Perception

So about two weeks ago, a friend of mine called me up with a question which was something along the lines of “Hey, I had an idea to start a tuition matching service for NUS students. Do you think it’s a good idea?”. After a brief discussion I told him I felt it was a feasible idea, but what I must say is that I was sold the moment he brought it up. A similar idea had passed through during my brainstorming process for OrangeOasis services, but I felt then that executing such a service would not be easy considering the relative saturation of the private tuition market.

To know that someone else was equally if not more enthusiastic about the idea completely got me excited about it again. The concept is pretty straightforward; what our service will do is match NUS students (both undergraduates and graduates) to parents seeking tutors for their children. This way, the parents benefit as they will be assigned tutors of competent academic standards, while the NUS students themselves also stand to gain from the opportunity to earn additional income to finance their studies.

I myself had set some objectives for my participation in this project. The seemingly most obvious one would be to earn money, and hopefully help myself to a couple of assignments as well. But besides this, my underlying aims were significant too. The first would be to learn more about starting a business, in terms of official paperwork involving ACRA, etc. Another objective was to gain experience in the field of marketing, especially through traditional means like classifieds and possibly flyers.

Last but not least, I hoped to be able to apply a smart technological solution to a menial problem in an already saturated market – the tuition market. Enter Tutorific, which is a simple site I rushed over this past week that allows tutors to deposit their details for us to reference. It’s not a technological feat in any way, nor is it the dramatic solution which I mentioned in the previous statement. There was a balance emphasis on both the design and its functionality, and it was really fortunate that the inspiration for this design struck me one night before I slept.

The colour scheme is pretty decent too in my opinion, and very relevant in a certain context. It’s built on OrangeOasis, so the account details are all tied in together. I’ve just managed to add in external accounts for students from other local universities (at the request of a friend) which I think would be a good idea to expand our base of tutors.

Right now, I’m still fine-tuning the details on Tutorific, and thinking of ways to further market it to the local tertiary student audience, especially those in NUS. I had to rush out OrangeOasis and launch a underdeveloped site as a result of Tutorific, but thankfully that’s nothing much on there anyway. Another problem to solve is actually getting tuition assignments, which I’ll talk about in a later post a couple of weeks down.