Alexander Kolchinsky is the CEO of Russian Math Tutors, an online tutoring company that was started in January 2020 (the initial days of the Covid -19 pandemic). The company is a hybrid (kind of) between a school and a tutoring marketplace. Being a computer programmer by trade, Alexander realized that he wanted to migrate from the existing platform – TutorCruncher. Reason being, too much administrative overhead, especially the process of acquiring new tutors and customers. Everything had to be done by hand and so he wanted to re-platform to a digital/online marketplace solution.
Now, the advantage of a tutoring marketplace is that it is more transparent while the client is given a wider choice of tutors. It reduces the administration overhead as it brings the tutors and clients closer to each other. Moreover, the administrator personally vets the tutors. As Alexander wanted to differentiate Russian Math Tutors from the competition, he wanted a platform where he could have the source code and incorporate new capabilities. He wanted to have his own domain and present a unified user interface where students could easily find teachers, book one-on-one and group lessons and have the teachers conduct lessons using the same platform. In short, he wanted a one-stop marketplace for all types of tutoring needs.
Early in the spring of 2021, Alexander started looking for an alternative to TutorCruncher. He came across two websites viz, G2 and another that listed all major solutions. And, after six months of careful research and trying different platforms recommended on those websites, he stopped at one solution that offered a trial period of 2 months. However, after the end of the trial period, he started to have second thoughts. Alexander thought that he would still be renting the platform and paying close to $600 every month to no end. And, all the features would still not suffice for what he wanted. In addition, the user interface was confusing and was broken into unnecessary screens and unintuitive menu items. This is when he decided to connect with FATbit Technologies for their product Yo!Coach.
Our representative reassured Alexander that if there were missing features we could easily add them later as the code of Yo!Coach was well written, and we had our proprietary APIs. Moreover, MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework was used. Being a software engineer himself, Alexander appreciated this architecture as it separated the application into three main components – Model, View, and Controller and focused on the size reduction of UI code, making it cleaner and manageable.
MVC Architecture – The controller acts as a facilitator between the Model (data) and View (user interface) and processes the input from the user.
Alexander was also impressed that Yo!Coach uses SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheet) files. These can be easily modified and customized to the look and feel desired as they are more mature, stable, and powerful professional-grade, cascading style sheets. So you don’t have to go through each screen and make the changes, just put the changes in one file and then distribute them.
Alexander was also impressed with the demo of Yo!Coach as he could try out administrator, teacher, and learner screens and see how the various user interfaces interact. He also admired that Yo!Coach comes with a mobile version and iPad version, so separate apps for Android and iOS are not needed. But the biggest selling feature of Yo!Coach for Alexander was that he could have the source code and install the product on his system.
Needless to say, Alexander found Yo!Coach was competitive for the price and purchased the base copy. Just within a couple of days, the whole platform was up and running. Even though he didn’t develop it, Alexander still found joy as it was built according to his specifications.
In his video testimonial, Alexander says:
“It wasn’t some rental software that they decided what features are required. In this case, I am the one who drove the development cycle. You know I was the product manager, so to speak. And, I would say I could use this software for at least, at least another 5-10 years.”
– Alexander Kolchinsky, CEO of Russian Math Tutors
Rounding Up
Alexander has been using Yo!Coach for almost a year and it has exceeded his expectations. He also mentions that the base copy of Yo!Coach is good as he didn’t have to start from scratch or else it would have probably cost him upward of 100 thousand to 200 thousand dollars (if he had to develop it himself).
So, if you are an entrepreneur looking to launch (or re-platform) your tutoring website just like Alexander, get in touch with us.
