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Why I spent months building an AI simulation engine to break the IELTS Band 6.5 bottleneck

Solo developer Said Baouhmad built an AI simulation engine to help international students break the Band 6.5 bottleneck on the IELTS exam writing module. The platform, IELTSRise, maps essays across all four official assessment criteria, highlights vocabulary and grammar gaps, and generates Band 9 model rewrites. The system launched on Product Hunt today.

read1 min publishedJun 3, 2026

Hey everyone,

I'm Said Baouhmad, a solo developer, and I wanted to share the raw journey behind a platform I’ve been pouring my nights into building: IELTSRise.

The inspiration came from watching brilliant, hard-working international students constantly stall out at a flat Band 6.5 on their IELTS exam writing modules. Because high-end human tutoring is gated behind steep hourly fees ($30–$50+/hr), most students simply cannot afford the continuous feedback loop required to figure out what microscopic structural or grammatical errors official examiners are penalizing them for.

To solve this, I spent the last few months engineering an automated, instant evaluation engine. Instead of just guessing a vague score, the platform maps an essay across all 4 official assessment criteria quadrants independently, highlights precise vocabulary collocation gaps, logs grammatical errors, and generates a side-by-side Band 9 model rewrite for that exact prompt.

We officially went live on Product Hunt today to launch IELTSRise out into the wild!

Building in public as a solo founder is an incredible mix of excitement and imposter syndrome. I am heavily focused on scaling our organic visibility and fine-tuning our user experience right now, so I would love to ask this community for some raw product feedback:

If you have a spare moment today to check out our live framework, test your own writing skills for free, or support our launch, it would mean the absolute world to me: Thanks so much for the support. I’ll be hanging out in the comment sections below to talk architecture, algorithms, or product strategy!

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