Tutorspree

» see tutorspree.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Tutorspree matched you with a private tutor. You described what you needed and a human at the company picked somebody, who then came to your house and taught it. Aaron Harris and Josh Abrams started the company in late 2010 and launched it on 26 January 2011, out of Y Combinator's Winter 2011 batch, which plenty of later write-ups record as Summer.

For two years it behaved like a marketplace that was going to work. More than 7,000 tutors signed up on the supply side and the company was ten people by early 2013. It raised $1.8 million in two pieces, $1 million from Sequoia in December 2011 and $800,000 from Resolute.VC in February 2013. The farewell note lists where the tutors ended up: "private homes in LA, hotels in NYC, yachts halfway around the world, and coffee shops in San Francisco."

Then March 2013 happened, and the company spent the rest of the year finding out that it had been one website's opinion away from having no business at all.

~ the chronicle ~

~ one channel ~

Aaron Harris wrote the post-mortem himself and it is unusually precise for the genre. "In March of 2013, Google cut the ground out from under us and reduced our traffic by 80% overnight," he wrote, and "the timing strongly indicated that we had been caught in the latest Panda algorithm update." The line that does the real damage is a different one: "virtually all of our customers came from SEO."

Any engineer who has shipped something on top of a system they do not own recognizes this without having lived it. You read the documentation, you build against the surface, the surface moves one Tuesday for reasons nobody will ever explain to you, and the two years of work behind you turns into a website with no visitors. Two months before the end, Tutorspree published a post on its own blog called "How Google is Killing Organic Search." It went to 535 points on Hacker News, the biggest thing the company ever put there.

~ the storefront nobody turned off ~

The site itself never got a tombstone. The homepage is byte-identical from 19 days before the farewell post all the way through the last archived capture on 10 December 2013, still carrying a START LESSONS NOW button and a signup funnel that looked entirely operational. Anybody who found Tutorspree through search that fall, which after the traffic collapse was not many people, got a working front door into a company that had already closed.

~ the asset sale ~

Wyzant announced on 24 January 2014 that it had bought Tutorspree, and TechCrunch described the deal as strictly an asset purchase. The founders had already returned what was left of the investors' money by then. The redirect to wyzant.com first appears in the archive on 26 January 2014, two days after the announcement and a full four and a half months past the company's actual death. The redirect dates Wyzant's purchase and nothing else.

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