VCs and E-tutoring

My never ending obsession with tutoring(esp e-tutoring)

Read my first post on e-tutoring(last year) here

Its a billion dollar opportunity and regular Pankap readers know it too well....

India is going to have stiff competition from china and eastern europe in future..but
India is well placed for GROWTH(for the time being).

But Sramana Mitra raised few very interesting points :

1.VCs are interested in this area(I would love to write about VCs when they become VERY interested )

2.Tutoring TAM(for geeks:its not Telecommunications Automation Model ..its Total available market) is very large ($5B), online tutoring TAM is likely to constitute of students who are quite motivated, and omit the ones who are not.

3.Growing Stars, one of the earlier entrants to this market, is doing a miserable job of strategic marketing, and hence will have difficulty gaining any traction whatsoever in terms of growth financing.

4.Personalization is the key. It should be 1:1 service unlike eSylvan.

But here are some questions(copied directly from Sraman sir blog) which VCs can ask

* How many students are they tutoring?
* How many hours on average do the students use the service?
* Who are these students? Public School Students? Private School Students?
* Any ethnic bias towards kids of Indian / Asian parents?
* Any geographical bias? Which School districts are adopting the service?
* Experience with HomeSchoolers? Is that a segment they serve? What % of the business is Home Schoolers?
* What subjects do they receive the maximum tutoring requests for? Algebra I? Calculus? Biology? Physics? …etc.?
* Do they ever have missed appointments, whereby the students skip their scheduled session?
* What kinds of skill-gap assessments do they do? How do they zero in on what to focus on?
* What content / syllabus do they follow in tutoring the students?
* How do they reconcile state-to-state and school-to-school variations in course material?
* What is the user experience like? Hardware? Software?
* What is the pricing model?
* How much have they benefitted from NCLB certification?
* How do they market the service?
* Do they have experience with advertising using the MySpace / Facebook communities?
* Do teachers recommend / use the service to help their students?
* What are the primary drivers of the business? test-preparation? home-work help? other?
* Any issues dealing with the teacher’s unions (NEA, etc.) due to off-shoring?


Growing stars,Tutorvista,Educomp and Career Launcher are some of the players in this largely unexplored market segment



Kapil Bhatia