Memories: The Relative Score

Lessons learned as a 16-year old entrepreneur

In high school, I built this app called Scholica with my friend Dante. It was a simple way to access all the information you needed as a student at our school — class schedules, grades, course materials — born out out of frustration about all of the outdated web portals that existed at the time and that didn’t work at all on our still relatively new iPhones.

Over time it grew out to a platform, and we had relatively free reign to build whatever we wanted into it, as it was a product we had built ourselves, and our school was just one (and for the longest time the only) customer.

One evening, I was fixing some things in the ‘grades’ module of the app. It showed a nice graph with your average scores per subject, and made it easy to see what subjects you were passing or failing.

Off the back of discussing our grades with some classmates earlier in the day, I realised the platform had access to the grades of all the students in the school, and I decided it would be fun to see if I could calculate how a student’s grades stacked up to the grades of everyone else in the school. I was mostly just interested to see where I would sit in the curve — never having been an amazing student, as I spent way too much time building my apps, but passing most of my classes relatively easily.

Within an hour or so, I had built this new section on the grades screen that showed what I chose to call the…