Earlier work · EdTech marketplace
Otootuitions
Tutor marketplace with a student app, a tutor app and a web portal on one matching API, plus an analytics layer.
3client apps
Students ↔ Tutorsmatching
40,000teachers on the platform
25,000students
200institutions
98%student success rate
- Client
- Otootuitions (EdTech start-up)
- Domain
- One-to-one tuition marketplace
- My role
- Senior engineer: code review, deployment, architecture
01
Context
- Thousands of teacher applications to screen
- Quality varied too much between teachers
- Teachers, parents and students had no common platform
02
Before and after
Teacher screeningManual, one application at a timeAdmin panel with a fixed checklist
NetworkEarly-stage40,000 teachers, 25,000 students, 200 institutions
OutcomesInconsistent98% student success rate
03
The problem
- Screening at volumeThousands of teacher applications had to be filtered quickly so the team could spend its time on the promising ones.
- Inconsistent qualityWithout a fixed onboarding bar, the student experience varied too much from one teacher to the next.
- Slow, manual matchingFinding the right teacher for a family's needs was tedious and depended on individual staff.
- Three users, no common homeTeachers, parents and students each juggled their own way of tracking classes and progress.
04
How it works
1Teachers
- Application and pre-onboarding checklist
- Profiles and progress tracking
2Operations
- Admin panel for screening
- Verification of each teacher
- Requirement mapping with parents
3Matching
- Student needs to teacher profiles
- Profiles and reviews for parents
4Learning
- Scheduling and joining classes
- Progress for teachers, parents and students
05
What we built
- Screening panel
- Filter thousands of applicants fast
- Team spends time only on strong candidates
- Verified onboarding
- Checklist for qualifications and experience
- Verified before a teacher goes live
- Smart matching
- Family needs mapped on a short call
- Matched to teacher profiles and reviews
- Three apps
- Teachers track progress
- Parents choose with confidence
- Students schedule and join classes
05
Key insight
In a marketplace the quality of supply is the product. Build the screening tools before the shiny features.
06
The hard parts
- Quality vs speed. A stricter checklist slows sign-up but protects the platform.
- The trade-off. A strict onboarding checklist slows teacher sign-up - accepted, because the platform's reputation is the quality of its teachers.
07
My part
As senior engineer I owned code review, deployment and architecture for the platform.
08
What I took away
- In a marketplace, supply quality is the product.
- Some steps should stay human.
Want the detail behind the numbers - architecture, failure modes, what I’d change? Happy to walk through it.
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