EZTutor believes that students learn best not just from someone who has taken the same standardized test as they have but from someone who has sat in the same classroom.
That’s the concept that helped propel the tutoring startup to the No. 1 spot at the Dallas semifinals leg of the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards competition earlier this month. And with that mission, as well as with a $11,000 prize package from the win, EZTutor is looking to grow its presence in North Texas before eyeing other cities in the Lone Star state.
“We don’t want to be just another platform that gets you help last minute on one homework assignment or gets you a big grade on one test,” Aryan Bhatnagar, co-founder and CEO at EZTutor told NTX Inno. “We want to be there for you consistently and we want to improve your fundamental success in education through making you a better learner.”
That funding brought the company’s total to more than $50,000, nearly all of which has come from similar pitch competitions.
Currently operating in Coppell and Flower Mound, EZTutor’s platform matches students with tutors who have gone to the same school and taken the same classes. Its algorithm also works to find tutors whose leadership and teaching style best fit with the students’ learning styles.
“In the classroom you might have a peer that truly understands something and you might have a peer who has no idea what’s going on, why can’t we just connect these two and make it easier to learn through each other,” Bhatnagar said. “Our focus is to connect you with someone who knows how it’s done, who has been in your exact shoes.”
When Bhatnagar and a group of friends first launched EZTutor in 2017, they were all upperclassmen at high school in Coppell. And the concept came from a personal need. As an athlete, Bhatnagar was used to spending hours a day on the soccer field with his teammates, until a series of ACL injuries took him off the field. EZTutor was a way to bring the camaraderie and leadership that comes with team sport to the tutoring industry.
Providing tutors who are close to the experience of the students they are teach, EZTutor has set up a rigorous hiring process for its tutors, requiring a top percentage high school GPA, high ACT or SAT scores before going through a three- to four-part interview process.
“We’re taking smart kids but they’re not the end product. We have to put them through a training program, we have to polish them before we put them in front of our clients,” Bhatnagar said. “We look to see if they have the ability to learn and to grow more and accept new strategies… of how they can help students. And if they have an open mindset and they’re willing to learn, then they make great EZTutors.”
While the other co-founders of EZTutor have moved on to pursue their college careers, Bhatnagar now runs the company largely by himself while studying finance at SMU. Since its launch, it has provided more than 8,000 hours of tutoring with more than 150 tutors on its platform, and recently hit revenue of about $180,000.
As Bhatnagar has been growing the business, he said much of EZTutor’s model has been hands-on, with him manually onboarding tutors and entering other data. However, now the company is expecting to launch it app within the next four to eight weeks, which Bhatnagar said will allow the company to handle more users as it expands in Plano, Frisco and other parts of DFW.
“We’re not saying, 'Okay, we can go to any city and make it work.' We want to know can we go to a city we only know a little bit about and make it work there,” Bhatnagar said.
The pandemic has caused some uncertainty for EZTutor and the edtech market, Bhatnagar said. On one hand, many schools are moving to pass/fail models or easier grading models due to the crisis, which could create less of a demand, since a C would get the same passing mark as an A. On the other hand though, Bhatnagar said it could cause a surge in demand as many are concerned that distance learning may not be as effective as in-person learning.
Either way, EZTutor’s sights are set on growth. Amid the pandemic, the company has moved most of its tutoring online and has been working with SMU to bring its tutors onto that marketplace. Within the next 16-18 months, Bhatnagar hopes to bring EZTutor to more than 20 schools in the region. He said for the time being EZTutor’s focus will be on DFW, before looking at expanding to Austin and Houston. He said by that point, he believes the company will have enough data to begin easily rolling out its services in other markets across the country.
“I think my generation has a different view on entrepreneurship… I think it’s less about money and cashflow, and I think it’s more about making a positive impact on society,” Bhatnagar said. “I definitely want to keep helping as many communities as we can help. We’re still very, very small, we haven’t event touched the iceberg in this industry but I think it has a lot of potential and a lot of room for growth.”
