Problem

The Tutoring Market is Crowded, Yet Flawed

Parents searching for tutors often end up frustrated. Existing platforms like Superprof, Varsity Tutors, and Wyzant offer an overwhelming number of tutors with no clear way to gauge quality. Many platforms prioritize quantity over quality, flooding search results with underqualified tutors, making the selection process time-consuming and ineffective.

Hidden Fees and Inflated Costs

Most platforms take a huge commission from every booking, forcing tutors to inflate their prices just to make a living. This results in parents paying exorbitant fees while tutors receive only a fraction of what they charge. Additionally, some platforms lock users into subscriptions or long-term commitments, adding to the frustration.

Booking is a Friction-Filled Nightmare

Even after finding a tutor, scheduling a session is often painful. Many platforms require back-and-forth messaging just to find a time that works. Some don’t even display tutor availability upfront, forcing parents to waste time reaching out to tutors who might not be available at all. Worse, many platforms lack instant booking, meaning parents and students are stuck waiting instead of getting immediate help.
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Limitations of Existing Booking Solutions

Initially, we relied on Cal.com for scheduling, which allowed us to move quickly from 0 to 1. However, depending on an external booking solution came with significant challenges. One of the biggest lessons learned was that when your business relies on third-party software for a core function, you're at the mercy of their updates and changes.

Over time, Cal.com made updates that removed essential functionality, such as the ability for me as the owner to create managed event types. These sudden changes disrupted operations and made it clear that we needed full control over the booking experience. Additionally, Cal.com lacked key features such as recurring bookings and multiple-session scheduling, which we found through user feedback to be major barriers preventing parents from committing to multiple lessons. This was a missed revenue opportunity and required extra manual work to follow up with parents for rebooking.

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Business Objectives

• Simplify tutor discovery so parents and students can find the best fit quickly.

• Ensure transparent tutor quality by vetting every tutor

• Eliminate unnecessary booking friction with real-time availability and instant payments.

• Enable multiple and recurring session booking to increase revenue, retention and reduce administrative workload.

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Opportunity

Unlike traditional tutoring companies burdened by high overhead costs—such as office space, administrative staff, and large sales teams—TutorLyft operates as a lean, technology-driven business. By leveraging automation and streamlined workflows, we keep costs low, allowing us to charge reasonable rates for students while ensuring tutors receive fair pay.

This approach not only improves accessibility but also increases platform scalability, making high-quality tutoring more affordable than competitors that are locked into outdated, high-cost models.

How might we make finding and booking the right tutor fast, intuitive, and reliable?

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Our Approach: Designing a Better Tutoring Experience

At TutorLyft, we set out to reimagine the tutoring marketplace from the ground up, addressing common frustrations for both parents, students, and tutors.

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Smart Tutor Discovery & Quality Assurance

To ensure the highest quality tutoring experience, we have a rigorous vetting process. Every tutor must have real-world teaching experience or a strong academic background, pass an interview with our team, and list their availability upfront to eliminate scheduling conflicts. We also introduced client testimonials, allowing parents and students to leave reviews that build trust and provide social proof. To make searching easier, we developed an advanced filtering system that lets users refine their search based on subject, education level, experience, availability, and keywords. To recognize top-performing tutors, we created the "TutorLyft Pro" badge, which highlights those who have completed a high number of sessions with strong student feedback.
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Empowering Tutors and Clients with a Self-Serve Portal

We are currently building a custom booking system along with a tutor portal and client-facing portal to address gaps in our existing booking experience. This new system is designed to improve the process by allowing parents and students to schedule multiple lessons in one transaction, reducing drop-off rates. It will support recurring bookings for weekly or biweekly sessions, making long-term learning plans easier to manage.

Automated follow-ups will send reminders and prompts to encourage additional bookings, helping to increase retention. Payments will be processed upfront through Stripe, eliminating friction in the booking process. The system will also introduce automated discounted lesson packages for parents who purchase five or more sessions in advance, something that I currently handle manually by reaching out to each student or parent individually to offer a discount. Once launched, this system will streamline operations, reduce administrative overhead, and encourage repeat bookings, ultimately increasing customer lifetime value.

As the Founder and Product Designer, I led the end-to-end design of this system and am currently collaborating with developers to bring it to life. By building our own infrastructure, TutorLyft will have full control over the booking experience, allowing us to iterate and improve based on user needs rather than being limited by third-party software.

To further enhance the experience for tutors, we are developing a Tutor Portal that gives them control over their profiles and scheduling. Tutors can update their availability in real-time, adjust their rates and bio without needing admin approval, and track their session history and earnings in one place. This change has significantly reduced the administrative burden, saving about two hours per week. Automated payouts with real-time earnings tracking have also eliminated five hours of manual work per month.

Another key improvement is the ability to set lesson-specific availability, solving a major issue tutors had with Cal.com’s limited scheduling options. Previously, tutors had to email me just to make simple updates. Now, with the Tutor Portal, they will be able to manage their profiles independently, making the entire process more efficient and user-friendly.

The booking app and portals are now under development, and I will update this once they are live and we’re able to see the impact of these improvements. Designs of the tutor portal can be viewed below.

Designing with SEO in Mind

TutorLyft relies heavily on organic traffic, making SEO an essential part of our design and growth strategy. From early on, I learned that landing pages serve as our digital storefronts—often the first point of contact for potential customers. Ensuring that these pages are both highly discoverable and conversion-friendly has been a key priority.

Designing with SEO in mind for TutorLyft means:

• Creating highly targeted landing pages – We designed pages specifically for high-intent search terms like 'math tutor Toronto' to attract the right audience.
• Optimizing page structure and content – Using clear headers, keyword-rich descriptions, and internal linking to improve search rankings.
• Prioritizing speed and accessibility – Ensuring pages load quickly and are mobile-friendly to improve user experience and ranking factors.
• Building credibility with testimonials and social proof – Strengthening trust with authentic tutor reviews and success stories.

This approach has been highly effective. TutorLyft now ranks in the top 10 search results for key transactional pages, such as 'math tutor Toronto,' where visitors are often high-intent users looking to book a session immediately. As a result, we’ve generated over $30,000 in organic revenue directly attributed to Google Search over a 3-month period—without spending a single dollar on paid advertising. Our growth has been entirely organic, demonstrating the power of thoughtful SEO-driven design and content strategy in building a sustainable business.

The Future of TutorLyft: How We're Thinking About AI

At TutorLyft, I see AI as a tool to amplify—not replace—the human connection at the heart of tutoring. The challenge isn’t just integrating AI for the sake of innovation; it’s about identifying the real pain points in the tutor-student experience and designing solutions that enhance efficiency, personalize learning, and remove friction. By breaking down the tutoring journey into three key phases—before, during, and after a lesson—I plan to thoughtfully introduce AI in ways that feel natural and genuinely useful.

Before the Lesson: Smarter Prep, Less Admin

We plan to develop AI-powered tools that help tutors streamline lesson preparation. Instead of manually reviewing past sessions, AI-generated lesson recaps could provide a quick summary of key topics covered, common mistakes, and recurring student questions. This would help tutors pick up right where they left off, ensuring smoother continuity in learning.

Lesson planning is another area where AI could provide real value. By analyzing uploaded documents and past lessons, AI could generate structured lesson plans, suggest relevant practice exercises, and even create custom worksheets or quizzes. This would reduce prep time while ensuring that each session is tailored to the student’s needs.
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During the Lesson: AI as a Real-Time Learning Companion

We’re also exploring ways to use AI to support students in real-time during lessons. One area of focus is quick, on-demand explanations. If a student struggles with a concept, an AI-powered tool could provide additional context, alternative explanations, or examples to reinforce understanding—without disrupting the tutor’s flow.

Another potential feature is AI-assisted note-taking. Rather than tutors having to manually summarize key points, AI could transcribe and organize important moments from a lesson, creating structured notes that both students and tutors can reference later. This could improve lesson retention and allow students to stay more engaged without worrying about capturing every detail themselves.

Additionally, we’re considering adaptive learning tools that dynamically generate practice problems based on student performance. Instead of relying on static worksheets, AI could adjust exercises in real time to challenge students appropriately, reinforcing concepts in a way that aligns with their progress.
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After the Lesson: Personalized Insights Without Extra Work

Post-lesson follow-ups are critical for retention, but they often take up valuable tutor time. We want to build AI-powered tools that automate lesson summaries, generating clear, digestible recaps that highlight progress, key takeaways, and areas for review. These could be shared with both students and parents to keep everyone aligned on learning objectives.

For parents who want to stay involved, we plan to introduce AI-driven progress tracking. This would compile meaningful insights into engagement trends, strengths, and areas for improvement, providing a clear picture of a student’s learning journey. On the tutor side, AI could analyze session effectiveness by identifying engagement patterns and comprehension gaps, offering data-driven insights that help refine teaching approaches.

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Final Thoughts

TutorLyft is a new company, but we’ve already helped over 450 students across Canada, completing around 2,000 tutoring sessions and logging over 110,000 minutes of tutoring. This early traction validates our approach and shows the demand for a better, more efficient tutoring experience.

As Founder and Lead Product Designer, I’ve overseen every aspect of TutorLyft’s growth, from UX/UI design of the marketing website to architecting the new custom booking system. Our mission is to continue innovating, leveraging technology to make high-quality tutoring more accessible, efficient, and impactful. And one more thing: We're just getting started.