Mobile Principal: a K-12 SaaS rebuilt off low-code
Aimen Houalef
Mobile Principal is a SaaS platform used by school principals and district administrators across the United States. It arrived built on Adalo and Xano, with real users and real daily traffic, and no room left to grow.
The state it was in
Nothing was broken exactly. That is usually how these arrive. It ran, people used it, and every new feature request had turned into a negotiation with the platform rather than a piece of engineering work. Response times were climbing, the data model fought back against anything new, and the whole thing was capped by decisions that made sense when it was a prototype.
What I did
I re-architected the frontend on Next.js for performance, SEO and maintainability, then went into the Xano backend and cut response times by redesigning the data model and drawing proper API boundaries. On top of that: real time communication between staff, role based access for the different levels of district and school administration, task management, and reporting.
Defining done
The thing I look for on a rescue project is not the ticket list emptying. It is whether a district can go through an entire working day on the platform without anyone needing me, and whether adding a feature has stopped being an argument with the foundation. That is when it is finished.
Where it is going
The backend is now migrating from Xano to a PostgreSQL first, code driven architecture, which is the kind of next step you only earn once the previous stretch is genuinely done.
Delivered in collaboration with Steptech Innovation LLC.
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Posted Sep 25, 2026
A K-12 SaaS for US school districts that had outgrown Adalo and Xano. Re-architected on Next.js.
