Study Haul

Sometimes the simple things are staring you right in your face.

So far, new users have essentially come from people/groups that I've directly shared the link to StudyHaul with. So I got curious yesterday and thought, "Does my site even come up in Google?"

Quick searches of keywords which SHOULD lead to my site and I couldnt find myself on first few pages. I asked Codex to check if StudyHaul.io was on ANY pages of Google or Bing and nope! That sent me down a rabbit hole.

I ended up finding various articles on how to improve your llm visibility (follow me here) and that led me to asking Codex to audit my site with the context of those pages in mind and determine what needs to change to improve both my search engine visibility and my llm visibility. I host on the domain Cloudflare so I suspected there could have been blockers there.

Long story short, hours of session happened to make improvements where the current SEO-friendly pages were rewritten and simple things like adding the sitemap to google and bing's search consoles were performed. Final audit determined everything that should find those pages, can.

So now we wait. :)

Yesterday, I released access links to my waitlist. Only 1 person made an account.

Pretty disheartening, lol. I had to double check if the emails even sent or if my in-app admin platform was tracking incorrectly. Loops.so showed that they did, so no issue there, but even with the one person who signed up, I discovered that there was a disconnect in their sign up and their invite being "claimed."

In hindsight, I'm a bit thankful that it was only one person because I was able to trouble shoot the disconnect and give them some free credits for their troubles. But for the rest who haven't responded yet, my friends highlighted that they likely deleted the invite email out of reflex.

My big takeaway: I won't do anymore waitlist email captures for future products with follow up invite links. Instead, I'll have "waitlist" folks create an account.

March 2026, I sat down to prepare to study for a professional licensure exam. I had paid a couple of hundred dollars for a prep course from a popular company, then opened it up to see that it was only videos and a test bank. No real sense of how to prioritize what to study for and, having been out of school for over a decade, I didn't know where to begin.

Then I started vibe coding what's become StudyHaul, an AI-driven exam prep solution for professional licensure exams. I began building it out in Replit, then started using Claude Code to iterate when I didn't want to keep spending on Replit usage.

Waitlist is growing and I have interest from a student healthcare organization to do an online demo. Not bad.