Live · 2026

Speak Up Lab

She teaches; I built everything else

2026

Dr Ayushi Agarwal has an Oxford DPhil and practises as a barrister at 8 New Square in London. For years she taught advocacy, argument, and oral communication at a high level. She wanted to run public-speaking and communication workshops for UK teenagers, and she had everything the programme needed except the infrastructure to run a business. In March 2026, we co-founded Speak Up Lab.

The free taster sessions are already running. The first paid cohort is September 2026.

Ayushi teaches. Everything that touches the business is mine to build and maintain: the website, the admin panel, the payment stack, the email lifecycle, the outreach engine, the customer research.

Before I wrote a line of code, I spent time on the research: who the students actually are, how the parents think about it, what the competition looks like in Amersham. Five customer personas on IDEO Human-Centered Design principles: two parent archetypes and three student archetypes matched to developmental stage. A competitor analysis for the Amersham area. Research on the GCSE Spoken Language Endorsement as the market context for families deciding whether to sign up.

Then the build. The admin panel came first because the business could not run without it: Ayushi manages the whole operation from it without touching code. Live dashboard with booking statistics. Taster session management with attendance tracking and walk-in capture. Enquiry and contact management. Subscriber management. Email template editing. A UTM link manager so every flyer and leaflet is trackable.

The outreach engine is a 17KB Python script that reads the contact list and creates Gmail drafts at scale via the Google Workspace CLI, with audience segmentation and email sequencing built in.

Aditya's name does not appear on speakuplab.co.uk. The brand belongs to Ayushi. That is by design.

Technical detail

Stack: Next.js 16, Supabase Postgres, Stripe, Resend with React Email (ten bespoke email templates: contact acknowledgement and notification, taster confirmation, reminder, no-show recovery, post-taster nurture and follow-up, newsletter welcome, and a daily admin digest). Upstash Redis rate-limits public form endpoints. PostHog tracks product analytics. QR codes generate for printed flyers and leaflets.

Thirteen API routes including Stripe and Resend webhooks with open, click, bounce, and complaint handling. Twenty-two Vitest tests across admin APIs, home page components, and core library functions. Two hundred commits in the first eight days.