Custom menu builder for photography educators

Every photography instructor teaching Photoshop or Lightroom Classic faces the same moment: they design a curriculum around a specific workflow, then spend 30% of class time watching students dig through the wrong submenu. The instructor knows exactly which 15 commands students will need for the course. The software exposes 400. There's no way to give students a simplified, task-specific menu environment that reflects the course structure rather than Adobe's taxonomy.

This gap exists because Adobe's workspace customization stops at panel layouts and keyboard shortcuts — it doesn't extend to restructuring or hiding menu items in a way that's shareable across a group of students. The educator has no tool to say 'for this six-week course, students should only see these commands, grouped this way.' Schools and bootcamps are the buyer here, but the software vendors sell to individuals and enterprises — education is a secondary market with no dedicated product attention.

The specific complaints that map here are 'too many functions under a pull-down menu and wish there is a more efficient grouping,' 'menus are difficult to navigate until familiar,' and 'wish there was an info box for certain options that could explain what they actually do.' An educator trying to teach composition to beginners doesn't want students to see the 3D menu, the Type menu, or 90% of Filter. Right now, the only workaround is to tell students 'ignore everything except these three menus,' which doesn't work in practice.

This is a business because courses run on repeating cycles — a school that runs a 12-week Photoshop bootcamp three times a year has the same onboarding problem every cohort. The curriculum is reusable but the menu chaos is reset every time new students sit down. Instructors who publish online courses face the same problem at scale: a tutorial filmed in one menu layout becomes confusing when Adobe shuffles submenus in an update.

What to build

Build a browser-based tool where photography instructors define a custom subset and regrouping of Photoshop or Lightroom Classic menu commands, export that configuration as a shareable workspace file with an install script, and distribute it to students — including inline tooltips that appear when a student hovers a configured command, written by the instructor in plain language.

Where to start

Start with online course creators who sell Photoshop tutorials on platforms like Teachable or Gumroad, where they can bundle a custom workspace file as a course asset — they already have an audience and a strong incentive to reduce student drop-off caused by menu confusion.

The hard part

Adobe's workspace files don't support full menu restructuring through documented public APIs, so any solution likely requires a local shim or extension that could break on software updates — and getting instructors to trust an install on student machines is a hard early sales conversation.

How it makes money

Annual license per instructor with a student seat limit; additional revenue from a marketplace where instructors sell or share their custom workspace configurations to other educators.