Aaron had the product sense. He understood user flows, funnels, retention, and growth loops. But like many non-technical founders, he felt limited when it came to querying raw data himself.

He wasn't trying to become a backend engineer.
He just wanted to confidently answer questions like:

“How many users used this feature in their first week?”

“What's our best-performing acquisition channel by cohort?”

“Who are our top 5% power users—and what makes them tick?”

So we proposed a clear challenge:
300 SQL queries in 45 days. A mix of fundamentals, business logic, and real-world use cases. The goal wasn't to memorize SQL syntax—it was to train the brain to think in queries.

We built a custom SQL progression tailored to Aaron's goals and current skill level.

Phase 1 - Foundations (Days 1-5)
Basic query structure, filtering, sorting, and grouping.
Focus: SELECT, WHERE, GROUP BY, ORDER BY, COUNT, SUM

Phase 2 - Joins & Relationships (Days 6-15)
Merging tables, relational thinking, handling NULLs.
Focus: INNER JOIN, LEFT JOIN, RIGHT JOIN, self joins

Phase 3 - Subqueries & Aggregates (Days 16-25)
Going deeper with nested logic and grouped data.
Focus: subqueries, HAVING, DISTINCT, nested SELECTs

Phase 4 - Window Functions & CTEs (Days 26-35)
Power tools for analyzing behavior over time.
Focus: ROW_NUMBER, RANK, LAG, LEAD, CTEs (WITH clauses)

Phase 5 - Real-World Scenarios (Days 36-45)
Challenges that reflect startup-style metrics and analytics.
Focus: user retention, funnel conversion, session breakdowns, product usage

Each day, we delivered 6-8 SQL challenges—either from a curated bank (StrataScratch, LeetCode, DataLemur) or custom-built based on Aaron's product domain.