Tuteable — Serving you with Best of Answers for your Questions
Adam Miller and John Westenberg on their latest venture Tuteable, which guarantees you an expert solution for your problems.
1. Could you please shed some light on your company and product?
Adam: Tuteable is a personalized, one on one approach to problem solving, with live video chat and screen sharing as the delivery tool. Each video tutorial is tailored by our Tuteable Experts (who are paid for their time) to answer specific problems.
2. What was the vision behind Tuteable?
Adam: Our vision is to become the go to destination for professionals who are trying to solve a problem. We want to change the way people approach problem solving.
3. What were the biggest challenges you faced during Tuteable’s development?
Adam: The biggest challenge for any 2 sided market place is growing each user base — some people say it’s a chick before the egg problem, I tend to disagree, I think it’s mainly about finding the supply and then bringing in the demand. The challenge lies in finding and attracting the demand.
Jon: Another challenge is definitely establishing our brand and growing a word of mouth reputation that will respected by the professional community, who are our key demographic. We want to be the first thought that pops into people’s heads when they come up against a wall.
4. What are the plans for your target market and other market as well?
Jon: We want to contribute to the development of the online multi platform learning market. We see it as being an extremely important area that can affect the world on a day to day basis.
5. What are your future ventures?
Adam: To continue working and developing Tuteable, growing the platform for the users and tutors and creating the best problem solving experience possible!
6. Tell us about your journey as an entrepreneur.
Adam: My Journey as an Entrepreneur is not as interesting as you would think — I was not running a company at the age of 12 or really doing much with myself which I would consider very entrepreneurial (apart from selling basketball cards and running any family or friends garage sales) — however I always did have a desire to do something big with myself and change the world in my own way. I am fortunate enough to say I have traveled all over the world — some of my biggest impression for change was discovered whilst in India — I noticed how smart the children where (from an entrepreneurialperspective) and couldn’t help but think, what would happen if you had a computer, the internet and a mentor to teach you all about business and to help you understand the theory behind what you are doing. My goals as an entrepreneur are guided by my vision to help make this world better — I’d like to be able to bring free business education to somewhere like India and encourage positive social change!
7. What are your views on the education market. Any suggestions or tips for EdTech entrepreneurs?
Adam: There are several sections of the education market I can talk about — however I guess I will focus on the problem solving side. Clearly I think it’s fragmented (otherwise why would I be doing this), Did you know that on average people spend up to 2 hours online trying to solve problems. It’s really easy to visualize that, think about the last major problem you had, and your typical process — search Google, read tons of articles that are too general and don’t address the specifics of your problem, reach out to social circles…it’s broken. We are now more so than ever living in a world of instant gratification and yet we still struggle to find the right answers to OUR questions. Studies show that if a website loads in more than 3 seconds people are more inclined to click the back button, so why should finding answers to our questions be any different?
Tips to EdTech entrepreneurs — the education market is gaining traction rapidly, the (off line) education system is outdated and broken and ripe for change, so if you have an idea you are thinking about JUST DO IT, stop waiting around.
Jon: My background as an actual tutor in both maths and English has taught me that no two people will learn at the same pace. Everyone takes in and processes information differently, and when their individual needs are not met, they can fall behind. I think one of the biggest problems that EdTech professionals are going to be faced with is figuring out how to address that. At Tuteable, we specialize in it with our one on one video delivery systems. But there are going to be other solutions to the problem.
8. What is the one lesson in your life as an entrepreneur that you would love to share?
Adam: Focus on what you care about, don’t be an opportunistic entrepreneur, be an entrepreneur that actually gives a shit about what they are doing. That was some of the best advice that was ever passed down to me.
Jon: Dream big. You have to tackle the small things when you’re creating anything, but your dreams should be way bigger. You should have a vision that goes beyond the little things and the early stages.
Get expert help at: https://tuteable.com/
Originally published at www.edtechboard.com on November 20, 2013.
