Campus Spotlight: Tutorfly, a peer to peer tutoring service
Tutorfly is a peer tutoring platform that launched in the fall of 2017, where students tutor other students. They are a socially conscious corporation that improves grades by providing effective student tutors at an affordable price. The company believes in students’ abilities to empathize with their peers and come up with creative ways to translate their knowledge. Tutors either receive payment, or receive community service hours and donate their salary to a local charity on their behalf.
We talked to UCLA senior Parsa Rezvani, the Founder and CEO of Tutorfly. To learn more, check out their website at https://tutorfly.herokuapp.com/!
How did the idea of Tutorfly come into being?
Parsa: Tutorfly was inspired mainly by my father, who immigrated here from Iran during the revolution in 1979. His flight was the last one out of the country before the airport was closed when he was 17. He was strong in math and physics, but weak in English, and he befriended a couple of his American classmates, which is where the tutoring story really begins. My father helped them with their STEM work, and they in turn tutored him in English. He ended up passing his English class, and went on to get his bachelor’s at Northeastern University, his masters at Virginia Tech, and his Ph.D. in Mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech.
My father instilled upon me the importance of peer learning. My freshman year of high school, I started tutoring a 7th grader and a 5th grader. They both started tutoring younger kids as well when they got to high school. When I thought about this, the idea for Tutorfly was born in 2017, and I am pursuing a unique business model of peer tutoring, something that has positively influenced my family for decades, to thousands of other students.
Can you walk us through why you decided to choose students to be the tutors, and the process of selecting and training them?
Parsa: Essentially, it boils down to our team placing our faith in the power of students, regardless of age. Students these days are expected to know a plethora of information, yet are still not fully entrusted to teach their peers. Our team not only believes that students are competent enough to tutor their peers, but in many situations, we argue that having a peer tutor is more effective and economical. Each classroom is different, depending upon the teacher’s style and the curriculum focused upon. Our tutors have often taken the same class with the same teacher that their tutees are taken, meaning that our tutors know specifically how to succeed in that environment as well. Furthermore, our tutors can act as relatable role models for the students that they are tutoring.
How are you overcoming the competition of other tutoring services such as Kaplan and Elite that are well-established and provide more experienced tutors?
Parsa: We are different because of our students as teachers, presence in schools, and our social commitment to the community.
Most important is having students as teachers. We make sure that our tutors are empathetic, knowledgeable, and creative. Some of our tutors tutor in some classes, and then are tutored in other subjects, which strongly connects our marketplace of tutors and tutees. Our presence in schools is tied to our partnership with school organizations, which allows us to expand by forming strategic partnerships with the local community groups. Third, we are socially committed to helping the community, and are one of the few for-profit companies that has a business model, revolving around raising money for philanthropies. Our tutoring actually works, because of the 85% retention rate we have of people that use our platform once, that schedule another follow-up session as well.
Looking forward, what do you think are Tutorfly’s greatest opportunities and challenges for 2018?
Parsa: One of our opportunities is to use the power of peer tutoring to bring high school communities closer together to increase graduation rates. We envision a productive high school as having upperclassmen tutoring and mentoring younger students. There are low performing high schools that could potentially increase their graduation rates by empowering students to help each other. Tutorfly is setting in forth plans in 2018 to perform some of these tests with LAUSD schools.
Another opportunity is to bring Tutorfly online, in order to provide the alternative of online tutoring sessions, in addition to our in person sessions.
We are also pursuing a couple of strategic partnerships that could bring about some exciting opportunities as well.
A challenge we are going to have is to continue navigating the education space, as there are a lot of traditional obstacles set in place that we are learning more about as we continue on.
Another challenge comes internally, that we are all between the ages of 18–24, and most of us are first time entrepreneurs. Fortunately, despite the steep learning curve, our advisors help us with our entrepreneurial pursuits.
Creating a startup is risky- why were you confident that Tutorfly would succeed?
Parsa: Quite early on, about a week after my idea, I looked to test my idea by having a family friend (a local community college student), tutor younger students at the local high school in chemistry. The tutor only had two sessions, before these parents started recommending the tutor to their friends without me asking. Two big indicators of potential success is that the customer is willing to pay for the product or service, and that customers are willing to tell their network about the product/service as well. Those first two happenings are what gave me the initial confidence to prioritize Tutorfly over other potential opportunities.
What is the best piece of advice that you can offer current students who want to create a startup?
Parsa: The best piece of advice I have is to actually test your idea! The hardest step is going from identifying a problem and guessing a solution, to actually testing that solution. Friends approach me with awesome ideas that end up gathering dust in their notebooks, because they don’t take the next step of trying out their ideas in a small setting.
I know there’s pressure to get an internship or study for the LSAT, but that can be done at any point in our lives. Starting a company, surrounding by a plethora of resources and a supportive UCLA community is only doable as long as you’re here at this school. Tutorfly is going well thus far, but even if it ends up tanking, the entrepreneurial, analytical, and managerial skills I’ve acquired are going to make me much more effective in whatever future career I pursue down the road. (The awesome connections you can make as a founder of a startup, don’t hurt either!)
