This is great! I had to trove through craigslist for a while before finding a quality French tutor. This solves the issues of:
Finding a quality tutor
Ratings
Weeding out spam
Knowing exactly who they are (many french tutors were just french students! I wanted a native or near native speaker).
I wonder though for this business model, what stops people from going around Tutorspree for subsequent lessons to get around the $5 per lesson fee?
One thing that pops into mind is the ratings system. It would be beneficial to continue to do the tutoring through the site in order to build a good profile.
There's also the credit card payment through tutorspree which is nice. (I'm assuming most individual tutors can't process their own credit card payments).
However, there's still a risk that after the first session people will bypass the system.
I really like this though, and can't wait to see this take off. Just sent it out to my tutor.
The "jumping" problem you point out is one of the long term questions for us. You're absolutely right that the ratings system is the biggest carrot to keep tutors in. As you collect feedback, you move up in the rankings. The feedback is not evergreen - so logging lessons over time will help float you up.
On the other side, we believe that the payment and scheduling elements are worth the fee, especially in aggregate to the two sides.
At the end of the day, though, we look at that as a final funnel. We'll tweak and iterate to maximize that final, long term conversion in such a way that unlocks the most value for the folks in the system.
Finding a quality tutor Ratings Weeding out spam Knowing exactly who they are (many french tutors were just french students! I wanted a native or near native speaker).
I wonder though for this business model, what stops people from going around Tutorspree for subsequent lessons to get around the $5 per lesson fee?
One thing that pops into mind is the ratings system. It would be beneficial to continue to do the tutoring through the site in order to build a good profile.
There's also the credit card payment through tutorspree which is nice. (I'm assuming most individual tutors can't process their own credit card payments).
However, there's still a risk that after the first session people will bypass the system.
I really like this though, and can't wait to see this take off. Just sent it out to my tutor.