Shared college application deadline board

The idea

A typical applicant now applies to 10-15 schools, each with its own mix of EA/ED/RD deadlines, supplemental essays, recommendation requests, fee payments and scholarship dates. The teen tracks it in their head, the parent tracks it in anxious questions at dinner, and the actual system of record is nagging. Spreadsheet templates for this circulate every autumn, which shows the demand and the inadequacy at once.

The wedge is the two-view design. Both people look at the same data, but the teen sees only their next three tasks while the parent sees the whole status board, and only the teen can move a task’s status. The parent gets visibility without asking; the teen gets autonomy without hiding things. Preloading deadlines for 300 schools removes the setup chore that kills spreadsheet adoption in week two.

Who pays

The anxious parent, obviously. Families in this market pay independent counsellors USD 200 an hour and application fees of USD 80 a school; GBP 32 for one season of not fighting about deadlines prices itself. One-time seasonal pricing fits a product that is worthless in June. Distribution: parent Facebook groups for the application cycle (“Class of 2027 Parents”), school counsellors who want parents redirected somewhere other than their inbox, and September-peaking SEO on “college application tracker”.

MVP scope

• School picker seeded with top-300 deadlines, fees, and Common App status
• Auto-generated per-school requirement checklists with essay prompts
• Teen view (next three tasks) and parent view (full board), comment-only parents
• Deadline emails via Resend at 14/7/2 days for unsubmitted tasks
• Manual scholarship deadline entries, Stripe one-time seasonal purchase
• Skip for v1: Common App account integration, essay editing or AI feedback, counsellor multi-student accounts, and UK/international admissions

Build AppTrack, a web app where a parent and a teenager share one college application season. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres + auth), Resend for email, Stripe.

Core flow: parent creates the family account and invites the teen; either adds schools from a searchable picker seeded with the top 300 US colleges and their EA/ED/RD deadlines, application fees, and whether they take the Common App (ship this as a seed table you compile once for the season). Adding a school auto-creates its requirement checklist: essays with prompts and word counts where known, recommendation letters, test score sends, FAFSA/CSS, and fee payment. Scholarship deadlines can be added manually per school or standalone.

Pages: the core design is two views of one dataset. Teen view: a deliberately minimal "next three tasks" list with due dates, nothing else visible. Parent view: full status board, schools as columns, requirements as cards with statuses (not started, drafting, submitted, confirmed). Plus school picker, school detail, and settings.

Implementation details: parents can see everything but can only comment, not edit task status — status changes belong to the teen, which is the anti-nagging mechanic that makes teens tolerate the product. Resend sends both parties deadline emails at 14, 7, and 2 days out, but only for tasks not yet submitted.

Pricing: GBP 32 one-time for the season (through 1 June) via Stripe. No subscription; the product's lifespan is one application cycle.