[ser0]

You raised a very good point. The thing about tutoring is that it is a very personal service. Good tutors are hard to find, and a lot of the time it's about how well a tutor can relate/communicate with a particular student; nevertheless, once the fit is established, then the relationship is quite steady and last a while.

For the tutor as well, once they find a good client, they may get many other referrals from the same client. For example, if Jimmy's math grades all of a sudden improved, his parents may attribute it to the tutor, which gets the tutor a lot more calls for work within that community.

All of the above means that beyond a finders fee, there isn't too much of an ongoing role for Tutorspree.

[YuriNiyazov]

Except there's so much that TutorSpree could've done in the marketplace model. They could've built a better scheduling system. They could've built a better way for tutors to offer discounts for purchasing packages. They could've built a bidding model where tutors could pay to show up higher in the rankings. They could've built a content network (e.g. various blogs about tutoring or education) and have tutors pay a fee to have their profile featured on those blogs.

You know what I hate doing? I hate printing paper that says "Tutor available" with my name and credentials on it, and those little paper tails that you rip off on the bottom with your email and phone number, and then going to the local university and posting it up everywhere. I will pay money to a service that solves that marketing problem for me.

Edit: to put it a different way - dating sites have this problem even worse than tutoring sites, because the presumably monogamous members of a couple meet each other, they don't need the dating sites anymore. Tutoring sites have a smaller problem because the tutor-tutee relationship isn't exclusive.

[ronaldx]

> I hate printing paper that says "Tutor available" with my name and credentials on it.

Are you willing to take a 40% cut in your rate for someone to do this for you?

I think this illustrates nicely why the market is a graveyard. It's competing with a super-simple task that cannot be replicated at scale.