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Instrucfor is an online portal that connects parents and students with tutors. It was founded in April 2017 by Maroof Khan and Muhammad Anas, two computer science graduates in their mid-twenties. Right after graduation, they got incubated at the Nest I/O which is where the seeds for their startup were sown.
Anas used to be a tutor himself during his university days and identified the bottlenecks of the traditional tuition industry. “I was aware of the problems parents were facing, I knew the issues encountered by tutors as well and there was no platform addressing them so we wanted to be the ones offering these solutions,” he recalls.
What exactly is it? Think of Instrucfor as an online marketplace that brings together the demand and supply side. You are a parent who wants to to find a tutor for your kid? Visit their website, control for your location and the subject and search for the tutors. They will show you a list of suitable prospects according to education, experience and reviews (not shown).
What if you are a tutor? Well, they make you visible to thousands of parents and add some credibility to your profile. How? In order to start offering your services, you must first take a subject competency test to prove your worth.
But to say that Instrucfor is merely an online marketplace would be short-selling them. That’s because their involvement goes further than bridging the demand and supply sides. Throughout the time a tutor is teaching a student, the Instrucfor team keeps in touch with both the parties to track progress. It can be in the form of monthly calls to parents to verify attendance and teaching hours of the tutor or the students’ test score improvement.
Not only that, they try to improve the way teaching is done by incorporating practices from pedagogical science. They have on board a number of educationists as consultants who recommend best practices or even design tests.
What if you have a special request? Maybe a subject that is not listed on their website? Or you want a tutor for a hearing-impaired child? They claim to be your guys even in that case. “We have connections in the industry so it’s far easier for us to find the right people,” says Anas.
A bootstrapped startup, Instrucfor has a business model similar to most online marketplaces: charging commission to suppliers. In their case, tutors are charged a monthly 20 per cent on their earnings which helps the company stay cash-positive. For tuition-seekers, however, it’s free of cost.
The duo isn’t too keen on raising money anytime soon either. “We want to first build it enough, get a good amount of data so we can analyse the industry better and only then we will think about investors,” the young co-founder said.
But so far, all of it is done more or less manually. Monthly progress of the students is monitored through calls with parents, rather than a formal report card. And the website itself needs more regular updates. Things obviously can’t stay the same if they are to become a sizable player. But hopefully as their user base grows, so will their team and investments.
Instrucfor’s biggest competition comes from the giant coaching centres and the star teachers who have both the credibility to get customers and the money to burn: something Anas and Maroof are still working towards. “Their strategy brings them quick bucks for sure, but at the end of the day, they are limited to a geographic location. That’s not a limitation we have,” claims Anas.
Wait, isn’t a tutor limited in both time and space in terms of when and where he teaches the students? Sure. But here’s the catch: while they are still mostly connecting students with tutors in a conventional way, that’s not their goal. The objective is to make it all online. “It’s far more convenient for everyone; students can record lectures, we can track better, and obviously no one is bound by geography,” Anas tells Dawn, adding “but unfortunately parents are generally still not willing to take that leap of faith.”
Though the perception will change as Pakistan’s wider tech startup scene picks pace, Instrucfor’s co-founders aren’t passively waiting for things to fall into place. “If a student is taking 3-4 tuitions through our portal, we try to convince parents to let at least one of them be online. These are baby steps but it helps in educating parents and creating trust in an unorthodox way of learning,” explains Anas.
This probably helps rationalise the optimism Anas has regarding Instrucfor’s competitive edge as well as its future. While they might not have the deep pockets, they have a growing wave of digitisation working to their edge. It’s understandable then that Anas hopes to scale the market beyond Pakistan. “South Asia has this big tuition culture and we are eyeing to cash in on that,” he says.
Whether they’d be able to achieve all of this and beyond is too early to say. The industry is still in its early stages and they themselves at an even younger phase.
The writer is member of staff:
Twitter: @MutaherKhan
Published in Dawn, July 1st, 2018
