Premium Play-tutor matching platform in Vietnam. Parents can search for trusted & safe tutors, who can both babysit and teach.
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#VC INVESTMENT #GROWTH
YAHO — Premium Play-tutor matching platform in Vietnam. Parents can search for trusted & safe tutors, who can both babysit and teach.
With the fast economic & infrastructural growth of Vietnam, the demand for better educational environment for children has been exponentially growing since the early 2010’s. Purchasing power of household had been increasing as the GDP grew, and parents are spending top dollars to let their children get access to premium education opportunities.
The socioeconomic problem with raising children in Vietnam is that around 74% of households were dual income, and with both parents having to provide living during the daytime, childcare had always been a big concern for families with pre-school children.
Schools and private academies could take care of children during the day, but were not an adequate solution for pre-school children because these solutions were (1) limited to only children above certain age, and (2) focused in ‘education’, rather than ‘care’.
Of course, daycare services were also widely available, but many of them did not provide access to ‘premium education’ opportunities, only focusing on keeping the children safe and entertained while their parents were gone for work. In addition, the daycare institutions’ non-flexible operating hours posed problems, when both parents had to work late, or get scheduled for emergency shifts.
With such background, ‘private homeschool/home care’ became an increasingly popular choice for the parents. The hours were flexible, their children were safely cared for, and most importantly, their children could have access to customized education opportunities while being cared for — just the right amount of balance between ‘care’ and ‘education’.
Although ‘private homeschool/home care’ were definitely a superior choice for caring and educating pre-school children, it was not free of any kind of problems.
FINDING SAFE, ADEQUATE TUTORS WAS A HUGE CHALLENGE:
While investigating the industry, we came up with the following hypothesis.
If we can provide three values above, we predicted that it should be able to provide an adequate solution for the parents in Vietnam.
Although our we planned to create a ‘platform’ type of MVP for our service, we wanted to test our hypothesis before investing top dollars to develop an expensive platform product.
We have decided to do the following for our first prototype, to test our product-market-fit:
With such plans in mind, we have created the very first landing page and immediately moved onto recruiting tutors and vetting them.
Our primary focus in recruiting tutors were VALIDATING qualifications & safety.
We realized that the parents’ concern for tutor’s qualifications and safety were one of the most critical elements in choosing the right tutor for their children, and we did not cut corners in such process. We have documented every single part of our screening process, and made sure to include the detailed vetting report within each tutor’s profile to add credibility.
We took two months to build a vetted tutor pool of around 50, and we decided that we’ve built large enough tutor pool to start testing for our prototype and bring in clients.
After our vetted tutor lists with detailed profiles were ready, we launched our service and aggressively executed numerous hyper-local marketing campaigns to infiltrate our target market. We primarily focused on the geo-economic factor, as it was very easy to distinguish residential areas with high disposable income.
Whether our campaign was online or offline, we made sure to funnel our customers (parents) through our landing page, with the goal to convert them into sales leads.
Once the clients were connected with us to book an appointment for a tutor, we gave everything we had to make sure that our clients understood our tutor pool is extensively vetted with safety and qualifications, and that their children would be safe and very well educated.
After about 6 months of going through this, we have achieved a major milestone of accumulating over 5,000 tutoring hours.
As many data & analytics information are proprietary, I am afraid that I cannot give full disclosure of the exact numbers of every detailed performance metrics we monitored. However, I can disclose the following facts, as they have been previous disclosed publicly by the management:
In conclusion, we hit the jackpot with the product-market-fit. Our hypotheses were correct, and our performance data were screaming at us to scale up. As a matter of fact, our operating capacity were overflowing, and many customers started to complain about our delayed response due to us being so busy.
Immediately following the alpha-test, we have secured a SEED funding from numerous well-respected venture capital firms in S. Korea. With the funding, we planned to finally transform our service into a digital platform product, and I led the mobile application feature ideation, along with streamlining our business model opportunities.
After our product ideation was completed, we moved into the UX/UI prototyping phase in order to give clear guide to the engineering team.
As soon as our UX/UI prototyping was completed, we drafted a very detailed PRD to prep for the platform development.
Instead of hiring full-time engineers in S. Korea, we have decided to hire a local engineering team in Vietnam in a contract-basis to save costs. With thorough communications and daily project management efforts, our first platform product was delivered within three months, and the decision to hire local team cut down our development cost by over 70% compared to what we would’ve paid in S. Korea.
After two weeks of extensive QA, we officially launched our product through iOS and Android app store.
And after the launch of our platform product, we were able to detect very strange phenomenon in our performance metrics:
We immediately contacted and invited some of our customers for FGI sessions, and we were able to learn a very interesting, yet very toxic mistake we had made.
We initially thought that being able to (1) freely choose from large pool of verified tutors, and (2) flexibly pick any time and day in an on-demand fashion — were the two things our customers valued.
However, it was clear that although having a lot of choice (in tutor and in flexibility) is a very nice perk, our customers put their highest value on the fact that our tutor pool was heavily vetted and verified by us, and that it gave them safety and confidence in choosing our brand to care for their children.
The new digital product of ours, felt more like a ‘uber’ of childcare, and didn’t really deliver the same kind of credibility as our older prototype, where every single matching process was handled by CS agent. Although the automated features made the process much quicker and easier, we have failed to conserve the credibility aspect when transforming digitally.
Our customers didn’t really care too much about the ‘variety of choice’ or ‘easy and fast use’ after all; they cared about the credibility that our brand was proposing.
After learning about this, we immediately went back to our drawing board to make sure our UX represented (and highlighted) the credibility of our tutor vetting process, and we made some major adjustments to sway away from making the customers feel like our product was one of the many common tutor matching platform.
After fixing the UX credibility problem of our digital product, we have been growing exponentially. As for the product and operation, many iterations and improvements had been made, with new business models being introduced to maximize the company revenue.
We started off from a simple ‘tutor matching’ service, and we currently (1) sell textbooks and education toy kits, (2) create & sell our own education content IPs, (3) export/import class materials and do much more. There are still a long list of milestones to reach accordingly to the product roadmap we’ve set, and it’s just exhilarating to imagine what this company and product(s) will look like in the next five years.
Although I am not at the liberty to disclose the exact numbers, we have accumulated over 30,000 paying customers and secured Pre-A funding from multiple renowned VCs as a result of our growth. As of November of 2023, we are preparing for a Series-A investment round with multiple offers on the tables already.