How We Turn Your Feedback Into a Living Platform
Why plugging into a shared brain beats trying to build your own experience.
Welcome to the 4th edition of the Hovn Behind-the-Scenes series.
Last week in BTS #3, I shared 7 ways your CPR software stack keeps you stuck in operations instead of out filling classes and signing employers.
This week I want to show you the opposite side of that coin:
How we use your feedback and real behavior to make Hovn a living platform — not “just another tool” that freezes the day you sign up.
The Tree Branch Problem
One of the hardest parts of building software for CPR is that many of you are first responders.
Your job is to improvise when things are missing. If you’re out of splints, you use tree branches.
The problem is when that improvisation turns into the feature request:
“We need more tree branches on the truck.”
In software terms, that sounds like:
“Can you add coupon codes so I can accept cash?”
“Do you have email tools so I can deliver materials?”
“Can I edit a student’s information before class?”
If we just recreate those tools, we’re rebuilding the same problems on a prettier screen.
So we push for the story behind the request.
What We Heard → What We Shipped
Here are a few real examples of how this works:
“Do you have coupon codes for employers?”
What they were actually doing: Creating unique codes per employer, listing them publicly on their site, then reconciling who used what at the end of the month to build invoices.
The real problem: Employers aren’t discount codes. They’re accounts with staff, history, and billing relationships.
What we shipped: B2B employer accounts. One place to see an employer’s staff, group client sessions into a single order, tie classes back to the account, and generate invoices from real data — not coupon archaeology.
“Do you have email tools so I can deliver materials?”
What they were actually doing: Manually triggering email sequences after registration, hoping students opened the right email at the right time, then resending when they didn’t.
The real problem: Students don’t need more emails. They need one place to see what’s next.
What we shipped: A student portal where materials, instructions, and upcoming classes live in one place. Email becomes a notification layer pointing back to the portal — not the operating system itself.
“Can I edit a student’s information before class?”
What they were actually doing: Chasing students via email to confirm details, manually updating records, fixing typos, and still ending up with bad data on rosters.
The real problem: The admin was doing all the work to maintain a single one-time-use row in a registration. No student relationship. No verified data. No leverage.
What we shipped: Student accounts with verification. After purchase, the student confirms their own information on a single profile — not a registration row. This brings them into the portal (building a relationship beyond email), asks for employer information (which providers now use as leads for group training), and gives you a “Verified” badge on the session.
That’s peace of mind before class and a stronger data point if you ever face a chargeback dispute.
How Feedback Actually Flows
We get input from three places:
Conversations — 1:1 onboarding calls, support chats, replies to SitRep and these BTS emails, and a customer advisory group. (Yes, we’ve registered for and attended classes from providers on Hovn.)
Behavior — Where students drop off in registration. How coordinators move through rosters. Which features get used heavily vs. ignored.
Patterns — The same complaint from multiple TCs. The same workaround story told three different ways.
Roughly half of what we ship in every release ties directly to something a customer said or did.
And here’s the selfish upside: we prioritize feedback from people who are actually running on Hovn and willing to walk us through their workflows. Those customers see relief first — prototypes, early versions tuned around their exact setup. Once we’ve tested and hardened the solution there, we roll a generalized version out to everyone.
If you’re in the weeds with us, your pain gets solved faster.
Home Depot vs. General Contractor
Most CPR software works like Home Depot.
They add more tools to the shelf. More fields. More configuration. More “flexibility.” You pick the tools, you design the workflow, you bolt it together. If something breaks, you fix it. If something’s missing, you build it.
It’s cheap to add another color to the crayon box. The value is in the picture.
We’re trying to be the opposite: a general contractor who’s led large-scale software, worked with dozens of training centers and baked those lessons into the product.
You don’t configure Hovn. You use it. And it gets better — not because you customize it, but because we learn from thousands of transactions across the platform.
We ship major releases every two weeks. Code goes out almost every day. The product you’re on in March is meaningfully better than the one you signed up for in January.
That’s what “living platform” means to us.
How to Know If Hovn Is Right for You
Hovn is for operators who don’t want to be the IT department — who want opinionated workflows that just work and keep improving as the industry changes.
If that’s you, you’re home.
If you want control over every field and workflow, you’ll probably be frustrated, because we’d rather go deeper on problems that affect many providers than bolt on every feature anyone mentions.
Why This Beats Building Your Own
A lot of owners respond by trying to become software companies: custom portals on top of Enrollware, Acuity plus a dozen integrations, months of configuration.
The problem: that stack only learns from one business. When you get busy, the product stops evolving. And the more you customize configurable software, the harder it is for anyone — you or the vendor — to improve it without breaking something.
We talked to a TC who built a custom multi-site SEO strategy years ago. It worked — he was ahead of the curve. Then Google changed how it reads inventory. His setup couldn’t adapt. Now he’s invisible in local search and on the hook to rebuild the whole stack: 40-80 hours of dev work, weeks of testing, plus the revenue bleed while he’s down. One shift, $50K+ bill.
That’s the tax of owning your own infrastructure: every industry shift is your problem.
Structured data is already built into Hovn. Everyone on their own stack is sitting on old tech, waiting for the next bill. Agencies get paid when you build. We get paid when you grow.
If you’re worried your feedback is “helping competitors,” consider the alternative: your ideas get locked inside a custom solution that only you pay for, maintain, and keep up to date.
With Hovn, you push those needs into a product you don’t have to host, upgrade, or keep ahead of Google and the agencies. We pressure test it with additional data. You still keep your real edge — relationships, instructors, employer deals — but you stop paying a solo tax on infrastructure.
The Bigger Picture
The real enemy here isn’t the TC down the street.
It’s the antiquated, DMV-style student experience that makes people dread taking these classes and drives prices down. Flooded directories with fake locations. Confusing websites. Clunky registration. Fifteen emails to figure out what’s next.
Shared infrastructure that keeps improving based on feedback is how we raise that floor — for students, for employers, and for the providers trying to build something worth paying for.
Your custom stack learns from one business. Hovn learns from thousands of students and sessions.
That’s how the whole industry gets back to a place where providers can focus on teaching.
Three questions for you:
Are you trying to build your own student experience… and are you really investing in it? Be honest: are you building your own platform, or bolting tools in front of a DIY / legacy stack and then going on feel instead of putting real time, money, or a cadence behind improving it?
How are you getting hard feedback on your student experience and tools? What are the actual feedback loops you have today to learn from students and employers about how it feels to find, register, complete, and get their card — and where your software / stack is making that harder than it needs to be?
If you were on Hovn tomorrow, what’s the first workflow you’d want us to sit with you and watch end-to-end?
Hit the comments and tell us.
If you already know you’re done playing IT and want to see how our feedback loop would attack your specific setup:
Talk soon,
Jon and Shubs
Co-founders, Hovn