I decided to write a quick blog post today to discuss some of the reasons this might be happening (as much our own fault as anyone else – this is not to pass blame, but to learn) and to solicit some feedback from you on how we might fix it.

First off, there are a number of reasons why a tutor may not respond to job request:

• They never received the notification email we send (went into their spam folder, they changed email address, etc)
• They were too busy
• They are no longer interested in tutoring
• They did reply, but the student never saw their response (again, spam folder, changed email address, etc)

It might seem like the above reasons would be pretty rare, but at times up to 40% of job requests going through the site go unanswered.  This makes for a bad experience with students and parents so it is something we’re very interested in getting fixed.

What we are doing today to fix this

We try to combat this problem today with our review system.  When clients go to rate a tutor, one of the options they can choose is “The tutor never responded”.  When a client selects this we temporarily take the tutor’s profile down and  fire off an email to the tutor asking if they are still available.  If they are, they can turn their profile back on with a few clicks – but this quick check makes sure they are still available.

This doesn’t seem to be solving the problem entirely though, and I’d like to get some feedback on what else we can do.

I’ve posted a few ideas below, but please leave others in the comments below if you have any insight into why this might be happening.

Other Possible Solutions

1. Allows students to post jobs and have the tutors contact them instead
   This would reverse the problem by allowing tutors to contact students based on their job postings (at least providing this as an alternative).
2. Show a tutor’s response rate on their profile
   We could calculate how often a tutor responds to messages, and show this publicly on their profile.  This may give them an incentive to keep their response rate high.
3. Notify tutors via other means, such as phone or text message
   If email deliverability is the problem, another form of notification could work better.

What do you think would work best?  If you’re a tutor, are you receiving the notification emails or have you ever had a reason not to respond to a job request?

Please leave us a comment below.  Thank you!

Brian Armstrong
Founder, UniversityTutor.com

Tutor ratings are one of the best features of UniversityTutor – they allow parents and students to quickly go through a large number of tutors and find the ones with the most experience.

However, the rating system was always somewhat basic and just used a simple average of all ratings to sort tutors.

In practice this led to some less-than-optimal results.  For example….

• A tutor with ten ratings and a 4.9 average was rated below a tutor with just one 5-star rating.
• A tutor with one 5-star rating and three 5-star ratings had the same rank.

To solve this I started investigating smarter ranking algorithms and eventually settled on this Bayesian rating system.

You can check out the details on that page, but the essence of it is that it you can become more confident about the rating when you have more votes.  So a tutor with few ratings will have their average rating discounted slightly (toward the site wide average), whereas you don’t need to alter the value as much for a tutor with more votes.

As you can see it leads to better results and fixes the two problems mentioned above.

Hopefully the new rating system gives some better results.

Until next time, happy tutoring!
Brian Armstrong

This was also a big change to our business model.  While in the past we charged tutors a monthly fee of $10/month to keep a profile on our site (after trying it for free and getting 3 tutoring job requests), we switched to charging a 15% fee on any online payments and there were no monthly fees for tutors.

So far we’ve gotten mixed reviews on this and we’re considering getting rid of the online payments as a business model.  Overall, it hasn’t been as successful as we hoped.  In this post I’d like to layout some thoughts on it from UniversityTutor’s perspective, and (most importantly) get your feedback on how we can best serve the UniversityTutor community going forward!

Some thoughts on the “new” business model charging a 15% fee on online payments:

Advantages

• No monthly fees for tutors means faster growth (tutors aren’t kicked off the site after their free trial is up – about 1 in 10 tutors chose to pay the monthly fee after their free trial was up)
• It’s more fair that “we only make money if you make money” and there is no up front cost or leap of faith required on the tutors part
• We can now track total number of hours tutored as an indicator of a tutor’s experience
• It can be convenient for a tutor to have funds deposited to their bank account or to send an invoice later if the parent could not come to the session

Disadvantages

• Many tutors do not get paid online to avoid the fee, despite the advantages of getting reviews and experience
• Many students/parents also (understandably) prefer to avoid the fee
• It can take longer in some cases for the tutor to get paid (direct deposit takes 3-5 business days)
• Some students/parents are not comfortable entering credit card information online with an unknown service
• It’s not simple – billing and paying customers (with our fee included) is more confusing for tutors and students and increases overhead in answering support emails, chargebacks, etc.

The online payment system (at least in it’s current state) is not feasible for us going forward in terms of profitability.  Adoption of it has been very slow and many tutors/students prefer to avoid it altogether.  To be clear, we don’t blame them for this.  It can be a major hassle to get paid online if a student/parent is unclear with the process, or if cash or check is right there after the session.  (I’m not sure I would myself want to use an online payment system in some situations.)

Yet, we do need to figure out a way to keep the lights on as a business, and hopefully continue to grow and expand to 20,000 or 50,000 tutors in new cities and countries (and attract new parents and students via marketing).

So I’ve decided to put the question out to YOU, the UniversityTutor community (tutors, parents, and students) :

Would you like to see the online payment system go or stay?  Where is it hurting or helping?

Would you (tutors) be willing to pay a fee to keep your profile on UniversityTutor?  If so, what form should it take and what would be a reasonable amount?

What can we do to make using UniversityTutor more profitable and enjoyable for you?

Please click below to post a comment and thank you for your feedback!  We really appreciate it.

Sincerely,
Brian Armstrong

P.S. I should also mention that if we do decide to eliminate the 15% fee on online payments, it will most likely NOT be possible to keep online payments as an option (just without the fee).  The reason is that we incur about a 5% cost in each transaction (both for billing a credit card and sending a direct deposit, plus monthly fees).  Even if we charged a 5% fee to cover costs, the additional support emails and chargebacks make it a risky business proposition.  As an alternative, if tutors still wanted to accept online payments they could use a service such as Paypal to send invoices (although Paypal caries it’s own fees).  Thanks again for your feedback!

I am a tutor at universitytutor.com. I really love your website and the recent innovations you have made including client rating and profile updates.

I just saw an email in regards to you setting up a new system with clients paying a markup on tutoring. I don’t know how efficiently this will work.

I work as a tutor and I am also currently going to school. It seems like a lot of money to pay by students just for getting tutored, they might also go to other websites or go to school learning centers to get the necessary aid.

Does this sound logical? I am just sending my thoughts and concerns because I really love your website.

Sincerely,
[name removed]

Hi [name removed],

Thanks for the email, I really appreciate your feedback! I think you’re right that the markup could cause a problem for some students. You may want to keep any existing clients you already have at your old rate so they don’t get an unexpected price bump. This tends to upset people more in my experience – unexpected changes – whereas if if a student knows the price up front then its unlikely to be an issue.

As for future clients, I don’t think it will be as a big of an issue as you might think. I know that when I first started tutoring, I “went out on a limb” and decided to charge $35 per hour which sounded like a lot to me. People paid and things went fine. I started meeting other tutors who claimed to be charging as much as $60 or $80 per hour, and I didn’t really believe it, but as I got busier I decided to raise my prices from $35 to $45. I figured I’d lose a good chunk of people but it was ok because I was getting busy. Remarkably, of the 30 or so clients I had setup with a bunch of tutors (it wasn’t just me at this point) I think only one expressed concern and decided to stop. There was zero drop in new business.

A few years later I had a “real job” and decided I wouldn’t have time for tutoring, but just as an experiment I’d put my rate at $65/hr just in case someone was really desperate. Incredibly, I saw no drop in business and new clients kept coming in at this rate. By the way, my “real job” was paying $25/hr so that tells you something.

Of course, by this time I had quite a lot of experience tutoring, but part of it was just that I didn’t realize how valuable it was to some people. In some professions (accounting, medicine, etc) it’s not uncommon to charge $500 per hour and up. Is it worth it? Well, if you REALLY need the IRS to get off your back or REALLY need your new kidney to work correctly, then yes it might be worth it. Similarly, if you REALLY need to pass biology this year, it might be worth it if you are the best biology tutor in town.

While there is occasionally free tutoring to be found (of dubious quality), keep in mind that your main competition comes from big tutoring companies like Kaplan and Silvan who have million dollar marketing budgets. These companies often sell their tutoring in “blocks” or “classes” which hide the true dollar per hour figures, but if you price it out it’s not uncommon for these classes to cost upwards of $85 per hour (and the markup on that is about 50% so the tutor is getting half). By these standards, the tutors on UniversityTutor.com are a steal.

I’ve actually been surprised by the prices that most tutors are putting on the website around $20 or $30 per hour. Every market is different, but in general I think most of the tutors on the site are pricing themselves too low. I don’t blame them because when I was a college student and the best jobs on campus paid $10 per hour, I didn’t believe it was possible either. But tutoring is not a commodity like a gallon of gasoline where the only way to compete is on price. Some tutors are much better than others and can command a much higher price. For better or worse, price is often used as an indicator of quality when people shop so it’s even possible that putting a higher price could actually result in MORE inquires from students who are looking to hire the best.

Anyway, I hope this helps and thanks for the feedback! We always like to hear from our users.

Thank you,
Brian Armstrong
www.UniversityTutor.com

Now you can get invoices by email and pay your tutor securely online by credit card. Tutors will receive funds either by direct deposit right to their bank account or via Paypal.

Our site uses 128bit encryption for all sensitive data and your credit card information is never stored on our servers. It is stored offline at a PCI Compliant data center. Look for the “https” prefix in the URL or the yellow lock icon in your web browser when entering payment info – this lets you know data is being encrypted before it is sent.

Our business model has changed as well. Now, instead of charging tutors $10/month to keep a profile up, we’ve switch to a 5-15% fee on tutoring completed through our site. Now we only get paid if you get paid – there are no up front costs or monthly fees.

Fully integrated payments brings us closer to a true marketplace website such as eBay.com, eLance.com, or Guru.com. With it come better “credibility indicators” that allow people to make buying decisions online. Here are two:

• Now students can *only* leave a tutor a review after completing a transaction through our site. This ensures tutors aren’t receiving “fake” reviews and they have actually worked with a student before getting a review.
• We are now tracking the number of hours a tutor has completed through our site. This will eventually become an indicator of how experienced they are. Client will be able to sort tutors by “most experienced”.

If existing clients are already used to using cash or check there is no reason to force them to switch over if they don’t want to. It’s optional for now. But it’s a good idea to start transitioning to online payments in the future because tutors will only be able to get reviews and increase their tutoring hours (which is displayed on their profile) by completing transactions online. This will allow them to remain competitive and charge higher rates in the future.

Finally, here is a demo video of the new features:

Or here is the same video on YouTube if you prefer to watch it there:

Feel free to leave us any feedback in the comments below. Thank you!

It’s designed mostly for creative professionals, but has some great features that are applicable to a variety of fields. For instance, if creates a beautiful PDF version of your resume that you can download, and gives you a personalized URL for your online resume.

Subtle features like this can really help you to stand out amongst a variety of candidates. After all, how many other candidates are likely to have an online version of their resume?

Check out this demo of how it works:

Other ways to quickly setup an online resume? Check out Weebly.com or try their demo here. Their interface is very impressive to get a professional website up and running quickly, and it doesn’t take any technical skills.

Next time you have to give a presentation for school, try recording your talk and getting that video on YouTube. Any impressive papers you’ve put together or personal projects? Get those on your resume website as well. You’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of 99% of other applicants.

What other tools have been helpful in your job hunting? Please leave a comment below.

For example:

• We verify enrollment by asking students to enter their .edu email address.  But some universities only issue .edu emails to faculty, not students.
• Some schools issue student emails under a different domain (e.g. grizmail.umt.edu instead of umontana.edu)
• Some students don’t check their university email account as often as their regular mail (such as gmail, yahoo, etc)

Worse still, we’ve had a whole bunch of VERY qualified tutors that we’ve had to turn away simply because they no longer had their student email.  Some of them are recent graduates, Phd’s, certified teachers, etc.

So to fix this we made a decision: why not open up UniversityTutor to anyone who wants to tutor!

With the review system in place we can maintain a high level of quality, and this will really be the best option for everyone (students included who will now have a greater selection).

So as of today you’ll notice that we no longer ask you for your university or a .edu email address when you sign up:

Better Communication With More Prominent Tutor Names

Making the above change prompted another one.  To improve communication between tutors and students, we decided to make tutor names more visible on their profiles (just first name and last initial).  We got feedback (on our user feedback forum) that this was sometimes a nuisance to match the right tutor (who’s picture was visible) with the right name.

Tutors can of course change their display name if they’d prefer it not to be visible, but we hope most tutors will appreciate the additional visibility on their profile.

We hope you find these changes useful and we’ll continue to bring you more as we move forward!
UniversityTutor.com Staff

This is using Google Maps technology underneath to integrate with the tutor database. Hopefully it will make it much faster and easier for people to find nearby tutors.

Check out the screenshot below or click here to try it for yourself:

We are still keeping the “old” way of listing tutors as well. The new map based search will only appear on the main homepage, http://www.universitytutor.com. The “subdomain” sites for each city will still have the text based listings. For example, to see a text based listing of tutors in New York, NY you can still visit http://newyork.universitytutor.com. For Austin, TX you’d visit http://austin.universitytutor.com, etc.

This old method worked fine, it was just a little more difficult to find tutors that were close by. You couldn’t search by zip code or street address. Further compounding the problem was the fact that many metropolitan areas are really combinations of multiple cities and suburbs. Some cities are geographically close yet the tutors were spread out over various subdomains.

Map based searching was one of the most requested features in our user feedback forum (now marked completed). See, we do listen!

As always, please send us any feedback you have in the comments, and we’ll continue adding more great features to UniversityTutor.com!