What It's About
A father creates a service connecting parents to tutors who can help their children.
Business Model
Skills Required
Complexity
Profit Potential
Words of Wisdom
Pete's story is not an overnight success at all. In fact, he cautions that it was a ton of hard work. He was literally spending 100% of his limited free time for more than a year building it before the real benefits arrived.
But now that it’s built, it’s reliable and sustainable. The site currently makes more than $5,000 a month and requires only maintenance and 5 hours a month of improvements from Pete.
Fun Fact
The first thing Pete did was research the companies that were already out there. He called each one and told hem he was making a directory of tutors from various tutoring sites. And he explained how he would bring their tutors more business—or at least he hoped to—and in exchange, they would pay a small fee for each tutor referral.
Of the 8-10 companies he made contact with, 4 of them signed up. Then, they provided him with data that he could use to populate the site.
Notes from Chris
Episode 88
We live in a world of nearly unlimited choice. There are at least 600,000 books published every year in the U.S. alone. We can listen to any song from any album or artist with just a simple search phrase in Spotify or any other music streaming services, and the list of options available to us goes on and on. But with so many choices comes a burden of decision fatigue and just not knowing where to go for something you may need. That's why there's real value in curation or simplification of any process. Anything that makes people’s lives easier or saves them time and decision fatigue has a lot of potential. Pete Abilla is a busy father of nine children. Like most parents, he spends a lot of time helping his kids with their school work. With such a big family, not to mention a full-time job, he’s not able to be as helpful or available as he’d like. So one day, he went online to search for a tutor. He found literally hundreds of thousands of tutors, on every imaginable platform, ranging from Craigslist to independent tutors with their own sites, to parenting forums that referred various tutors. Pete didn’t need hundreds of thousands of tutors, though. He needed one, maybe two, and the multitude of options overwhelmed him so much that he didn’t make any choice at all. He kept thinking about the problem until he decided to try his hand at solving it for people other than himself. Pete created a tutoring service that has been a huge success with 100,000 users, and a $5,000/month recurring revenue capitalizing on initiating connections between quality tutors and those in need of tutoring, both students and parents. Have you ever been so overwhelmed with choices that you were unable to make a choice at all? If so, what would you do to make it better? MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Find Tutors Near Me: Learn more about Pete and his simplified tutor search engine
- Wyzant: Do you possess knowledge that others would pay for? Wyzant is a massive community of tutors that are matched to people looking to learn what you know
- Hospital Database Programmer Outsources His Skills: How a hospital employee utilizes skills that he learned from work to help others work with and process complex computer programs and information earning over $100/hour
Resources
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