How Qoom Helped Me On My Entrepreneurial Endeavor

About Ontrack

Ontrack is a parental control application I built that helps parents monitor their kids while they're studying. I had already previously created a chrome extension that allows students to self study. With the coronavirus pandemic that started a few months ago, however, I decided to build a parental control application so that parents would be able to monitor kids studying at home. Especially for young children, being forced to stay home and do homework online makes it very easy for them to get distracted by entertainment sites. Without going into too much detail, Ontrack essentially allows parents to enforce study sessions where students may only acccess certain approved websites and keep track of websites that their kids are accessing. To learn more about Ontrack, go to https://joinontrack.com.

How Qoom Helped Me Build Ontrack

A few months back, I had an idea to pivot my business idea to the parental control market due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Having previously built chrome extensions, my plan for the product was to build a fullstack web application that would be paired with a chrome extension. The parent would install the extension on their child's device and use a parent portal to monitor their child. With all the nuances and features figured out, it was time to actually build the product.

The chrome extension part was very simple and publishing it was simply a matter of waiting for the Chrome Web Store to approve it. The parent portal, however, would be very complicated. Although I had the technical knowledge to build the necessary components, I didn't have much experience with databases and web hosting. It would also be a huge pain to debug the communication errors between the portal and the extension because I would have to toggle through a handful of applications.

Qoom replaces them all

That's when I was introduced to Qoom. At first, I was a little skeptical about doing all my work on my Qoom space as I had grown extremely comfortable on Visual Studio Code. However, with all the necessary node packages already installed and the back end files already setup, I went with it as it would save me a lot of time. From then on, all I had to do was code. Instead of having to setup a local server to preview what I had or setting up a domain through GoDaddy, I could view it from the production server on my desired domain. Since Qoom automatically stores and saves all your code files, I didn't even need to push and pull code from Github. All I had to do was wait a few seconds for the code to save and reload the application. My account even came with a Mongodb database setup so I didn't have to make an Atlas account to keep track of user data.

Thinking back on my coding experience, the amount of time and work that Qoom saved me was absolutely mindblowing! The built-in domain, hosting, and database allowed me to focus on the coding so that I could get my product out as quickly as possible. It's like being able to do a job without having to go through the paperwork!

OnTrack is the winner of 2019 Leangap competition. Qoom helps entrepreneurial students succeed.

Originally written by Nathan Lee, July 29 2020