FLT is covering the 2013 Startmate accelerator program, which aims to help early-stage companies become enduring internet companies. Here, we introduce the team building Tutor on Demand.
Tutor on Demand founders Ben Sze, Duncan Anderson and Jeremy Cox met while working together as analysts for investment bank Goldman Sachs JBWere. At the time they were all based in Melbourne. Now, Sze and Cox have moved into Anderson’s Paddington share-house — he’s been in Sydney for a couple years now, leaving a strategy role with Google to join Startmate.
Tutor on Demand provides online tutorials for final year high-school students, completing VCE or HSC courses. It’s a royalty based system — top teachers are rewarded based on the number of purchases of their courses. Each course costs $25, allowing a student access to around 8-12 hours of content.
“The whole idea is to connect as many students with the few great teachers,” says Sze. “It started in Victoria with the VCE course.”
Since launching in March 2012, more than 2,700 students and teachers have signed up to the platform. Around 1,000 of those are paying customers. In a Startmate first, none of the team members have a technical background. The founders think it might be because the concept has shown some early success attracting customers and increasing revenue.
“Teachers go through everything in the syllabus. It’s really important to get ready for the final exams, so that’s why we’ve focussed on Year 12 so far,” says Sze.
You can tell the founders have known each other for years: they often jump in, finishing each other’s sentences.
Anderson continues: “It’s all about finding the best teachers. Different people learn in different ways, and we’re trying to cater for that.”
Tutor on Demand founders Jeremy Cox, Duncan Anderson and Ben Sze (Image: Zach Kitschke)
They first started discussing the concept for Tutor on Demand in early-2011. Anderson says as soon as he heard the idea, he knew the potential was huge. Tutor on Demand now has courses from 17 teachers — the founders say they’ve found the top teachers in the state, but aren’t keen to reveal how they’ve recruited them.
“Benny called me, and said ‘I’ve got this business idea,'” says Anderson. “He mentioned using Skype and providing tutors, but I’d been in Korea, and met this company called Megastudy. They built a video marketplace and were killing it.”
As of July 2012, Megastudy had a reported market capitalisation of $431 million. It was founded in 2000 to cater to the hundreds of thousands of high-school students, who attend the cramming schools scattered across the country. The goal for students is to remember as much as possible for exams, in the hope of going to the best school or university.
Lynda is another humble video education success story. While many won’t have heard about the tutorial site created for software, creative and business skills, it recently raised $103 million. That followed 17 years of organic growth. PandoDaily reported how Lynda execs were courted for years by VC firm Accel Partners, before finally agreeing on a deal. The Tutor on Demand founders say they are trying to do something different to these sites, and organisations like the not-for-profit Khan Academy; backed by Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
They say there’s an unequal distribution of good teachers in Australian schools — the best teachers are not evenly spread between suburbs, cities and towns, public and private. Their goal is to find the best teachers and allow any student to access their lessons. The best teachers get rewarded, while students get access to helpful tutorials.
“A good education shouldn’t necessarily be free. You need to reward good teachers,” says Cox.
Over the next few months the Tutor on Demand founders will be focussed on growing the site’s customer base. Currently, they’re trying to do a customer phone call a day. There are several groups which they want to better understand: those who signed up and didn’t purchase any courses, those who have previously used the platform and now don’t, and those who use it all the time.
The feedback is clear. Students want study notes (many have been taking screenshots from the videos and printing their own), an iPhone app, and more quiz and test content. The trio aren’t confident they’ve got the pricing right just yet — there are several potential models which the founders are exploring. Potentially, they could offer access based on subscription, or have a different pricing model for selling to schools. They say the latter opportunity is something they only realised once teachers started asking. Interestingly, more than 5% of the current paid users are teachers.
“Good teachers want good outcomes for their class. They’re more likely to be early adopters because they want to find the best way to achieve good results for their students,” says Anderson.
Until now, a friend of Sze’s who owns a web development agency has been helping with development. However, Startmate founder and coordinator, Niki Scevak, has been considering introducing a ‘Hackstars‘ style program for startups to trial potential staff, and get additional support during the five month program. The Tutor on Demand founders are hoping they might be able to find some development talent to support them.