CrackParty: Exam Prep in Five-Minute Sprints

JEE and NEET preparation is dominated by long-form platforms: hour-long lecture videos, full-length mock papers, structured courses that assume a student sits down with a clear evening ahead of them. That format works for the student who is already deep in a routine. It is a bad fit for everyone else, and it makes practice feel like an obligation you postpone rather than something you pick up.

CrackParty starts from the opposite end. The unit is a five-minute timed sprint. You open it, answer a handful of questions by tapping cards, get a result worth sharing, and close it. No onboarding funnel, no course to enrol in — phone-OTP sign-in and you are in.

• Backend: A Go monolith — deliberately not microservices at this stage — with MySQL as the primary data store and DigitalOcean Spaces for assets.
• Client: React Native, so one codebase covers both platforms and the feel stays consistent as the format evolves.
• Question Retrieval: Meilisearch, so questions can be pulled by topic and difficulty fast enough to assemble a sprint on demand.
• The Hard Part — Ingestion: Exam questions live in PDFs and scans, full of notation that plain OCR mangles. I built a backoffice tool that runs papers through the Gemini API to parse images into structured LaTeX, which is what turns a pile of past papers into a usable question bank.

CrackParty is live in early release with a small initial user base — which is the point. A limited launch is where the interesting product questions actually surface: which sprint lengths get finished, which topics people return to, whether a shareable result travels the way I expect it to.

The ingestion pipeline is the piece I am most confident about. Content supply is the bottleneck that quietly kills exam-prep products — a platform is only as good as its question bank, and building one by hand does not scale. Making that tractable was the prerequisite for everything else.

This is also the second time I have taken a run at gamified exam prep. Compi, in 2021, was built around live multiplayer lobbies that needed 25 students playing simultaneously before anyone could start — an elegant idea with a brutal cold-start problem. CrackParty keeps the competitive feel and drops the dependency on a full lobby. That lesson cost me a product to learn.