but was not strong enough when life got difficult.
• Built and shipped the current Step One PWA using React, TypeScript, Firebase, Firestore, Cloud Functions, OpenAI and AI-assisted coding tools. I used AI to move faster, but still owned the product decisions, code review, debugging, user support, analytics, onboarding, payments and positioning myself.
• Designed a weekly verdict system that uses weight, waist, lean/fat trend estimates, training consistency, training setup, phase fit and checklist basics to tell users if they are On Track, what their trend means, and the one thing to focus on next.
• Added training setup checks that look at volume, frequency, progression, effort, fatigue and exercise coverage, so the weekly fix can identify whether food, training, consistency, recovery or phase choice is the main bottleneck.
• Tested landing pages, Reddit acquisition, free audits, pricing, user interviews, onboarding flows and an Only Pay for Progress pricing model where users only pay in months with at least two On Track Mondays.
• Learned the hard early-stage lesson that useful is not the same as needed. Some users pay and find Step One valuable, but the bigger lesson was learning to judge ideas by market pull rather than by how rationally useful they seem.

Came back to Garment for a final attempt at the idea, a fashion/style discovery app that helped people find stylish outfits that lasted rather than getting lost in short-lived fashion trends.

• Built and shipped a new web app version of the product and explored a stylist/influencer-led marketplace.
• Improved the product, UX and technical execution while testing whether the idea had a stronger route to demand.
• Chose to shut it down after realising the market pull was not strong enough and I did not care enough about fashion to spend years in the space.
• Took the main lesson into Step One: test demand, distribution and willingness to pay much earlier, before building too much product.

Owned the internal implementation and rollout of a new booking system, working between the founder, operations team, tour operator clients, UI designer and external developer.

• Mapped end-to-end workflows, translated team and client needs into product requirements, helped the founder prioritise competing requests, tested features and resolved client-facing issues during rollout.
• Simplified existing processes by removing or combining unnecessary steps, then introduced Trello workflows and consolidated hotel and availability trackers to reduce repeated work and basic errors.
• Coordinated the contract process across a four-person team, working against deadlines that affected when tour operators could launch and sell tours.
• Redesigned the Bowling Tours sales and quoting process, building live pricing tools and an internal system that reduced personalised quotes and hotel enquiries from 1-2 hours of manual editing to a few minutes.
• Implemented a CRM workflow, initially in Zoho and later in Trello, so enquiries, follow-ups, bookings and post-trip care were tracked in one place.
• Ran Bowling Tours sales as the new season opened and closed around 18 group bookings in a couple of months. Also improved the website and basic SEO to support the sales process.

Started my first proper start-up while still at university, building the first iteration of Garment, a fashion/style discovery app that matched trending looks with people’s own taste.

• Taught myself Swift and took the idea from zero to a fully functioning native iOS app during COVID.
• Later improved the design and UX and started learning web development as well as mobile.
• Gained core product and engineering skills, and proved to myself that I could go from idea to shipped product on my own.