Father of 9 Starts “Uber for Tutoring” Hustle

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

Greetings and welcome to Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. We live in a world of almost unlimited choice. Since you're listening to this podcast, you have access to so much information. There are at least 600,000 books published every year in the US alone.

We can listen to any song from any album or artist, with just a simple search phrase in Spotify or in other music streaming service, and on and on it goes. But with this nearly unlimited choice comes a burden of decision fatigue, and just not knowing where to go for something you need. That's why there is real value in curation or simplification. Anything that makes people's lives easier, saves them time, removes that decision fatigue, often has potential as a side hustle. That's what you'll hear about today, how a father of nine starts what he calls Uber for tutoring, right after this.

Pete Abella and his wife are parents of nine children. It's probably not surprising at all that Pete spends a lot of time helping his kids with their schoolwork. However, it was such a big family, as well as the fact that he works full-time for a software company, he's not able to be as helpful or as available as he'd like. So one day, he went online to search for a tutor. This is not like a lot of our stories, where Pete's Google search led him into the wilderness, where Neria tutor could be found.

No, the problem was the opposite. 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, and so on. Pete didn't need hundreds of thousands of tutors, he needed one, maybe two, possibly three. Because he was overwhelmed by so many choices, that day he didn't make any choice at all. Pete had been looking for a hustle, so he kept thinking about that problem until he decided to try his hand at solving it for more than just himself.

He started with doing online research, which basically means using Google to find the top 10 online tutoring companies. Then he called each one of them and pitched them. He said he was making a directory of tutors from various tutoring sites. He explained that 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 those 10 companies he made contact with, four of them agreed to sign up.

Then they provided him with data that he could use to populate the site. The result became Pete's directory, findtutorsnearme.com. He calls it the Uber for tutors, as in whenever you need a tutor, no matter your location, you can go online and find several qualified options, but not tens of thousands of them. The site has tutors from those top four companies, as well as many other independent tutors that have found it over time and decided to make a profile. Parents in search of tutors stumble upon the site, probably with a Google search, a lot like Pete first did when he was looking for his own help.

Those parents then find a tutor. If they contact a partner tutor from one of those companies, Pete gets paid a fee for that lead. If the parent contacts a tutor that directly places their profile on the site, the tutor keeps all the money. Since starting, Pete's site has connected more than 12,000 parents with tutors. It's not an overnight success at all.

In fact, he cautions that it was a ton of hard work. He was literally spending 100 percent 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 a few hours of attention and improvements from Pete. Here's what's interesting, and I tried to set it up for you in the beginning.

All of the information on Pete's site is freely available elsewhere. But the problem is that there's far too much tutoring information all over the web. A lot of people like Pete go out to try to make a decision and they just get overwhelmed and give up. Now, this is true with a lot of different kinds of information. Think about reading the news.

For example, there are all kinds of places you can go to read the news and commentary, analysis, all kinds of features and stories, and you can do that for free. But yet even though the news is essentially free, the New York Times has two and a half million paid subscribers. It doesn't matter necessarily that the information is available somewhere else for free. It is a question of curation and value. A few years ago, I started a travel service called Travel Hacking Cartel, which was all about sending travelers deal alerts whenever there was something they could do to earn a lot of frequent flyer miles.

All the information that we publish there is available somewhere else, but the benefit of that service is you can subscribe and we'll save you from reading 80 different blogs and forums every day. We do that so you don't have to, and a lot of people find it valuable. In Pete's big success, he has more than 100,000 users registered on the site. He's making $5,000 a month in recurring revenue. What he capitalized on was facilitating connection between quality tutors and those in need of tutoring, both students and parents.

Just quickly on that last point, you always want to think carefully about your market. If your tutoring focuses on middle school students or high school students, maybe sometimes even college students, it's not necessarily those students who come looking for help. It's often their parents. You want to formulate your message, your offer, your copy to the people who will actually make the purchasing decision. Pete understood that and in a world of almost unlimited choice, he found a way to make people's lives easier and to make money by doing it.

I hope that gives you something to think about. I also hope you're taking action on your ideas. If you'd like to see the show notes for today's episode, learn more about Pete's business model and the business of subscriptions in general, just come on over to the site, sidehustleschool.com/88. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.

I'll be back tomorrow.