About SocraTeach
Our Story
Northwestern University, 2019
In the summer after my junior year as a physics student at MIT, I wanted to earn a little extra money on the side teaching math and science to high school students. I spent some time browsing tutoring websites that would allow me to become a tutor on their platform. One of the sites that seemed to have the simplest application process to become a tutor at the time was Chegg, so I sat down for an hour or so and answered questions about my background, university, grades, teaching experience, and other personal questions. After submitting my app and waiting about a week, I got a rejection email saying I didn’t meet the requirements for becoming a physics tutor.
Instead of filling out more applications on other sites and waiting to hear back again, I fixated on the complexity of the application, the wait time, and the rejection – there had to be a better, faster way to connect a student and a teacher.
Maybe I wasn’t qualified by their standard; I realize you have to have certain experience to prove your knowledge. But the reverse is also true – plenty of professional teachers are hardly better than classmates in getting help. I started building my solution, SocraTeach.
As students at MIT started taking an interest and using SocraTeach for their classes, the global pandemic sent everyone home from campus. SocraTeach became a platform perfectly suited for dynamic, remote schooling. It offered a peer-to-peer mobile tutoring platform to connect students not only at MIT, but across the country to get their questions answered in real, live discussion. My brother Scott, a law student at Northwestern University, and a close friend Bharat Rao formed the rest of the team in scaling up the platform’s architecture. We knew that success lay in following three principles closely all the way through:
- A student who downloads the app should be able to get into a call with a person who can help them solve their problem with as few taps on their phone as possible
- Follow principle 1, but for people who download SocraTeach to teach and earn money
- Users who teach others should earn real money, instantly
Think of it as a dating app. You’ll get connected with someone who likes you (more like they know how to solve the problem you posted) and chat over text messaging or, if you like, audio/video chat. The date is quick – just 10 minutes. 10 minutes to get not just the solution, but a real understanding of the problem and how to solve it. Student is happy. Teacher makes money. 10 minutes.
This is a tutoring session that is highly streamlined and focused on what a student actually needs to get done. Traditional tutoring is often a $30-$45 an hour wishy washy therapy session that may try to cover some of the concepts you’re struggling with, but there’s no real effort to get sh*t done.
SocraTeach is a true democratization of tutoring. And it’s a fraction of the cost of traditional tutoring because of it.
Pricing
Pricing is simple and cheap. Only pay for sessions that went well and get free sessions just for downloading the app.
All payments are 100% worry free. That means fully refundable if you experience any issues in your sessions and the freedom to cancel your membership at any time.
The beauty of SocraTeach lies in its peer-to-peer nature, so take advantage of it. Use your teaching earnings to cover the cost of your own personal tutoring needs. It’s a 3 step process. Here’s an example:
- You help a student with their easy math problem to earn some cash
- Down the road, you find yourself stuck on a tricky biology problem
- Use your cash in the app to pay for your biology session (or transfer that cash to your bank account)
It’s a nation wide study hall (that pays you).