Utorial — Face to Face Lessons on Just about Anything

Learn new concepts or teach your favorite subject with Utorial face to face lessons which are powered by live chat. In interview with Paul Butterworth, Founder, Utorial.

1. Could you please shed some light on your company and product?

Utorial.tv is a Global community where people can teach or learn anything with anyone face-to-face on Web Cam. We’re launching at the end of November but already via our holding page we have thousands of people signed up to teach Guitar, American History, Digital Marketing… and Pupils waiting to learn things like Portuguese, programming — even Ukulele! I’ve found it strange but satisfying to see the number of pupils and tutors grow in parallel — there’s as many people with something to teach as there are with a desire for knowledge.

2. What was the vision behind Utorial?

I want to make sharing knowledge and skills easier and bring it inline with technology. Text and video as learning tools are of course good, but you can’t challenge or discuss with a video or the written word… You can’t contextualize the information to your own specific scenario. And often, you might ‘learn’ but do you really understand?

The site is now aimed at teaching and learning academic, business and lifestyle subjects — anything that people are willing to teach and learn… but the idea started when I was trying to learn one simple subject — to play guitar. In this age of long work hours (and recently for me: new born twins), I was struggling to find a Tutor who would fit in with my spare time. Plus it seemed archaic that I was confined to learning from people within a small geographical radius of where I live and work. I needed to learn at 6am or 10pm — and from the right kind of person I could engage with — and this was only achievable by opening up the pool of potential Tutors beyond my sphere and to everyone else around the world. With a bit of research, it was clear that for whatever reason no one else had spotted and solved this problem.

3. What were the biggest challenges you faced during Utorial’s development?

This is my first venture, so pretty much everything has been a challenge — albeit an exciting one. Putting the right team together was the hardest of them all though. Plus, the idea started out pretty simple but to deliver a proper solution, the design, UX and back end got way more complex than I expected. The site is looking incredible though and it’s robust, so I’m glad the extra time was spent.

4. What are the plans for your target market and other market as well?

One of our biggest goals is to make knowledge shareable with the whole world — regardless of wealth, geography or upbringing. As a start, we’re talking to charities about enabling our community to choose where a % of our profits are sent. The charities are international so they’ll be helping people in developing countries (especially children and women) as well as people in their own country. If anyone reading this is part of a charity in this field, we’re keen to hear from you! Ongoing, I want to make it possible for those same undeserved people to receive access to Utorial so they can see, hear, engage and learn from people around the world — that’s a medium to long term goal.

5. What are your future ventures?

It will be in renewable/ green/ conscious business. There are a lot of solutions being developed for private energy production — I’m keen to take a look at the other end of that system and develop an affordable, residential water-treatment system. By combining this with existing solar panels and wind turbines and thermal heating, we could be pretty self-sufficient (OK apart from the internet!).

6. Tell us about your journey as an entrepreneur.

There really isn’t much to talk about yet — I’m new at this. I can say with confidence though that it’s the most exciting adventure I’ve been on — it’s been fantastic.

7. What are your views on the education market. Any suggestions or tips for EdTech entrepreneurs?

It’s incredibly saturated, so any new ideas need to be game-changing. Also, even if you’re starting out with an MVP, I’d really recommend spending at least a little time/ money on design and UX — there’s a lot of sorry looking sites around.

8. What is the one lesson in your life as an entrepreneur that you would love to share?

Nothing brilliant comes from mediocrity or similarity — don’t just aim to be the best in the World at what you do — be the only one doing it.

Sign up at Utorial at: http://utorial.tv/

Originally published at www.edtechboard.com on November 15, 2013.