I definitely know how hard it is, I have 10 years of experience and I'm now staff eng and team lead at a 50B+ MC company.
I had my own startup, and built many projects first-hand, but I'm not going to de-anonymize myself for the sake of argument.
In my opinion, it should always be hard. OP had a good launch and delivered, which is something that's incredible and that only < 1% of devs do, especially by themselves. The design is terrible, but the idea and execution was great.
I also love the fact that he did this out of wanting to prove that he could do the work, and not taking the L from the rejection.
I hope I never work on your team, the attitude you're displaying would me an instant no-go from me. Junior devs need encouragement, guidance, and positive feedback. You've managed to wrap semantically positive feedback in a negative mantle. Please leave this guy alone and allow him to continue kicking ass.
The design doesn't need to be great for an educational site. More frontend tasks can be done to change the css with a library like tailwind ui and it will look better, doing css from scratch is harder but cheaper than the $200 tailwind download. The hardest part of this application is done.
How much experience do you have with design, which was your criticism? More importantly, what objective characteristic of the design do you think is awful?
I had my own startup, and built many projects first-hand, but I'm not going to de-anonymize myself for the sake of argument.
In my opinion, it should always be hard. OP had a good launch and delivered, which is something that's incredible and that only < 1% of devs do, especially by themselves. The design is terrible, but the idea and execution was great.
I also love the fact that he did this out of wanting to prove that he could do the work, and not taking the L from the rejection.