Built by dental students, for dental students

Victor's side

It was late. One of those study room sessions that had gone on so long the flashcards had stopped meaning anything. We'd been at it for about nine hours, revising for our formative exams, and nothing was going in anymore. We needed something closer to the real thing, so we went looking for practice questions that actually matched the exam format.

We found a site that claimed to have questions for every year. We paid for it. Turns out "every year" meant five questions, for our year. We'd been scammed, just not very dramatically. We ended up laughing about it more than anything. The bit that had existed was actually decent, which almost made it worse. It was good enough to show us what we wanted, and small enough to prove no one had actually built it properly.

That's when one of us said it, half as a joke: even we could build something better than this. Neither of us had any real software background. But we couldn't stop thinking about it, so we stopped joking and started trying.

What followed was the sped up version of a company being built by two people who had no idea what they were doing yet. Testing hosting platforms, comparing what would actually work, teaching ourselves as we went. School holidays disappeared into it. All nighters that ran straight into 9am lectures became normal. At one point I deleted the entire site with no backup and lost everything we'd built. We just started again.

The hardest part was never the coding or the content, though there was plenty of both. It was the balance. Dental school doesn't leave room for a second job, and this wasn't a second job. It was closer to a second full time job with overtime, stacked directly on top of the first. Bus rides to uni stopped being downtime and became time to write questions. Library sessions ran until they were physically closing the doors on us, more nights than I'd like to admit. We were there early enough and late enough, often enough, that we got to know the morning cleaners. Not just a nod, actual conversation, the kind you only get from showing up at hours you probably shouldn't be awake for. There's plenty from that stretch I'll keep for us rather than a blog post, but that gives you the shape of it. There were points where it felt genuinely unsustainable. What got us through it was that we were doing it together. When one of us ran out of motivation, the other one hadn't yet, and it evened out just often enough to keep going.

DentPass exists because we got scammed out of £3.99 on a formative exam night and decided that was unacceptable.

Lahi's side

I've always been someone that's creative and aspirational. After we found that website, I honestly believed in it, not that they'd done something impressive, but that Victor and I could produce something much greater.

We were hit with technical challenges almost immediately. Registering the company, setting up transactions, sorting a bank account, buying a domain name, figuring out advertising, and plenty more on top of that.

On the backend, we actually started on an Excel spreadsheet. Genuinely. That's where the question bank was born. Think of a question, write it down, don't forget the correct answer option, and format everything properly before Excel cries itself to sleep.

If I'm honest, what we're trying to do is help people centralise their revision. DentPass isn't here to be another form of revision, it's here to streamline the process of searching for one. Students spend something like a fifth of their time just searching for resources before they've even started learning anything. We wanted to give that time back, by pulling together the methods that actually work, spaced repetition, real exam style questions, proper practice, all in one place instead of scattered across ten different sites and half finished decks.

Building it together

It has had its challenges at times, of course it has, but it helps to remember this is a marathon, not a sprint. We've both had to stay consistent, even on the days neither of us felt like it. It's a bit like a three legged race, except one that doesn't really end. You're tied to someone else's pace whether you like it or not, and the only way through is staying in step together.

The biggest thing about DentPass has always been staying close to the people actually using it. We built this for the community, not just to serve it from a distance. Whenever someone sends feedback, a request for a topic we haven't covered yet, or an idea for something we haven't thought of, we take it on. It genuinely shapes what gets added and what gets fixed. DentPass exists because of the people using it, so it only makes sense that they get a say in where it goes next.

There's no agenda at play here. DentPass isn't controlled or puppeted by some larger company pushing an angle. What's worth saying is that we're students. There was no outside funding and no help from anyone else. Whatever DentPass needed, we funded ourselves.

Where DentPass is now

As of writing this, DentPass is live and growing, and the plan is to keep reaching students across the majority of universities in the UK.

Where it's going

That growth is really where the bigger goal comes in. We want DentPass to become the best revision platform for dental students on the BDS programme, and we don't want that limited to the UK. Plenty of other countries run the same BDS structure with the same core curriculum, even if the actual revision culture looks different day to day. Jordan is one example, and similar BDS programmes run across countries like India, Malaysia, and Singapore too. We want to build something that serves anyone working through that pathway, wherever they're doing it, and keep supporting them well beyond graduation, right through their careers as dental professionals.

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From the DentPass Family.