Show HN: Teachity - find a tutor or be a tutor online | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Teachity - find a tutor or be a tutor online

teachity.com

14 pointspanther2k17 comments

Some immediate thoughts:

The featured projects and tutors on the home page could be linked so you can find out more about them without signing up.

As a prospective teacher: How do I get paid? How often? What cut does Teachity take?

As a prospective student: How do I pay (credit card, I assume)? What happens if I don't like my tutor (refund policy, etc.)?

Thanks. I'll add some copy to the front page to clear up some of your questions.

Payments are all done through Stripe Connect. Right now Teachity isn't taking a cut, but if the site ends up getting enough users then I'll start experimenting with pricing... as a comp, I think airbnb is 6-12%, elance is ~9% of each transaction.

Refunds are tricky. Everything is run through Stripe so I can't directly issue refunds above Teachity's cut. If people have a really horrible experience/no-show tutor I can ban the tutor and give refunds out of my own pocket although that wouldn't be sustainable. I'm working on a feedback system, so hopefully that will head off most problems... although you need enough reviews for that to be effective in the first place.

Hey there, I work on Connect at Stripe. Sorry if there was any confusion regarding refunds and Connect: you can both make refunds back to the customer, and refund your application fee back to your tutor.

Would love to help clarify things, feel free to email me at amber@stripe.com as well. (:

Pagination buttons aren't working (current page isn't highlighted).

Logging in as a tutor, and then returning to the home page throws up the Stripe flash behind the Featured Projects and Featured Tutors titles.

How do I see the virtual classroom without bidding on a "project".

We have hundreds of expert tutors, teachers and advisers from around the globe standing by.

Really? I'm user 38.

Thanks for catching those bugs, I'll fix them up.

Classrooms are created when a bid is accepted so there's no way to navigate to one of the actual classrooms beforehand. I should probably incorporate a screenshot or preview of the classroom on the home page.

I guess I wrote that copy in a fit of optimism! Corrected it so as not to be misleading.

Thanks for the feedback.

> I guess I wrote that copy in a fit of optimism! Corrected it so as not to be misleading.

We have expert tutors, teachers and advisers from around the globe standing by.

Glad the optimism hasn't worn off :-) Stripe only works for the US and Canada, so...

And Welcome to the world's premier online learning marketplace! is a bit spammy, and yet twee at the same time. Quite an achievement! ;-)

You're right about Stripe, however it's just the suggested payment method. If they don't use it, I don't get paid but I'm not going to try to keep people walled in, especially in light of Stripe's limited availability ex. North America.

I'm going to stand by that one, even if just to save a little pride. ;) Technicalities FTW!

> I'm not going to try to keep people walled in

Then why can't I hide the ugly red banner?

Stripe can be used to charge foreign cards too.

And none of your Featured Tutors seem to have accounts.

Also you might want to set up a notification system to let registered tutors learn about new projects in categories they're interested in.

Keep going, I think you have the M down, only V and P to go ;-)

Yep, a tutor notification system is on my to-do list. Good idea.

Thanks again for spending so much time with it.

what if I can tutor in some topics and student in others? Should be able to see the list of topics w/out signing up.

Hmm, you should be able to navigate to the project board without signing in. You would be able to see all the jobs that have been posted by students + the broad category buckets. Or did you mean I should highlight the categories on the home page?

The default bootstrap-template could have been modified, at least.

Also the "hero banner" or whatever it's called has some serious artifact issues. It looks almost like a magic eye

Heh, my photoshop skills are sub-par. I've been putting off replacing the banner with a more robust site intro/overview, sounds like I need to make that happen.

Why? Honestly - if you're shipping version 1 the only people that are going to care are people who know what twitter bootstrap is. That's less than 1% of 1% of the population. So why spend precious time catering to that group? Did you check whether the site works in IE6 too?

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