I need a private tutor for your exam
tomorrow the private centers are closed
need to meet your tutor tomorrow at 4
p.m. you have to commute for an hour
most countries and especially here in
the Middle East we complement in-school
education with after-school tutoring
private tutoring is a standard for
success
one out of three students struggle to
find a tutor and it take on average four
to five hours to find someone who's
qualified accessible and available
thinkers is your solution thinkers is a
peer-to-peer platform that connect
students to highly qualified private
tutors and three simple steps all you do
once you open the app is pick a course
select a pre-vetted tutor based on your
preferences and directly book a session
move to demo please if you're looking to
prep for your GMAT let's say or to learn
a new language download sinkers up
search for your course for instance math
grade 9 select the shooter based on your
preferences number of our suitors
proximity select a preferred date and
time then choose your payment method
cash or credit card as soon as you
confirm your booking with your tutor you
can instantly chat with your tutor and
share your location the material and
decide whether you'd like to meet in
person or online via sinkers platform
back to slides please at sinkers we
build our online tutoring system from
scratch with no cheering whiteboarding
and video functionalities once the
session is done a student reads the
tutor and as soon as the session is done
after that and he received a progress
report we've automated at synchro's our
HR process in a way that I need
can apply on the application they submit
their document their interviews our
machine learning algorithm are helping
our HR team to pre-select our candidates
thinkers would recommend you the best
shooter because we have an algorithm
that favors our jurors based on several
criteria like proximity education
background number of hours tutored we
use our graph database to connect
students tutors and their interactions
to show personalized recommendations in
real-time educational centers like my
tutor Beirut etc lab personalization and
flexibility and have known easy access
to online Dartford which is quite
unusual in the 21st century both online
tutoring platform like check teach me
now and educational centers like
flexibility and fail to invest in their
tutor based on their performance at
sinkers we match students with peer
tutors who have been in their shoes and
have the same educational background as
for our tutors we reward them based on
the number of hours they teach we
provide them with internship
opportunities with training and cash
bonuses
sinkers will cater for the MENA market
and will be in Arabic the MENA market is
around 1.1 billion dollar globally the
private tutoring market is worth a
hundred and thirty eight billion and is
going to double in the next four years
we launched sinkers in September 2016 we
expanded to Dubai in 2018 till date we
have 25,000 students over 500 vetted
jurors and completed 29,000 of tutoring
in September 2016
we completed 40 hours in September 2017
400 hours in September 2018 four
thousand hours were completed on sinkers
in less than one year we were able to
increase our revenue by 90 percent we've
also established a strategic partnership
with the Ministry of Education and Dubai
which allowed us to sign a couple of em
OU's with two schools and three
universities these institutions are
endorsing sinkers and onboarding
thousands of their students on the
platform our business model is quite
simple we charge our tutors a 20%
Commission per transaction we're also
going to charge the institutions
universities and schools $1,000 per
month in exchange for analytics about
their students tutoring activities who's
behind sinkers a team of four passionate
people hi I'm Audrey I founded my first
startup at 19 and have six years of
experience and operation and business
development
as for the synchro's team they have
extensive experience in marketing HR
product and software development
thinkers is looking to build the largest
self-regulated community of knowledge
exchange to make education
accessible to odd if you'd like to
contribute to this community and make a
change
contact us today thank you all right
judges a big Ronnie want to start can
you hear me about your current
recruitment process and how much effort
does it take to actually train and
validate and verify all the tutors it
seems to me like you're very kind of
heavy but delicate process to recruit
tutors first of all it's very simple
because we apply we post a job on the
University portal we receive
approximately twenty to thirty CVS per
day in less than 24 hours as soon as we
receive application they know that they
have to download sinkers app to apply so
we automated the whole process it's done
on the application they have to submit
their documents CV their transcript they
need a minimum of an 85 over 100 to be
able to teach the course and then also
they submit their interview on the
application once done our algorithm pre
select the top candidates and our HR
team thoroughly pre-screened them all
selected one and I would like to mention
also that we established a partnership
with the British Council who are
training all of our tutors thank you
why the name sinkers it comes from two
words synchronization and thinkers so
we're sinking the thinker's okay cool
and from an analytics platform
perspective and I understand data when
you're charging $1,000 to the
institution's what are the kind of
things that you're sharing with them why
would they be interested in paying that
amount of money so we've already signed
five my use and we're already testing it
with the universities in terms of data
what we share with them as a number of
our is a number of students who are
consuming private tutoring per major per
course
who are the brilliant tutors and their
universities for instance that are
teaching and like that that have a good
insight about where is the gap where is
the need and every time they revise
their curriculum foreign for instance
they have to look at this data to adapt
it and it happened to us at AU be the
the gene wanted to know more about
what's going on and their market it's
great that you're connecting students
with mentors after a connection is made
for the first time what stops them from
connecting offline and that instead of
the mentor getting 20% taking the full
100 so on the other students side we
introduced a new feature called prepaid
packages at a discounted rate and
parents school students and university
students are loving it because they buy
a bundle of hours ahead of time at a
discounted rate then on the tutor side
because it's a market place there is a
competition you have to build your
profile we show the number of hours
tutored how many your reviews and also
our algorithm favors the one who will
score high and our retention rate is at
50% currently returning users yeah I
wanted to ask the same question because
I built a marketplace so I know that
there is yes there's always a slippage
so people would
just take the the job and go offline or
take the tutor profile and just recruit
them offline so I I wanted to know
what's your strategy to fight that
so is other than what you mentioned is
there anything else you're going to do
or planning on doing sure so an example
because also we signed a MoU news with
the universities they were willing to
reward their best shooters because all
our tutors are brilliant University
students most of them 90% of them so
they care about paying their tuition and
the university will contribute to that
and reward their top jurors by providing
free credits by free credits two to
three credits free at the University
second as I've mentioned we partnered
with the Minister with the British
Council so they only get a certificate
that they're trained
once they complete over a hundred hours
on the application okay my question to
you is when you think about building
this is a global platform how what was
the biggest challenge in taking it to
Dubai and how are you going to create
this big vision of this peer-to-peer
platform how are you going to do that
what's the biggest challenge how will
you overcome it when we expanded to
Dubai honestly our challenge was mainly
to be able to adapt not to a new culture
but they have several curriculum and not
just a Lebanon we have a couple there
they have almost worldwide curricula so
we thought it was a challenge to recruit
tutors the first thing that we did we
approached top universities and as soon
as we did that within three weeks our
supply were recruited more than 200 to
300 tutors in less than three weeks and
because we establish a strategic
partnership with Dubai future
accelerator khd a and the Ministry of
Education in Dubai it has opened a lot
of doors to us but in terms of
scalability if you'd like to expand to
other markets how it works is on the
supply side which means the tutor they
apply we apply or just post a job at the
University and
free of charge receive application on
the demand side which means the client
we have three strategic pillars social
media targeted social media Facebook and
Instagram we have strategic partnership
like the Ministry of Education the
schools the institutions and the third
one we hire brand ambassadors who
represent our brand and refer their
friends
thank you all right give it up for
seekers
[Applause]