Two platforms died on my students. That is the short version. The longer one is worth telling.

In 2024 I ran a class. The goal was simple: help a group of students build a professional presence online so that when they finished their studies, employers could find them. I chose Read.CV. It was clean, it was modern, and it showed work in a way that a PDF never could. We spent sessions on it. Students built profiles, uploaded their CVs, wrote short bios. By the end, most of them had something they were genuinely proud of.

A few months after those students entered the job market, Read.CV was acquired by Perplexity. Within a reasonable amount of time after that, the platform was shut down. The profiles were gone. The work those students had put in was gone with them.

That was the second time this had happened.

The class before the Read.CV one, I had taught students how to publish articles on Medium. At the time, Medium was the place to write. It had reach, it had credibility, and getting published there felt like something. The students wrote. Some of them wrote well. Then Medium changed its model, restricted access behind paywalls, and the audience that had once been there largely moved on. What the students had built on that platform stopped mattering in the way it once had.

Two classes. Two platforms. Two dead ends.

I started thinking about what a platform built specifically for these students would look like. It would need to do what Read.CV did: show a person's experience, skills, and work history in a way that felt professional and was easy to share. It would also need to do what Medium did: give people a place to write and publish, connected directly to their name and identity. A profile and a voice, in one place.

That much was obvious. What I had not fully accounted for until I was standing in front of a classroom was the language problem.

During those classes, I would walk students through a sign-up process and watch them freeze. The button on the screen said something like "Sign Up" or "Continue" or "Get Started." It was right in front of them. They could see it. But the language barrier made it invisible in a functional sense. They would look at the screen and ask me what to do next. I would point at the button. They would ask again. I would read it to them and explain what it meant. Then they would click.

This happened over and over.

When I started building Qoraal, I built the interface in Somali. Every label, every button, every error message. The sign-up flow, the dashboard, the profile editor. All of it in Somali. The difference was immediate when I tested it with the same audience. People moved through the flow without stopping to ask what a button meant. The friction that had nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the language was gone.

Qoraal is the answer to two questions I had been sitting with for a while. The first: what happens to everything my students build when the platform closes? The answer is that it should live somewhere we own. The second: why are we building on platforms that were not designed with our community in mind? The answer is that we do not have to.

The name Qoraal means writing in Somali. That felt right.