hi guys my name is Seba Marin-Quiros and I'm a freshman at Stanford University.
for the past two months I've been tutoring high school and middle school
students on primarily SAT Math but also just math classes at school today I'm
going to tell you about how I got into the side hustle and about my business
model so how the idea came to be I spent a lot of time studying for the SAT while
in high school and I eventually got to a score that I was satisfied with but
there were two big problems that made that process more harder than it really
should have been first was the fact that all the SAT tutor said I was trying to
look at were way too expensive there were some tutoring places that would
charge up 270 dollars an hour or even some of the more affordable ones 472
dollars an hour and so that was way more than I wanted to make my parents pay and
way more than a lot of families would be willing or able to pay the second
problem was the fact that a lot of the SAT tutors would teach you how to do the
problems but not actually coach you through them they would teach you how to
do the math but not coach you through how to think about the problem and how
to approach it for from a more psychological perspective and so the
problem with that was I already knew how to do the math but I would freak out
during the tests and not be able to do them so seeing these two problems I
decided that after high school I could actually offer very inexpensive SAT
classes that would also hit at the fact that students not only need to know how
to do the math but they own they also need to know how to think about the
problems and so this was a good idea for a few reasons
first was the fact that it was great money for me charging 40 or 60 dollars
an hour I would make way more than I would ever make at a minimum which job
or any side hustle I could think of the other good thing about it was that I was
actually providing great service to my community
I was helping students get ready for the SAT in a more affordable fashion and in
a more time effective fashion that was actually personalized for them the final
thing that what I liked about this idea was that I was actually putting all the
time I invested in high school towards getting good at the SAT to a different
and better use so about the actual classes the way
that I structured my classes is very simple I do two main things first and
this usually happens for the first few sessions with students we actually take
a look at different SAT maths practice tests that they've taken and we go
through every single question that they got wrong or that they simply struggled
with and we go through three different things first is the actual math behind
the problem that's where the actual tutoring comes in I give them different
strategies on how to do the problems and we try to see what would work best for
them second I tell them what the College
Board is actually thinking what they're making this question are they just
trying to intimidate you and confuse you with decimals or fractions are they
making this question so that you'll spend a lot of time on it and not be
able to spend more time on other problems or is this a real question that
is legitimate and is simply testing how good you are at math and so there's very
important distinctions between those three categories and finally we also
take a look at how they should think about the question so it's less
intimidating so that what it really comes down to is their math abilities
and not what they're thinking in their head oh this questions so hard
etc the second thing that we do is I make worksheets for my students so that
they'll be able to work on problems that they specifically struggle with I make
different variations to the problems so that they'll have to use different
strategies and in that way be able to see which strategy actually works best
for them so that they'll be able to use it on the test to get more questions
right and do so more quickly so let's talk about my actual business model
what's very important to realize here is that there were actually very low
barriers to entry into SAT or just math tutoring I actually just started
tutoring my sister at the beginning and in that way I got experience and kind of
got a feel for how I should structure my classes and what worked best next I just
started talking to my friends about it and family friends and see if anyone was
interested and slowly as I started gaining more customers and getting more
comfortable with the idea of tutoring people I start
advertising on Instagram and trying to get a larger amount of students to the
point where right now I have seven students and slowly in that way I built
my way up to where I am right now and so when you're starting your side
hustle if it's this or something else I would very strongly recommend starting
off small kind of figure out the little details and then start to scale up as
you're comfortable and in that way there won't be any point where you'll be
blindly going through trying to provide a service for people that you don't
really know how to provide as of the actual cost structure i charge $40 an
hour if people come to my house or $60 an hour if I go to a location of their
choice usually their house and so this is good for a few reasons first of all
the fact that I judged $60 an hour to go to people's houses is to offset the
price of an uber because I don't drive so actually getting there and back will
cost money to meet and so thinking about that little detail before I actually set
my prices was very important because if I hadn't thought about it I would
actually be losing money every time I tutored someone at their house I really
thought about prep time so the time that it would actually take me to read up on
different college board books or the time that I would actually spend making
worksheets for people because right now I'm spending about thirty minutes for
every hour that I tutor just prepping things out and so before I actually set
my prices I had to make sure that even with that half an hour for every ever
worked in I was actually making an amount that I was happy and comfortable
with and so that was really important again there's a theme of optimizing your
business in the sense that you have to think of every little detail that is
very important when you're thinking about your pricing model really think
about every little cost that will be involved one very important thing to
remember is to nice your business to what your customers need but also to
what you're comfortable with so for me personally when taking the SAT I really
struggled with the reading and writing sections so I would never actually be
able to tutor someone in those sections and actually give my customer the value
that they're paying for but actually also be
comfortable while teaching them so that's why I picked just doing SAT math
so one of the ways in which I helped my word-of-mouth marketing happen was by
actually incorporating the people that I knew into my business I did this in two
ways first I offered a 10% commission to anyone who would refer a student to me
for the first two sessions the second thing I did is I started paying people
60 percent of what I would pay an uber to get me to a student's house and back
and in that way they would earn their own money but I would also optimize the
cost of my own business model so what I did was very simple I identified
problems that I saw in my own community I identified a way in which I could help
my community with those problems and then I figured out my business model I
looked at every single cost that would be involved I also looked at every
single way in which I could optimize this costs and finally I put everything
together into a cohesive business plan that I could slowly start marketing to
people thank you guys for watching and thanks to the college hustle for
inviting me on the show I really enjoyed it and I hope you guys enjoyed it too
and if you really like this video make sure you leave a like below and
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