Bootstrap your startup: become a hacker tutor | Hacker News Reader

Bootstrap your startup: become a hacker tutor

blog.tutorspree.com

102 pointsryanb16 comments

I have a little bit of experience with tutoring from TAing a senior-level CS course in college. Even at that level, there's a big need for it, and as a tutor, it feels great to see that lightbulb moment when a student suddenly groks a concept you've been working with them on. If the idea of teaching appeals to something inside of you, go for it.

That said, it can be a massive time sink, and very frustrating, especially for students for whom programming just doesn't click at all (and they are out there). You can probably make significantly more doing freelance work, so if you know you don't have the patience to, for instance, repeatedly explain that their Python script isn't working because they're trying to invoke it from the wrong directory, you might want to pass.

i'd like a system like this where instead of getting money you get labor. some sort of informal internship, if you will.

would be cool to connect people learning to program with mentors who are looking for contributors to their projects.

So does this mean you dropped the old requirement you had about needing to have previously been an educator.

That's a guideline we use focused on the k-12 subject matter areas (still our main focus). It's where the "being a teacher" piece is a response to parent feedback.

Here, for the hacking side of things, we think the dynamics are a bit different. We still want great people, but the formal teaching piece is not a requirement.

Seems like it's only for US guys. Has US-specific fields state and zip-code.

We've only built it out for the US for now. If you're international, Fill in your city and hit the zip with all 0s. When we rejigger it to allow for international, we'll let you know.

You could put those instructions on the sign-up form (or change the controls there). Are you deliberately holding off from doing that at the moment?

This is a pretty interesting idea and I like the idea of the site itself. What percentage of tutors get work at the rates they have posted and how many hours do they get on average? I'm curious to know if anyone is doing anything besides getting beer money (so to speak) with the site right now.

100% of tutors are booking lessons at their posted rates, actually - no real haggling going on. I think it's a different situation relative to, say, freelancing. You're not negotiating with a business over a deliverable, you're part of a transparent framework where people are trying to get educated. It's a different kind of motivation.

TutorSpree folks, here is a search I made in Washington, http://www.tutorspree.com/search/?q=washington you have this two duplicated many times over. You may want to fix this.

not sure what you mean - please shoot me a line at ryan@tutorspree

we haven't really expanded into the DC area yet but we're working on it.

edit: oops. you found an IE7 bug. thanks!

Is there a link to edit my tutor profile? When I log in, I don't see anything about it.

under your picture on the left hand side of your Dashboard, click the "Edit my profile" button. perhaps we should make this more obvious.

All I see under my picture on the Dashboard is "Upcoming sessions - No upcoming sessions."

My tutor profile definitely exists, because I sent myself a message through the site.

Is there something messy with having a user account and a tutor account with the same email address?

How is this bootstrapping and not just working on the side?

some people consider "bootstrapping" to be equivalent to "spend most of your cycles on the startup, but also spend some time freelancing to fund it"

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