When we first went onto online teaching back in March (we are just returning to it tomorrow) I found my students worked at all hours of the day. Moreover, this got me thinking about how our schedules may not be the most conducive to ALL students. Eventually, I started to think about tutoring, which I had quite a bit of experience with as a student in my K-12 years and my wife has offered at the personal level, hired by a parent to assist a student, and at a organizational level, within a corporate tutoring service.
Finally, this brought me to my idea of on-demand tutoring. A service much like Uber or Skip the Dishes, but for learning.
You can go to my site which has the Elevator Pitch and the Venture Pitch, by clicking on the logo below or you can watch the elevator pitch below.
Hi Michael,
I like the idea of comparing your product to that of Uber and Skip’s on demand service, education style. However, I do want to know the market a little more before diving in. Do you have a market analysis and an ask?
Neal
Hi Neal,
Thank you! I did have an “Ask” page, but I did not include it by accident. So, it is there now, thank you! As for the market, I attempted to find information, but the reports I could find all cost a substantial amount, although I did find one report by Yahoo Finance, which I have now included.
I had the same problem this fall when returning to online teaching. Many emails at odd hours so I do think it is a need. I almost went with a tutoring system for my venture! LOL I guess that would say there is a market for your idea. I liked that you put yourself into the video so the viewer could get a feel for the person pitching the company.
Overall your presentation was smooth and gave me lots of information so I knew what you were about.
Good work!
Thank you Sarka! It was quite interesting to see when students would send emails or complete assignments. I do think they suffered a lot when they came back in September as their schedules were way off. I had a few fall asleep in that first week or so back. This time that we are online, we returned on the 30th, we have much more structured times, which I think is working.
I wanted to make it like an “elevator pitch”. If I had more editing skills I would have made the background look more like an elevator, but I worked within the skills that I had.
Hi Michael,
I like the idea for an app with in-demand tutors that support the nuances of in-demand topics. I haven’t seen anything like that in the K-12 space, but working in higher education at Pearson I’ve seen this applied on a global scale with some serious financial hits and some newer, more promising successes.
TutorVista came immediately to mind when I listened to your idea. Pearson partnered with the company and rather too rapidly invested in the company and scaled up. The partnership seemed to make sense. Campus research and customer support lines all seemed to point to an immediate need for tutoring services in the more complicated subject areas like calculus, algebra, tech math, and chemistry. The service was integrated into our online courses and the first three uses of tutors (phone or chat) were free. After that, students had to pay for the service. That failed. Students did not pay for the inexpensive service. What went wrong? So the pivot was to sell the tutoring service at the institutional level, where all students can benefit. Too few schools paid, and that part of the business was dropped for a while. Now there is Smarthinking in use, and seems to offer the same services but is now being used in ways that TutorVista was not. The business is virtually the same, and 90% of the tutors have Master’s or PhD credentials. Maybe the first tutoring service was just scaled too quickly.
Maybe at a local or provincial level to begin with it’s a great idea. If you ever seriously considered it, I’d highly recommend that you don’t develop an app and deal with software developers, but that you start with a company that has an existing, customizable web app with a design team for support and ecommerce capability already built in. You could start quickly, validate the business idea quickly, get feedback on the design and necessary functionality with little upfront capital invested. Or you might pretend that you’ve just completed this first phase of development and you’re now seeking investment for marketing support and more secure/robust app development. Scalability across provinces will require an additional cost of mapping services across the various curricula. That may be a simple mapping activity, but will need to fit into the design cost and map into the ecommerce system.
Best,
Ben
Thanks a lot for the feedback Ben, you really gave me a lot to think about.
FEEDBACK
Hi Michael, thanks for your elevator and venture pitches. I think your concept is quite interesting and I appreciate the thought and effort put into turning it into a venture. I would like to provide some feedback for each pitch separately.
Elevator pitch: Overall, it was quite well done, I think you covered the problem and how your venture seeks to solve it quite well. Your pitch was a bit long however, at well over the 1 minute maximum.
Venture pitch: You covered your topic quite well in my opinion. I especially appreciated the walkthrough of the app interface for both students and tutors. If I can offer some constructive criticism, I would say the website design needs a lot of work. The purple on purple is a little too much and the large moving banners were hard to keep track of and distracting when they wizzed by as I was reading other portions of the page. For something like a venture pitch, elegant simplicity is oftentimes more important and in this case I would argue a simplified UX could go a long way.
Hi Adrian,
Thank you for the feedback. I really struggled with getting the Elevator Pitch at a minute, I think I had 48 minutes of attempts, as I wanted to try and make sure I got the idea across. I have been very impressed with what I have seen on other peoples’ pitches and definitely feel like I have learned from them. As for the colours, I only found that out after my kids said something to me about the colours, as I am colourblind, I thought it was a dark blue or purple with a light blue. Unfortunately, I had created the design online and paid for it, which gave me the colour palette to match and couldn’t find a way reverse it, but thank you for the feedback.
REVIEW: Hi Michael, I think you have clearly given a lot of research into the venture pitch, and I quite like the solution that you posed. I think matching the tutor’s strengths with the student’s weakness area is a good function to help ensure a more successful session. Rating the tutor is also a great function, because it meant that the tutor needs to actually solve the student’s problems, and not just deliver lots of information and never focus on what the student actually needs.
You went into very specific details on how it works, which shows that you have a very clear direction on the product, and it can give potential investors more confidence in you.
Thanks for sharing!
Thank you!
Hi Michael,
I would like to reflect what some others have said in that I feel like you have done a wonderful job with including yourself as part of this product. You have a convincing presence in your elevator pitch, and sell your product well. You add an honest, personal touch to CQ.
Neal