About Futor
- Techika Techa-intrawong
- Aug 30, 2021
- 4 min read
Have you studied with a tutor for college entrance exams? Were there any obstacles then?
Problems have been faced among students. For example, tutors going off-topic, tutors not having a solid background and teaching experience, students wasting time trying to book a class through many processes, or even students needing advice but not knowing who to go to. And at the same time, tutors are struggling with reaching new students or get canceled at the last minute. Because I have been a student myself, these incidents lighten up the idea of “Futor,” a platform that provides tutors for your future.
“Futor” has been developed from our data and insight that most freelancers prefer to work as tutors, according to surveys from 400 university students all around Bangkok.
Our platform is cost-effective for students and parents. We offer an effective learning curriculum and free consultation while also helping tutors reach new students, gain teaching experiences, and income.
Our early customers include high-school students who aim to apply to an international program, their parents, college students who wish to become tutors, and tutors who want to be on a tutoring platform. From our interviews with more than 250 students and parents, we gain insight that parents are usually the decision-makers, not the students.
Once the user gets into the website. If you are a tutor, the platform will lead to a login page. Sign up with background information, address, picture of ID card, and bank account number.
If you are a student, on the other hand, the platform will lead to the login or signup page that requires the user to briefly provide background information, top 3 faculties of choice, and past scores. From our interview with more than 100 tutors, we have learned that many tutors find it helpful to know more about students before teaching.
Our unique features consist of...
class objectives: To avoid any off-topic discussions during class, there is a specific set of class objectives for that particular class for students, and tutors, to focus on.
Consultation: Sometimes students gain a high score but still can't be certain that they will get into their desired faculty. Why? Because there's no one to guide them. Therefore, a consultation will guide them to the right path.
Booking: To avoid complicated booking processes through admin, our platform provides convenience by allowing students to book a class through the tutors’ updated schedules and make payment in a single step.
Portfolio: To provide students with options and tutor credibility, the tutor's background, scores, and teaching videos are available on our platform.
Each feature in the platform is designed based on the needs of more than 300 tutors and parents that we interviewed, which we believe will make it easy to use and responsive for both sides of the users.
On this page, for instance, students can see all the tutors who are teaching SAT math. To view each tutor’s portfolio, students and parents can click on the red icon.
The portfolio includes their background information, examination scores, important teaching details, and in-class teaching videos for the students to see whether they like the style of teaching.
To book a class, students must fill in their name, student ID, subject, hours, date and time of learning. Students are required to pay in advance when booking to discourage last-minute cancellations. Cancellations and date change are only allowed a minimum of 24 hours before the class. Otherwise, an extra fee will be charged.
We also provide our student free counseling program and information about university entrance requirements.
Students can book consulting sessions through the consultation page.
We have a page that provides statistics about past year’s scores and the requirements of each faculty to guide students' decision making processes.
There is also a page that shows past students’ achievements, and learning experiences with Futor.
We conducted 50 interviews in order to improve our prototype. The first draft, however, turned out to be not quite interactive and uninteresting for many of our interviewees.
Based on the positioning map, our competitors are snapask, Chulatutor, and GURU. Our platform aims for international programs and fixed class objectives.
From our insight, students will start preparing for college since grade 10. Therefore, our target market would be high school students in grade 10-12 attending international programs which account for 29,000 students. 14,000 of those students plan to attend university international programs, 3% of which or around 418 students will be our users in the first year.
We will collect 1,000 baht per 1 new student for the commission fees from tutors. If there are around 418 students on the platform in the first year, we will make a total of 418,000 baht.
The revenue projection is ‘conservative’ as we assume 1 student will study with only 1 tutor. On average, students year 10-12, one student studies with 5 tutors.
How we reach customers would be through offline and online platforms. Offline includes setting up booths and participating in senior student talks at international schools where our team members graduated. For the online platform, we target facebook ads, educational facebook pages, talk sessions in Clubhouse, video on Youtube, and Futor official page.
As shown on our business timeline, we are currently in the process between prototype testing and MVP launching. After this, we will release a product that can be continually improved as we validate assumptions and build future iterations that better serve our customers.
We are a group of people that have once experienced the time and difficulty of applying for college. This is why we truly understand the user's pain points and believe that we can guide students into success. We are not going to stop at providing the best tutors, but we want to be a product of real work to provide quality graduates.
Pitch Deck:
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