Connect Music Teachers to Students

Music students practice alone all week, then meet their teacher for an hour. Teachers have no visibility into what happened in between. Feedback runs a week behind, and bad habits set in unnoticed. Existing practice apps treat a human, analog craft like corporate software.

In collaboration with the three founders, I joined as the 4th and designed CODA as a 0-1 project from the ground up as a two-sided product where a teacher’s studio workflow and a student’s daily practice live in one place. The design language is a sketchbook: warm paper, ink-line icons, hand-set italic numerals. It reads as a tool for working musicians, not a dashboard. Students get real-time practice tools (tuner, metronome, recorder with live audio visualizers) and clear daily assignments. Teachers get scheduling, a practice-submission queue, and AI-assisted lesson reviews that surface key moments automatically. I documented the whole thing as a design system: 11 color tokens mirrored light to dark, a four-family type scale, nine hand-drawn line icons, and card, pill and sheet component recipes. A two-role app with first-run onboarding that holds together across both themes and meets WCAG 2.2 AA.

CODA shipped and is live on the iOS App Store. Teachers see how students practice between lessons. Students get structured guidance, timestamped teacher feedback, and a daily streak that earns its recognition. The loop weekly lessons leave open is finally closed. Six months after the MVP, 2,400+ teachers and students are running their week on it, students return on a 73% 30-day retention curve, and studios using LabAMI with ten students or more report +62 NPS. LabAMI is now backed by Google for Startups, Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, NVIDIA Inception, J.P. Morgan Innovation Economy, and Dell for Startups.