Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Karen V. Ordones is the CEO and Founder of Tutor.id, which is constantly looking for ways of transforming the education industry, growing tutoring businesses, and enabling novel ways of income for both tutors and their students.
Tutor.id was born as a management tool for tutors because Karen noticed most management software in education was targeted at schools, and the system was too complex and costly for a one-person business. As a full-time private teacher, Karen needed a simpler, more affordable tool to manage her own tutoring business with 100 students. She had more students than she could have comfortably managed with excel sheets, so she decided to create a product for herself and her peers who were experiencing the same problems as her.
Tutor.id’s first version was released in late September 2016. Karen thought it was a big risk for the edtech company as it had no competitors at that point of time, and the team was afraid that they might have launched this innovation too soon. It is always risky when an organization spots a market need even before consumers know it. In cases like these, companies need to educate the customers, which can be very expensive and time-consuming.
After creating an easy-to-use management solution for the tutors to manage their business and students, Karen, together with her co-founder Murillo Ichikawa, decided to add the marketplace to Tutor.id’s product in early 2019, creating a holistic solution never seen before in the tutoring industry. Tutor. matched tutors and students while supporting both throughout the entire learning journey, which paid off massively and led to 900% higher retention than its closest rivals.
Thanks to its history of starting as a management tool for tutors, the edtech platform had built the first marketplace keeping teachers in mind. Tutor.id’s full suite management software (payments, scheduling, lesson tracing tools) helps individual tutors launch and grow their business hassle-free and adds a lot of value to its marketplace.
Presently the edtech firm works with two business models:
- 20% revenue share from marketplace transactions
- Subscription(10-40$/monthly) for management tool for tutors
Currently, the organization comprises more than 7.8k tutors registered from 119 countries.
The Leader
A Brazilian of Italian descent, Karen V. Ordones has always been very interested in understanding human behavior, which led her to study Social Sciences with a concentration in Political Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. This also motivated her to experience several different cultures and societies.
Additionally, Karen holds a Master’s Degree in Baltic Sea Region Studies from the University of Tartu, Estonia.
Karen’s journey as an educator began with her family, which has been involved in education for at least three generations. Her grandfather and his brothers founded a very popular music school in São Paulo and actively organized Modern Art Week, a revolutionary event that changed Brazilian art forever.
Karen says, “I don’t have a specific event that activated my “Education genes,” because since I was a school kid, I enjoyed teaching my peers. As an adult and having taught both in schools and privately, my positive and negative experiences led me to create Tutor.id.”
Motivation to Establish the Business
Initially, as a tutor, Karen faced several challenges managing students with excel sheets. Her primary motivation was to solve her own pain as a solo tutoring business owner.
She was way too overwhelmed to manage a whole business on her own. She always wanted a professional tool that could automate extremely time-consuming tasks. She wanted to focus on preparing great lessons and supporting her students.
With time and growing demand, Tutor.id’s product evolved into a marketplace on steroids and extended its mission to helping students to keep track of their learning and be more motivated to learn. “It is extremely challenging to bring individual learning assessments to scalable tech, and we are excited to take up this task to figure this out!”– she explains.
“It is time to bring more innovation to Education. We have been digitizing reality, but it is about time to create novel ways for the new generation to learn faster and better to build a better world.”
Karen also wants to empower people to become the best version of themselves. Tutor.id’s primary mission is to make the learning process much easier, faster, effective, and exciting. The edtech firm aspires to help students enjoy the learning process and achieve their academic and professional goals with its qualified tutors. The firm has also built several tools to help students track their progress, gain confidence and motivation to keep learning new things, and succeed in whatever they set their minds to. Karen is aware of the fact that she and her team play a crucial role in helping people learn more about how they can effectively learn at a faster rate and how to retain that knowledge long term. Although challenging, Karen still finds it very rewarding to see people being directly impacted by her products.
Additionally, as a startup, Tutor.id works closely with the community of users. Karen says, “If we change one person’s life with our product, we already feel a huge sense of accomplishment and aim to scale from there. We aim to build something users love and cannot live without.”
With its growth, Tutor.id plans to work with organizations that will enable the company’s impact on different parts of our beloved planet. With Tutor.id, these organizations will have access to remote communities that could benefit from the quality and remote education.
Tackling the Pandemic
Karen states, “My favorite and the most exciting market trend is the Metaverse and any sort of augmented reality technology. Wouldn’t it be amazing to learn biology while walking in the Amazon rainforest with your teacher and classmate?”
Since the first quarter of 2020, the world has witnessed a deadly pandemic, leading to many deaths, lockdowns, work-from-home orders, and closed schools. This pandemic, however, brought an increase in Tutor.id’s access by 4000%, which eventually triggered a series of instability in the product. This situation allowed the CTO Murillo Ichikawa and his team to quickly identify technical weaknesses and rebuild the platform for faster growth. Thanks to its brilliant results and positive impact during such emotionally draining times, Tutor.id closed its biggest funding of 500K EUR from angel investors of Estonia, Denmark, Canada, and the United States.
Preparing for the Future As the organization’s CEO, Karen would love to see Tutor.id as a brand that people recognize and know that its values are deeply rooted in empowering education for both tutors and students. She states, “Our plan to get there is really focusing on providing value. We aim to ensure learning is measured, so students and tutors can track their progress. This is something that has not been achieved by any company yet, so we would like to be the pioneers in adding this value to the industry and create the gold standard of learning assessment.”