Case Study - Scaling a Music Education Platform

Overview

Forte is an industry-leading platform connecting music students with ideal teachers through personalized matching. Students complete a detailed survey about their goals, while teachers create public profiles. Once matched, they schedule and attend lessons seamlessly on Forte’s platform, powered by Pure Audio — a proprietary technology delivering crystal-clear sound optimized for music instruction.

The Challenge

Forte launched in 2020 with a mission to revolutionize music education. Their initial prototype proved demand but faced technical limitations—especially in video call quality and scalability. To support rapid growth, they needed a complete rebuild with a future-proof architecture.

Forte has since established itself as the industry leader for providing an all-in-one platform for music teachers and students. The platform enables students to find their perfect teacher through a personalized matching system. Teachers can create detailed public profiles that students discover after completing a comprehensive survey about their goals and preferences. Once matched, students can seamlessly schedule and attend lessons directly on the platform using Forte's innovative Pure Audio technology, which delivers crystal-clear sound optimized for music instruction.

Our Role

As primary engineers on the project, we designed Forte’s scalable architecture from the ground up, including:

• A flexible data model to support rapid feature development.
• A rebuilt video call system for a seamless in-lesson experience.
• A responsive and intuitive user interface for a wide variety of user personas and devices.
• Infrastructure scaling reliably for tens of thousands of users.

Primary Tools & Technologies

Product Features:

In-Lesson Experience: Engineered for Music Education

We architected Forte's lesson environment to solve unique challenges of remote music instruction:

• Zero-downtime migration from Twilio to Daily.co, improving call reliability by 40%
• Forte Pure Audio technology bypasses standard noise cancellation to preserve full musical frequency range
• Waiting rooms with AV pre-checks
• Multi-camera support enables simultaneous wide-angle and close-up instrument views
• Integrated workflow tools:
  • In-call messaging and shared notes
  • Auto-saved lesson recordings

Pure Audio’s custom audio pipeline solved the industry-wide problem of music distortion and audio loss in WebRTC applications.

Teacher Profiles and Studios: Scalable, Trustworthy Infrastructure

We built Forte's teacher profile system to support deep customization built for our custom matching algorithm. The solution delivered:

• High customization - Teacher's can create a tailored profile with details about their teaching preferences and style.
• Seamless moderation - Access-controlled profiles let admins approve user generated content changes without disrupting service. This allows for a very small internal team to handle all the throughput.
• Verified credentials - Verification for institutional affiliations, like Recording Academy, Royal College of Music, and Aspen Music Festival and School.
• Marketplace matching - Teachers are matched to students based on their profile and the student's details, with over 25K+ searches performed.

Subscriptions: Flexible Monetization Engine

We designed Forte's subscription system to serve both marketplace and independent teachers with precision:

• Tiered access - Free members teach marketplace students, while paid subscriptions unlock external student management.
• Seamless onboarding - Teachers can transition between tiers without service interruptions.
• Revenue reliability - The system handles recurring billing and billing failures (e.g. expired cards).

Teacher Payments: Automated Revenue Delivery

We engineered Forte's payment system to handle transactions with complete transparency:

• Failure-proof processing - The system gracefully handles incomplete and failed payments with automatic retries, in-app messaging, and email notifications.
• Full visibility - Real-time status updates ensure teachers always know their payment position via Stripe integration.
• Flexible pricing - Teachers control what they charge and how they are paid. Teachers can charge by lesson, specifying their perferred lesson duration, or create custom lesson bundles with discounts for students who commit to multiple lessons upfront.

Scheduling: Intelligent Calendar System

We built Forte's scheduling to automate logistics while keeping human connections:

• Smart availability sync - Teachers set recurring openings that automatically adjust for booked lessons.
• Multi-channel alerts - Instant notifications (email/app/chat) for new bookings.
• Seamless follow-ups - Trial lessons flow naturally into standard scheduling via built-in messaging.
• Reliable reminders - Automated alerts and reminders reduce no-shows and missed appointments.

Forte has students and teachers around the world, so we engineered the scheduling to handle complex edge cases. Our scheduling solution seamlessly handles overlapping time zones, daylight-savings behaving differently in different countries, and last-minute changes, all while maintaining a single source of truth for all users.

Finding Teachers: Precision Matching at Scale

We engineered Forte's discovery system to turn preferences into perfect matches:

• Smart profiling - Student surveys are analyzed to identify ideal teaching styles.
• High-performance search - Delivers 50+ qualified matches at sub-second speeds.
• Transparent decisions - Clear pricing/availability displays with instant booking.
• Frictionless trials - One-click scheduling removes onboarding barriers.

Payments: Fair, Secure Transactions

We designed Forte's payment system to protect both students and teachers:

• Risk-free trials - Students pay upfront, teachers collect only after completed lessons.
• Guaranteed accuracy - Charges students precisely when teachers finalize lessons.
• Flexible policies - Supports custom no-show/late arrival fees per teacher's requirements.

The system’s idempotent transaction design ensures financial accuracy even during edge cases—like duplicate finalizations or mid-process refunds.

Trust & Safety Infrastructure

We engineered Forte's compliance systems to protect all users while minimizing friction:

• Parental control hub - Guardians manage multiple minor accounts and monitor their children's activity.
• COPPA-compliant verification - Blocks under-18 access until adult approval is confirmed, which became a model for other edtech platforms.

Admin Experience: Powerful Tools for Scalable Operations

We built Forte's admin systems to empower teams without engineering overhead:

• Smart Slackbot - Automatically alerts staff about critical platform events for rapid response.
• Retool Admin Console - Gives non-technical teams full control over users, content, and partnerships.
• Partner Dashboards - Custom views for 6+ institutional partners to track their teachers/students.
• Real-Time Analytics - Live queries monitor system health and user engagement.

The Retool integration enabled complex data relationships to be managed visually—eliminating 90% of back-end support requests.

Marketing Site: Beautiful, Responsive, and SEO-Optimized

We built Forte's marketing site to be a beautiful, responsive, and SEO-optimized experience for their users:

• Beautiful design - A modern, responsive design that is easy to use and navigate.
• SEO-optimized - The site is optimized for search engines, with a focus on content and user experience.
• Fast performance - The site is fast and responsive, with a focus on performance and user experience.