There has to be an easier, quicker way.
It’s the sentiment that led Moshe Ohayon to set up his initial tutoring center in St. Matthews in 2007 after he found himself spending too much time traversing the Louisville metro area — and not enough time actually tutoring.
“I was literally driving from one side of town to the other to go to people's homes or meet them at a coffee shop,” he recently told me.
And it’s also the driving force behind PrepSharp, which he has co-founded with two other tutors, Grace Lee and Ross Thompson, from Equitas Prep in Downtown Louisville. Although Ohayon and his team have primarily been seeing students at their center at 410 S. First St. since 2018, they also see students at different locations throughout the city.
In total, they work with 400 to 500 students a year, ranging from sixth graders to high school seniors.
In 2019, in the interest of creating more time to spend tutoring, Ohayon and his team created a simple, easy-to-read version of the answer keys and other materials for practice tests for the ACT.
The intent was for their high school student clients to score their tests on their own before they arrived for their sessions. Historically, the scoring of standardized tests such as the ACT have involved lots of adding and dividing to come up with scores.
“We just redesigned it in a way that was much easier,” said Ohayon, showing me a version of his one-page score sheet. “‘How many did you get right? This is what the score is.’ And that's it.”
They posted a digital version of what they created on their organization’s website. They were intrigued at how many visitors they were starting to get from outside destinations, thinking maybe there would be a couple hundred a month. Instead, they were getting around 1,000 hits — a day.
The web traffic has been nationwide, with New York City, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Atlanta making up the top five cities with the most visitors, as of a recent day. In fact, Louisville was 23rd on the list.
Remarkably, all of the online momentum has simply been generated through internet searches — and presumably word of mouth by other tutors.
“It's mind-boggling how much of a need there was for this,” Ohayon said.
And so the idea was born in July 2019 to take the static material that they had uploaded for free, and find a way to make it a subscription-based interactive and intuitive platform — thereby creating a “B2B2C SaaS” business model, with tutors being the second “B” and students being the customers.
“Every company out there focuses on students,” Ohayon said. “The important thing is to really focus on tutors … because the tutors make the determination of what the student needs to do.”
Currently at no cost, the PrepSharp site offers visitors answer keys, scale tables, bubble sheets and a visual proctor for the six individual sections of the ACT. There are plans to offer similar resources for the SAT and PSAT as well in January. There's no distinct timetable on when PrepSharp will start charging subscription fees for its services.
Given that none of the founders have the coding knowhow needed to build the desired end product, PrepSharp is in the process of hiring the appropriate talent to develop the software — buoyed by an initial seed round that included $100,000 from being one of eight winners of the 2022 Render Capital competition and an additional $45,000 from KeyHorse Capital.
It also was named to Awesome Inc.'s latest cohort in October — and won a fan favorite award at a 5 Across competition at Awesome Inc. in June.
“We know that we need to build,” Ohayon said. “We know that this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to pain points that tutors deal with. We know what those are [because] we live them every day.”
Ohayon said there should be a higher sense of urgency to “launch the paper and pencil interaction into the 21st Century” given that both the ACT and SAT will become completely digital in 2024.
“In the grand scheme of things, it's great that it's all going digital,” he said. “But for those students who are right in the transition, they are at a huge disadvantage.”
Ohayon initially started tutoring in Louisville in 2005 as a means to make some money before preparing to go to graduate school, after having spent several years in his native Israel, first doing an apprenticeship in patent law and then mandatory military service. He had first arrived in Louisville in 2003 after his father had accepted a job at Krauth Electric.
In 2011, Ohayon founded Educational Justice, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to lessen the disparity gap of educational opportunities provided to students from low socioeconomic status through the tutoring and test prep programs. A year later, he would finish master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Louisville. Next year, he will have been in the city for 20 years.
“It's really kind of cool,” he said of Louisville, “how much this place grows on you.”
