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Coach — Helping tutors market, manage and grow their businesses.
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hey @spencerfry! very cool.
what are some problems you've seen that are specific to tutors re entrepreneurship generally in the "bottom up" economy?
@smalter We made a huge effort to research the answer to this question at the end of 2015. We spoke to 300 individual tutors in November and December and came away with three pain points that they have:
1. They want to look more professional/legitimate.
2. They want to spend more time tutoring and less time on administrative tasks.
3. They want more business.
We built Coach around solving all three of those pain points through our core features: website, scheduling, online payments, content, and community.
Hey Product Hunt! Thanks @naveen for hunting us. I’m excited to share Coach with you all.
We built Coach to make working independently easier. As an entrepreneur, I know how rewarding it can be to invest in your own business, and I wanted to give other independent professionals that same opportunity. While we’re currently focused on tutors, our end goal is to become the go-to platform for any freelancer or independent professional who’s looking to manage, market and grow their business.
So why tutors, right? Tutors are some of the most underserved independent professionals out there. Most tutoring products and services are focused on the needs of the student and other tutoring agencies/marketplaces take massive profit cuts, some as high as 75%. With Coach, we offer tutors the platform and support system they need to become more professional and less reliant on outside lead sources, so they can stay focused on what they do best: teaching.
Let’s talk about the product. With Coach, tutors get their own free website, scheduling tools, online payments, and a way to earn extra money on the side through selling their own content. Aside from those features, we also offer tutors a more professional workflow, which helps them keep track of all their contacts, materials and messages. Finally, tutors can join The Coach Community to chat live with our team of marketing experts and even get their own spot in our tutor directory.
So, you may be wondering, why us and why now? I’d say a lot of where we are today with Coach has to do with my experience at Carbonmade. At Carbonmade, we helped artists and designers make careers and lives for themselves and it was very rewarding. As a lifelong entrepreneur, it’s an amazing feeling to help other people build their businesses on their own. I’ve helped hundreds of people make the transition from employee to entrepreneur and helped guide them through the ups and downs. I believe that I’m in a unique position as a product designer to help people manage, market and grow their businesses, and I’m excited about the good we’ll be doing at Coach.
I’ll be here all day to answer questions; you can email me directly at spencer@withcoach.com or message me on Twitter @spencerfry.
@spencerfry congrats on the hunt. Your Product looks great, beautiful and easy to use - love it.
You say that you want to become the go-to platform for freelancers and independent professionals - how are you different than the other sites, that offer this?
@mikkel_ulstrup Thank you. We spent a lot of time getting the product right and still have lots to do. There’s a lot of interaction between all of our core features: website, scheduling, online payments, and content.
I’ve yet to come across a platform for independent professionals that focuses on both the business management and the marketing/growth of the individual. There are plenty of products out there that cover one side or the other, but at Coach we’re solving both sides of the equation. We’ve taken on a more difficult task, but to us it’s hard to solve one side of the equation without also solving the other side.
@spencerfry you're welcome.
Alright that's the right selling point for me - I am impressed!
I know people who are looking for exactly this kind of platform that offers that full range. I completely understand that you want to solve both sites, and I hope that you succeed with it :-)
Shared your startup on Twitter!
@spencerfry hey! Just wanted to drop in and say I'm a fan of your work. Coach looks awesome!
I’m excited to hunt Coach today. Coach is a platform for tutors (and other freelance professionals) who are looking to independently market, manage and grow their businesses. I believe Coach is going to change the tutoring/freelance industry by giving people the tools they need to successfully start and run their own businesses.
I’ve known the founder, Spencer, for a long time – I’m looking forward to seeing where he and his team take Coach.
Site looks nice.
How is this different from all the tutoring apps that have come out in the past?
What do you understand about the market that not many others understand?
In particular:
http://tutorspree.com
http://tootapp.com
A lot of these businesses have started and failed: http://betalist.com/markets/tuto...
And a quick cromonitor evaluation or waybackmachine of their sites indicates that they've gone through the same evolution of freemium to premium and back.
@datarade Thanks for the questions. These are some of the same questions I had when first thinking about building Coach.
Coach is a lot different than previous tutoring apps that have come and gone. I’ve actually been fortunate enough to speak to the founders of Tutorspree on a half dozen occasions since this past summer and learned a lot from them.
Tutorspree and every tutoring startup to date that I’ve ever come across has been purely a closed marketplace for students to find tutors. Coach, on the other hand, is focused around adding value to independent workers (starting with tutors) with tools: their own website, scheduling tools, online payments, content, and more. It’s the easiest way for them to manage their business — independently.
What I’ve came to learn about the tutoring market specifically is that tutors are not happy with being gouged by tutoring marketplaces to the tune of upwards of 75% of their earnings. This incentivizes them to transact behind the closed platform and to not bring business to it. With Coach, we have a much lower fee (5% + 30 cents) and really work with the tutors to help add to their overall revenue through students reminders, passive income, a tutor directory and more.
@spencerfry I see. So this is a lifestyle business then?
I'm running the unit economics on 5%+30 cents and only a fraction of that is your profit. The engineering looks sufficiently difficult/ the product has to be competitive.
There's people who start tutoring every day and there's people who quit every day too. High churn rate meaning finding a new market of tutors will be sufficiently difficult.
The U.S. tutoring, test prep, and counseling market is about ~$11 billion. I imagine more than 50% consists of test-prep places like Kaplan, TestMasters, and Princeton Review.
@datarade Without letting the cat out of the bag, 5% + 30 cents is not the only way we’ll make money in the future. It’s just one part of our revenue strategy.
We purposefully chose to focus on the tutoring market as we develop the product; today is only our launch day and we have a lot more to do both on the development side as well as the learning side. Despite our current focus on tutors, a significant percentage of our users are outside the tutoring space and we expect that to continue to increase as we grow the business.
This looks awesome and clearly fills a need in the freelancer space.
I'm interested in seeing how Coach will play with marketplaces... These features (scheduling, payment, etc..) are what marketplaces have been offering on top of connecting supply & demand.
How do you guys see it? Will you guys take tutors out of existing solutions? will they use marketplaces as a way to source leads and then take the conversation to Coach?
Keen to hear your thoughts :)
Ricardo
@ric0seq Thanks, Ricardo.
Current marketplaces tend to be closed systems where you can only work with students/clients that have been referred to you by the marketplace. We don’t think that makes a ton of sense. In that system, you’re basically prohibiting the supply side from taking advantage of the tools that the marketplace has to offer because the user would rather just transact off platform.
With Coach, we’re building a more open platform where tutors/independent workers can freely use our tools for all of their students/clients. This allows us to better help our customers find more business, while not prohibiting them from only using Coach to do so.
As far as Coach customers taking their leads from other marketplaces and moving them onto Coach, that’s bound to happen when most tutoring marketplaces are taking upwards of 75% of their business.
As a maker, I've definitely kicked this product idea around before. Glad to see someone executing on it! I hope you find success!
@brosky117 That’s awesome. Would love to hear your detailed thoughts on the space if you have some time. My email is spencer@withcoach.com.
@spencerfry this is much needed - just sent to a friend building his tutoring business for high school students. thx!
@nagda That's awesome to hear. Have him send me a note at spencer@withcoach.com if he has any questions. Appreciate you passing on the word.
I'm super excited to see this launch! @spencerfry has been on an admirable mission to help people be their own bosses and launch successful, independent businesses. Really excited to support in that effort!
@spencerfry This is awesome. I was looking for something like this, taking a crack at it now.
Got a few questions
* Any chance for a custom domain?
Just that one for now
@saijo_george Thanks a ton! Custom domains are coming very soon. Happy to answer any more questions over email: spencer@withcoach.com.
@Spencer
Any plan to integrate more payment option? Stripe is the most popular but sadly it's not available in many countries. I wish I could get a Stripe account!
This is a no brainer for any retired teacher or one who wants to make some extra money. I see a huge market for this service considering many high school classes are getting harder and harder. Also, I could see a huge market with college kids needing help learning how to research a project and then lay it out. One of the best platforms I've seen in hte past year. This has use value
@workstationw Thanks a ton, Bill, that really means a lot. We also see a massive need for a well-designed, open platform like Coach to help educators and students. I’d love to chat more if you’re up for it. My email is spencer@withcoach.com.
I've always been curious on apps like this that charge transaction fees, how do you ensure that all transactions are taking place inside your app? In theory, couldn't a coach use your app to promote themselves and then somehow skirt around your transaction fees by not booking things through your app?
@deronsizemore I'm not with Coach, but as an outsider this is my perspective: I would view that almost as a form of lead gen. If that user wants to go through the hassle of booking things outside of their Coach account just to save a few pennies, let them — as their business grows they will realize how wasteful it is to spend energy manually scheduling when Coach (which they are already using for other purposes) can just do it for them.
It takes time, but eventually everyone learns this lesson: no "free" solution is truly free, because *your own time is not free.*
@spencerfry @kylefox Thanks. The other question I've always wondered with models like this is about refunds and unhappy customers. What's your process for handling those folks who maybe feel like they aren't getting their money's worth, etc.?
@deronsizemore @kylefox Unhappy folks can request a refund from the seller. The seller can then accept or deny. We want to keep control in the hands of the seller as we're an open platform and we want people to build their businesses the way they think best.
@spencerfry @kylefox That makes sense and is probably the best approach. So what then if the seller denies the request? Is there ever a time when you all would play mediator and decide if a refund was necessary and force a seller to do so? Sorry for all the questions; these are all questions I've just never been able to work out the logistics of in my head.
@mirandachale Thank you, Miranda. Please let me know if you have any questions. We have quite a few writers on Coach.
Opting for transaction fees rather than monthly fees is a great decision - I bet it will help with retention immensely. Also interested in hearing more about the marketplace as per @ric0seq 's comment
As a user of Coach, I feel that my suggestions are being heard. Before I signed up, I emailed Spencer to ask a few questions and was surprised by how quickly he answered. Not only that, but he ended up sharing with me mockups of their future designs (which I didn't ask for)! That really says something about his passion and the customer service.
I really like the way the products are laid out - I like the clean look. It's nice to have both the digital products and the course in one place - I am using gumroad, udemy, and mailerlite - looking forward to switching all this to Coach.
[edit 12/14/16]: Just got off a 30 min coaching call with Spencer, he has given me pretty good direction in what I should do next. Very satisfied with the service!
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