
Tutorspree (YC W11) Is An Airbnb For Tutoring - razin
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/26/tutorspree/
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ImperatorLunae
From the FAQ: "...only experienced educators - PhD's, high school teachers,
special education instructors, and professors with real classroom experience -
can list themselves on Tutorspree."

Really? This seems a little stringent. High school teachers are busy teaching
high school; PhD's are busy conducting research or teaching their own classes.
Of course, some of them are going to pick up tutoring on the side for some
extra money, but you're screening out huge portions of the available pool of
tutors.

Consider my position; I have a BS in Physics and currently tutor a few
students--mostly in calculus and geometry. Of course, I don't have "classroom
experience," but I've been tutoring students for a while. I know my stuff, and
I know when my students don't. I know how to read their math, catch mistakes,
and work through their errors with them. I know how to identify recurring
mistakes students make and prescribe problems to remedy those errors. I'm not
an educator, but I know the subjects I'm teaching. That's as good as any grad
student working as a TA, and they're teaching at the university level.

Why the high requirements? I understand the need for quality, but I sense,
more often than not, students are looking for someone who knows the material
to correct and guide them. You don't need a PhD to do that.

~~~
jacquesm
Personally I like the Karate method: everybody teaches what they know all the
time.

High requirements are a good way to get started though, that way you can set
the bar high, guarantee good reviews and happy customers, then slowly relax
the rules. The other way around wouldn't work nearly as well.

I'd say being a college student should allow you to help out high schoolers in
the subject of your studies though, likely you are aware of the problems the
high schoolers face better than anybody else, likewise high schoolers should
be allowed to tutor grade schoolers.

There might be a nice 'certification' gig hidden in here somewhere.

~~~
akharris
The certification question is a really interesting one. We looked at a lot of
other sites focused on various kinds of tutoring while building. We found that
the ones that offered online "tests" for certification were producing false
positives as to legitimate quality.

If I see a high schooler with certifications in 58 subjects, those
certifications tend to lose their meaning. Likewise, if I have a friend with a
Masters in English who taught writing at the college level fail your writing
certification, it seems a little funny. That's part of the reason we took a
different route.

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pagliara
Not YC-backed and no TechCrunch article, but WyzAnt (<http://www.wyzant.com>)
is a similar service that's been around for 6 years already. Another recent
one is Teachoo (<http://www.teachoo.com>). Tutorspree isn't the first and
probably won't be the last start up in this space.

~~~
yarone
Wyzant is growing steadily and gaining traction.

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rottencupcakes
A truly brilliant idea. The alternatives are essentially an unverified tutor
off of craigslist or an agency that takes 50% of the tutor's money. With a
good feedback system in place, I would be surprised if this doesn't become the
standard way to find a tutor.

Good luck, guys!

~~~
akharris
That's what parents and tutors kept telling us, and they sounded unhappy. We
decided to try to make them happier by building something for them.

~~~
kareemm
When I was running eduFire, finding the tutors was easy - it was aggregating
the students (and parents) that was the difficult part. If you can aggregate
the demand in a two-sided market, the supply will come.

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qeorge
I'd love to sponsor tutoring for someone who can't afford it. Maybe that's a
feature you could add later? Great job!

~~~
akharris
Thats a great idea. We've had thoughts in the same direction. Stick with us.

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chancho
"Founded by ... the startup is disruptive in the sense that the tutoring space
up until now has been monopolized by..."

Tech journalism bingo in one sentence!

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sachinag
I'm curious why you're doing actual subjects and not doing test prep. Did your
customer development say that people prefer Kaplan et al for SAT, SSAT, PSAT,
ACT, etc.?

(Personally, I would really love to have a service that screened potential
clients for me. I charge $150-200/hour for GMAT tutoring and I spend way too
much time dealing with people bitching about my fees. If I was just given
clients who had the ability and willingness to pay with no hassles, I'd be
thrilled.)

~~~
akharris
It's a question we keep playing around with. Our customer dev work said that
the subject matter market was, far and away, the most underserved/archaic - so
that's where we decided to focus.

But, we don't want to restrict our tutors. They decide what they want to
offer, and we'll list them for the subjects they want. I'm pretty sure that
the community will grow and change over time, but we want to make sure we're
hitting a defined problem first to get a full understanding of what works and
what doesn't.

Sign up, and we'll definitely be in touch. We love a good tutor.

~~~
sachinag
That's cool - you may be onto something. I'd wager there's some overlap
between subjects and SAT IIs, AP exams, and name-your-state equivalents of New
York State's Regents exams, as well. I'd do some thinking and planning on your
expansion vectors around those things.

As for me, I'm in Ann Arbor right now, so I don't think I'd be useful to you
yet. :)

~~~
akharris
Agreed. We're going to focus heavily on the problems we understand and solve
them before moving on.

We like Ann Arbor. You could be our first tutor out there - that's a nice
market share.

~~~
sachinag
Well, TechCrunch had an ad for WyzAnt next to your article, so I just signed
up for them. :) No, seriously, happy to help however I can.

Hey, if Ann Arbor can support a $200/hour GMAT tutor, then great. (Boston does
have a base of bankers and consultants to whom my services were very
attractive.)

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zaidf
_the screening process favors people who have experience teaching kids in
front of a classroom_

Interesting.

Some of the best tutors I had in my life had no classroom experience but were
exceptional tutors who knew their stuff and knew how to teach it one on one.
They were hands down better than the teacher in the classroom--as sometimes
the case when students need tutors.

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lifestyleigni
This is great! I had to trove through craigslist for a while before finding a
quality French tutor. This solves the issues of:

Finding a quality tutor Ratings Weeding out spam Knowing exactly who they are
(many french tutors were just french students! I wanted a native or near
native speaker).

I wonder though for this business model, what stops people from going around
Tutorspree for subsequent lessons to get around the $5 per lesson fee?

One thing that pops into mind is the ratings system. It would be beneficial to
continue to do the tutoring through the site in order to build a good profile.

There's also the credit card payment through tutorspree which is nice. (I'm
assuming most individual tutors can't process their own credit card payments).

However, there's still a risk that after the first session people will bypass
the system.

I really like this though, and can't wait to see this take off. Just sent it
out to my tutor.

~~~
akharris
Thanks! Looking forward to having your tutor.

The "jumping" problem you point out is one of the long term questions for us.
You're absolutely right that the ratings system is the biggest carrot to keep
tutors in. As you collect feedback, you move up in the rankings. The feedback
is not evergreen - so logging lessons over time will help float you up.

On the other side, we believe that the payment and scheduling elements are
worth the fee, especially in aggregate to the two sides.

At the end of the day, though, we look at that as a final funnel. We'll tweak
and iterate to maximize that final, long term conversion in such a way that
unlocks the most value for the folks in the system.

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johnrob
Wonderful idea. This could go way beyond grade school stuff. There are many
topics I'd love to learn more about, if there were a good way to find an
expert looking to give lessons. Piano, Surfing, Horseback Riding, etc etc.

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EGreg
Funny, I had this idea back in 2006 when I discovered web development. This
was before AJAX, I was pretty proud of having invented dynamic checking
myself. Hopefully the site still works -- it was one of my first attempts at
PHP

<http://thetutorbase.com> (used to be dailytutor.com)

I abandoned that project because although tutors were easy to get, the
marketing to students didn't scale well, and a paywall didn't work well (you
could pay with paypal for up to 3 tutors' names).

I thought up a better business plan, involving an online tutoring service, but
at the time no one would invest into anything. Similar idea, I'd say ...
that's how I know that raising money and doing joint ventures is about
relationships!

PS: Paul Graham where were you in 2006! :)

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bvi
Sorry to break it to you, sport, but nobody cares about your "ideas" if you
don't execute.

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EGreg
but I did execute. The website is there, and I signed up 100 tutors and got a
bunch of students. I got those 100 tutors in a week without any expenses. Even
after I abandoned it, the tutors kept signing up for a while afterward. That
showed traction on the tutor side.

I couldn't convince anyone to invest into it because I only asked family and
friends.

how do you figure?

~~~
EGreg
It's not that I didn't execute. I didn't know anyone who actually cared. I
even made a professional business plan about the 4 billion dollar tutoring
market and what I was planning to do.

The one rich guy I talked to did not know much about computers and just said
"students have no money, I won't invest" -- this is a guy who wanted a friend
of mine to build a botnet for him so he can generate traffic to his lead
generation business :P

I tried to explain that when it comes to education, students spend quite a
lot, especially when they are in need... but it didn't fly.

The bottom line is, you gotta execute AND have existing relationships with
people! Both are important factors in a startup's success.

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happy4crazy
Awesome! I've been thinking about how much I miss tutoring, and was grumbling
just the other day about how annoying it is to advertise your skills in any
reasonable way.

Just signed up, so if anyone has kids who need math/science/cs help in Boston,
look for Alan O'Donnell :)

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ryanb
awesome, thanks for signing up alan.

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danest
Any information on how the three founders met?

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akharris
Sure: Josh and I have known each other for years through mutual friends. We
started working on the idea that would become Tutorspree at the beginning of
the summer, and as we realized we were onto something, started figuring out
how to round out our team.

That led to a full on search for a technical co-founder back in NYC. It took a
fair amount of doing (and if you want to know more about finding a great
technical co-founder in NYC, happy to discuss some more). After a lot of work,
we found Ryan, and it's been great ever since.

~~~
danest
Aaron how much of technical background did you and Josh have when you first
started building the website and also when did you guys realize that you had
something?

Also do you guys plan on staying in NYC or moving out to California?

~~~
akharris
Not much. My last real coding experience was C++ back in AP CS. I started
teaching myself python at the same time we were doing full time customer
development. I had a couple of friends pitch in some time to help us do some
early stage stuff.

We hit a tipping point in early August where we realized we were onto
something - no one thing did it, more an aggregation on a lot of signals and a
lot of legwork and conversations. We decided the time was ripe to do it for
real, and put all of efforts into "finding Ryan."

He handles all the real coding. I pitch in on some of the front end work
(taught myself HTML and CSS) - but he's the guy who makes it all come
together. Although, I do seem to get stuck with setting up printers and
routers.

As for NYC/California: we're out in CA now for YC. We'll do whatever is best
for the company when the program ends.

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colanderman
Some feedback:

* My picture got stretched vertically when I submitted it. Not a lot, but enough to make me look goofy.

* Can I suggest sorting teaching experience by year? Mine's in a goofy order and I can't see how to fix it.

* It would be nice to have a way to charge a "travel fee" under circumstances determined by the tutor (e.g. to meet at the student's home, or to meet more than 1/2 hour away)

I love the 50% cut once / 5$ thereafter scheme. The 50% cut forever scheme
that is prevalent drove me to look for clients on my own, especially since I
tend to form lasting relationships with clients.

~~~
akharris
Great feedback. Consider it added to our stack.

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simonista
Very cool. I'm torn on the strict requirements to be listed as a tutor. On the
one hand I totally understand the need to filter for quality, and if you still
have enough tutors, you've probably set the bar at the right place. On the
other hand I am a graduate student and a Teaching Assistant and enjoy helping
people learn, although it's not something I'm pursuing professionally.

Small bug: the last two questions in the FAQ under the For Parents And
Students section are duplicates.

~~~
akharris
You should definitely sign up. You'll notice a lot of high quality grad
students with TA experience in our community. We use our requirements as
guidelines for making decisions - not intransigent rules - and we're always
refining them and making them better.

Thanks for pointing out that bug. We'll fix it.

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yequalsx
Some feedback. I teach mathematics at a community college. Using a Tablet PC
and services like Adobe Connect I could tutor anyone in the world who speaks
English well enough. Your service appears to be location based. With the rise
of online education it seems to me that limiting yourself to location based
tutoring is too limiting. Online tutoring can be done well (it can also be
done poorly).

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euroclydon
We homeschool our children. I want to find top quality tutors for languages
like, French, Greek or Hebrew. Also grammar, math, and comp-sci. I'll keep an
eye on Tutorspace. We're in Durham, NC.

~~~
akharris
We'd love to help out as soon as we get to Durham! Sign up for our mailing
list, and when we show up, you'll know.

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cmer
This is a good idea. However, I think applying the same concept to babysitters
would have much better potential. It's a much bigger market and problem in my
opinion.

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revorad
Looks interesting. You guys should do a grubwithus for tutors and students!

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jacquesm
What is your start-up the airbnb of?

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JoelMcCracken
I read that as "YC-Backed Torturspree is an Airbnb for Torturing"

~~~
JoelMcCracken
Aww guys, I just thought it was a funny misread

