Why I'm Building Ink Wise (And What It's Teaching Me About AI, Doubt, and Doing It Anyway)

A few months ago, someone at work told me I couldn't do it.

I'd been talking about an idea: a tool to help educators assess student writing in ways that actually develop capability, not just catch cheating. Something that used AI properly, not just as a detection engine or a chat interface.

The response was polite dismissal. Too complex. You'd need a team. That's a serious engineering effort. Maybe partner with a vendor.

Translation: stay in your lane.

So I went home and started building Ink Wise myself.

The point I'm trying to prove

There are actually two points. One is personal. One is bigger.

Ask any education leader what they're doing with AI and you'll hear: "We're looking at how students can use chatbots responsibly" or "We're investing in detection to maintain academic integrity."

That's like saying electricity is for light bulbs and nothing else.

AI can do so much more. And Ink Wise is my attempt to show what "more" looks like.

What Ink Wise actually is

Ink Wise is an academic writing assessment tool for modern learners. But that description doesn't capture what makes it different.

Most AI in education falls into two camps:

Ink Wise is neither.

It's AI that helps educators understand how students write, where they struggle, and how to develop their capabilities over time. It's not about catching or replacing, it's about illuminating.

The tool analyses writing to surface patterns: How does this student structure arguments? Where do they lose coherence? What's their relationship with evidence? How has their writing developed across submissions?

This gives educators insight they can't get from reading essays one at a time. And it gives students feedback that actually helps them improve, not just a grade and some red ink.

Why "AI for good" isn't just marketing

I'm building Ink Wise because I believe AI in education has taken a wrong turn.

The dominant narrative is adversarial. Students use AI to cheat. Institutions use AI to catch them. Everyone's trying to outsmart everyone else. Trust is eroding.

Meanwhile, the actual potential of AI to improve learning is being ignored.

• →AI could help us understand how people learn, not just what they produce.
• →It could give educators superpowers, the ability to see patterns across hundreds of students.
• →It could personalise feedback at scale and identify struggling learners before they fail.

But that's not where the money is. The money is in detection tools that universities panic-buy and chatbots that make headlines.

Ink Wise is my bet on a different future. One where AI is a partner in learning, not a threat to be managed.

Is it naive? Maybe. But someone has to build the alternative.

Building solo (and why that matters)

Here's what the doubter got wrong: building serious software no longer requires a team.

Five years ago, they'd have been right. Ink Wise would have needed backend engineers, frontend developers, ML specialists, DevOps, QA. A team of six or eight, minimum. Months of coordination. Significant capital.

Today, I'm building it in evenings and weekends, using AI assistants that handle the tedious parts while I focus on the hard problems: what the tool should actually do, how it should feel, what educators actually need.

I'm not saying it's easy. It's not. I'm saying it's possible in ways it wasn't before. And that changes everything about who gets to build, and what gets built.

The best products come from people who feel the problem. Enterprise software built by committee serves no one well. Tools built by someone who's been in the classroom, who's marked a thousand essays, who understands the gap between what educators need and what vendors sell, those tools are different.

That's the advantage of building solo. Not speed (though that helps). Coherence. Vision. The ability to make opinionated choices without design-by-committee compromises.

The doubt was a gift

I should thank the person who doubted me. Genuinely.

Without that conversation, Ink Wise might still be an idea I talked about occasionally. The dismissal was the spark. "You can't do that" became "watch me."

This is a pattern I've noticed in myself. Tell me something's impossible and I'll become obsessed with proving otherwise. It's not healthy, exactly. But it's productive.

Guest Loop started the same way: frustration with generic tools and bigger competitors who thought they had the market locked up. Now it's a product helping vacation rental hosts across Australia.

Ink Wise will follow the same arc. Started as a point to prove. Becoming a product that could actually matter.

What happens next

Ink Wise is in development. The core is built. The roadmap is clear. I'm using it to refine my own understanding of what educators actually need.

If it works, if it proves that AI can be genuinely useful in education without being adversarial or replacing human judgement, then it becomes another product in the Teachnology Ventures portfolio. Something I can sell, license, or use to demonstrate what's possible.

If it doesn't work, I'll have learned a lot and proved I can build production-grade software solo. The doubter will still be wrong about what's possible.

Either way, I win.

The real lesson

Here's what building Ink Wise is teaching me:

You can do this too

I'm not special. I'm a product manager who got annoyed and decided to build.

The capability gap between "person with an idea" and "team that can execute" has collapsed. If you have domain expertise and a willingness to learn modern tools, you can build things that would have been impossible five years ago.

That's what Teachnology is about. Not just building products ourselves (Guest Loop, Ink Wise, Forkcast) but teaching organisations how to build their own.

Most consultants create dependency. We build capability. We want you to look at a problem and think "we could build that" instead of reaching for another SaaS subscription or waiting for a vendor's roadmap.

The tools exist. The patterns are learnable. The only question is whether you're willing to ignore the doubters and start.