Q: What is University Tutor?

A: We help students and parents find the perfect tutor and contact them for free!

Bigger picture, we disrupt the traditional model of tutoring companies (Kaplan, Sylvan, Kumon, etc) which take about 50% of what the student pays as a commission. On UniversityTutor, the tutors keep 100% of what the student pays. This means the cost of tutoring is reduced and you no longer need to go through an expensive middleman. Similar shifts have already happened with travel agents and stock brokers, and I believe the tutoring space is the next business which will be disrupted by the internet.

Q: When did you have the idea for University Tutor?

A: The site started as a local tutoring company just in Houston around 2004 while I was in college. In 2008 a friend gave me the idea that doing most of the matching by phone with regional managers was inefficient. So the business was reinvented as the tutoring site you see today where 20,000 tutors are signed up all over the world (a dozen countries), tutors and students can directly contact each other, and there is no percent fee taken by the company. Today the business model is much closer to Google's, where any tutor can have a free listing on the site, but if they want a featured listing at the top of search results it's $9.95 a month. And of course the entire site can be run by just one person now (me) since no phone calls are required to match tutors and students.

Q: How long did it take to build University Tutor?

A: It took about 1-2 months to get the first prototype out. It was my first website built with Ruby on Rails. However, the site has continued to evolve over the following few years and is much different today. Here are some posts documenting the early versions and development process: startbreakingfree.com/242/from-new-idea-to-business-launch-in-two-weeks-with-pictures
startbreakingfree.com/category/universitytutor-com (start at the bottom)

Q: How long has the site been live? How is it doing?

A: It's been live a little over 2 years. I now have 20,000 active tutors signed up and 300 job requests go through the site per day. With about 2% of tutors as paid members (traditional freemium numbers) the site does about $3,000 in revenue per month with a 90% profit margin. Having no office or employees helps keep expenses low - in fact the only fixed expense for the company is $85/month for web hosting. I've considered raising money but I'm honestly not sure what I'd spend it on which would have an immediate and measurable ROI (I'm already doing various forms of advertising on a small scale which are profitable - they don't appear to be at higher CPCs).

Q: What are your plans for the web site? Do you plan on bringing on any team members?

A: No plans for that at the moment. If it becomes difficult or cumbersome to manage, I may bring on someone for support requests. But even these are relatively easy to manage. Each time someone asks a question by email, I add it as an FAQ and this drastically reduces the number of support requests. One of the best things about the site is how it practically runs itself. This way if I get distracted by another project for a few months and come back, it does fine on its own and continues to grow.

Q: What did you use to make your web site?

A: Ruby on Rails. MySQL. Slicehost.com

Q: Tell us a little about yourself

A: I started in the computer science arena and have a Masters in Computer Science from Rice University in Houston. But I've always known that I wanted to be the CS guy who understood business (a rare combination). So I double majored in economics as an undergrad, took accounting, and ended up tutoring about a dozen MBA students in finance and accounting (although I never got an MBA myself). I've worked briefly in consulting and other fields which hopefully give me a good perspective on the business side as well.

Q: Is there anything about your experiece developing this application you're like to share

A: I've always been impatient and I think I had unrealistic expectations going in that the business would become quite successful after maybe 6 months of work. Here I am three years later and I'm about where I thought I'd be in 6 months :) The experience has really caused me to start thinking more long term. I really believe most of the "overnight successes" we hear about are the result of maybe 10 years of hard work.

Q: Can our readers contact you with more questions?

A: Yes, they can reach me through my blog using the contact form on my personal site. I'm always interesting in meeting aspiring entrepreneurs and chatting about business ideas.