The short version
Life Lab makes short video lessons for grades 6 to 12, sold to schools as the In Control and Can Do U curricula. It’s used in over 3,000 classrooms, including Johnston County, Spotsylvania County and Granbury SD. Its founder, Jeff Becker, is a former school counselor who built a demo of the platform himself in Replit. We took his code and made it a working product. It’s live, it’s still changing, and Jeff still writes some of it.
What the demo was
Honestly, it was better than we expected. The screens were good enough that our written plan said “Replit is the MVP,” and we didn’t bring in our design team at the start.
Behind those screens, the data was made up. The login let you pick which role you wanted to be. There was a real backend in the code that nothing was using, and no version control. When we brought it into GitHub on August 5, 2025, that first commit was 47,860 lines across 232 files.
Jeff had also hit the wall most people hit with these tools.
I think the project just got too big for replit.
I tried for it to change fonts, and that took me, like, nine prompts.
What we built
We kept what worked: the React and Express foundation, the way roles were laid out, and the screens as our brief. The platform still runs on Replit today.
The rest was the part you don’t see in a demo. We moved the data and logins to Supabase, a hosted database and sign-in service, and replaced the role picker with real accounts. We added a district admin role, plus bulk CSV import so a school can load its people from a spreadsheet. We built anonymous student screeners and trial signups that feed HubSpot. And we connected ClassLink, the single sign-on many schools use, which certified Life Lab in April 2026.
We also cut things. AI features and lesson checkpoints came out of the first release.
On October 6, 2025, two months after the repo opened, we’d covered everything in the original plan. The production link went out that December, and a pilot followed in January 2026.
this app is so good, man. This is going to change public education.
Jeff kept building
This is the part we didn’t plan. On May 7, 2026, Jeff made his first commit to the repo, using Claude Code, an AI coding tool. He works on his own branch, and we review what he makes and publish it. He’s made 127 commits so far.
He once added a Mario figure to the interface so he could tell his branch from the live site.
Interactive lessons started on that branch and merged in June 2026. They’re in beta now, with AI-written reports for teachers and school admins.
This feature is a game changer. No one else has this in their stuff.
That quote is about his own work, for what it’s worth.
