‘Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.’
-Henry Ford
Keeping this simple statement in mind, two individuals, Mr. Sandip Kar, a tech graduate and Mr. Anindya Kar in the year 2002 founded My Private Tutor, with the objective of connecting students and teachers for the purpose of simplifying the task of finding tutors for students across more than 10 countries including India, Malaysia, Qatar and several others.
In India, parents and students feel that formal education is wholly inadequate in equipping students for a rapidly changing workplace. As a result, demand for supplemental education – most prominently in the form of personal tutoring and coaching classes – continues to increase every year. However, since the tutoring market is fragmented, unorganised and has negligible entry barriers and standards, finding the right tutor is difficult and time-consuming. At the same time, tutors who have the skills find it difficult to signal their expertise and attract students. This is a classic matchmaking problem. My Private Tutor has been trying to solve this problem using technology since its inception.
Till date they have successfully achieved the following:
- – 250,000+ tutors on-board. 750,000+monthly users.
- – Presence in 10 countries via country-specific websites.
- – Positive cash flow with employee strength of 40.
- – Bootstrapped with little external investment.
- – Tech-focused: Developed chatbots and machine-learning algorithms to facilitate matchmaking between tutors and students.
In Anindya’s own words, “After spending 10 years in the corporate world, I am enjoying the freedom that comes with running one’s own business. However, I have also realized that building a profitable business is a lot harder than anything I did in my corporate career. Being an entrepreneur is effectively a 24X7 job as you are always thinking of how you can improve your business.’’
My Private Tutor aims to build an affordable learning platform that combines high-quality personalized educational content with live tutoring from top tutors.
IIMCIP has been encouraging the organisation through every stage of their progress path, not only by providing funding support but also providing mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs like K. Ganesh. Experts have also been readily available to discuss & guide on crucial topics like various challenges faced in running a startup.