We are building an intellectually vibrant and passionate community that cares about spreading knowledge, learning new things, and helping each other. LearnTo is a platform that facilities the matching of people who want to learn with those willing to teach, all in person. LearnTo allows individuals to share whatever it is that they're good at. This ranges from music, dance, and languages to origami, economics, and computer programming. Lessons happen in person at a local coffee shop or other public place. Learning in person does not only enhance the experience, it also allows like-minded people inspire one another.
Last summer, my brother Vishnu, a medical student at UCSD, decided to learn programming like many others his age. He wanted to learn programming to broaden his horizons and bring his own ideas to life through apps and websites. Excited by his new intellectual venture, Vishnu tried using a variety of different resources - CodeAcademy, One Month Rails, Khan Academy, and many others. However, none of them worked. Time and again, he would get stuck, and frustrated as he tried to parse through challenging new material without any help from others. Unlike how he learned throughout his life, this time he didn't have anyone to answer his questions, point him to the right resources, and check his understanding. In seeing this, I realized that Vishnu is representative of a large group of people who don't learn best on their own and are being left behind by online education. He, like so many of us, thrives when he has someone there to help him understand the beauty and the intuition behind what it is he is learning. Learning alone, with no one there to communicate with, is unnatural, difficult, and ineffective for him.
Check out www.learnto.com!
LearnTo's solution to the problem is simple and elegant - we connect people who are interested in learning a topic with people in the same area who are passionate about sharing their knowledge on that topic. The teachers and the students would then meet up at a local public area and learn and share with each other. The unique facet about LearnTo is that it's designed to be free. While traditional tutoring costs nearly $70 an hour for some subjects, well outside the price range of a large majority of people interested in learning, LearnTo will be free to use to learn and teach, opening knowledge to more people than ever before. Teachers on LearnTo are not paid to teach. Our teachers teach because they have a passion, be it photography or mathematics, and want to share it with others. They also share because they want to meet new people and to give back in return for learning from the community. We strongly believe that teachers will in fact be willing to teach for free, and we've seen it in our community already. We look at examples like CouchSurfing, where millions of people host others for free, Wikipedia, the Open Source movement, and Stack Overflow as proof that people will share for free if they're doing something they love.
In connecting people who want to learn and share, LearnTo recreates the physical, in person, learning experience that all of us have grown up with. As such, it provides much needed support to the scores of people who want to learn new things and aren't effective at simply learning on their own. Moreover, LearnTo gives people an outlet to share things that they've always wanted to and in doing so opens up a dazzling array of different topics and subjects to learn. Already, we have classes on incredibly unique things like Calligraphy, Bhangra, and Geometric Origami, that you simply would not be able to learn anywhere else. Nowhere else is there a real outlet to share your knowledge with others around you. This is truly powerful and we believe that this is just one example of how LearnTo opens up the collective knowledge of a community to its members and opens new doors, perspectives, and horizons.
But beyond learning, LearnTo will also help people meet other bright, interesting people in their neighborhood and will create real physical communities in the process. At the end of the day, learning is an inherently social experience through which we've met many of our closest friends in college and school. LearnTo harnesses this to help people continue to meet others in their community through fun, intellectually engaging experiences. Due to these reasons, we believe that LearnTo will take a large step towards helping people learn and explore new things and will unlock a whole new world of knowledge waiting to be explored.
Our initial target market is young adults, living in large metropolitan cities who've just graduated from college and are looking to continue learning and meeting new people. Our typical user loves learning and exploring new things. To her, learning new things is so important to staying intellectually engaged and excited. In fact, she has probably taken her current job because she's seen it as a great way to learn new things that she's interested in. Moreover, now that she is no longer in college and in a new area, she is looking to meet new people and find new communities as well.
Our preliminary business model is to implement a simple credit system that will charge people who learn without teaching. Every time you teach, you gain a credit to take a class, but if you lack the necessary number of credits, you can buy them from LearnTo at a very low price of $5 or $10 per class that will keep learning affordable. We see this as a great commitment mechanism to ensure learners will complete lessons. Moreover, it will also help us promote teaching in the community.
We also hope to earn revenue through driving new users to local businesses. In particular, we have an initial 3-step process. First, we will partner with a few local coffee shops. We will suggest the location for learning and teaching to be at the coffee shop, if appropriate. In return, the coffee shops will promote us in store through means of business cards and posters. The next step would be to work with the shop owners to provide a small discount coupon to our users who decide to meet up at their location. Finally, we would work to split customers coupon or take a small referral fee. This plan could extend to other locations such as rock climbing gyms if we see enough traffic.
We've already created partnerships with some of the most popular coffee shops in the area such as Voltage and Toscanini’s. They’re currently promoting LearnTo in store and we’re encouraging our users to carry out their lessons and these locations. The owners of these coffee shops are really excited to be on board with us and want to be known as the place in Cambridge to meet and learn.
We've already shown that we can execute a tremendous amount in a very short time. We've created a beautifully designed website, acquired 150 users, and completed 50 lessons - in just one month. This is all without spending a dime on advertisements. If given the chance to put all our energy towards building our solution over IAP, we are incredibly confident that by the end of January, we can establish LearnTo as the signal best way to learn and meet new people in Cambridge.
Our three-person team is comprised of Dhruv Parthasarathy, Jeffrey Warren, and Crystal Shei. Dhruv is a Computer Science Masters student at MIT, Jeffrey is a senior also studying Computer Science, and Crystal is an experienced UX and UI designer.
Dhruv has an infectious passion for teaching and believes the best way to empower people is through education. He has tutored extensively through his undergrad at MIT through Amphibious Achievement, where he mentored underserved high schoolers from Boston and designed curriculum to help them succeed in the SAT and high school. He has a strong background in leading teams through his experiences as the Head Admin of Camp Kesem MIT, the chair of the Culture Show (the biggest student run performance at MIT), Academic Coordinator of Amphibious Achievement, and House Manager of Phi Beta Epsilon.
Jeff has had an interest in learning and teaching since entering college. He’s helped other students through tutoring and TAing, and underprivileged elementary students though math and science mentorship. Moreover, he has the desire and ability to build technical solutions to interesting problems. From a demand-forecasting tool at Amazon, to a distributed background processor at Pinterest, he loves designing systems.
The Accelerate Contest is all about creating your Minimum Viable Product. Given that semifinalists will be provided resources (such as mentorship and $1,000), what do you plan to accomplish during IAP and demo in February? (86/500 words)
Our MVP is not just a product but also a community. Through IAP, we plan to establish a dominant presence within the MIT Graduate School population. There are nearly 6000 MIT Graduate School students and we will have 700 of them using LearnTo by the end of IAP with at least 300 lessons exchanged. In doing so we will become the single best way to learn, share, and meet new people if you are an MIT Graduate Student. Once we dominate this market, we will expand to other graduate schools in the area, such as Harvard, and then eventually spread to all of Cambridge.
We also have technical goals that will help make this a reality. Our service is currently a very minimal product that allows people to post their skills and other to effectively sign up for those skills. We’ve developed this over the past month in a few nightlong sprints. In order to accomplish the goals that we set out, we’ll need to build the web application to be more feature complete. Among the list of ideas are more robust user profiles, single vs. repeating lessons, suggested lessons, location aware services, social features ("your friends are teaching these skills", etc), and more. Balancing new features with business development will be crucial.
Additionally, we’d like to build out a mobile presence for LearnTo. Our target user population, young professionals, is a mobile-oriented audience. They have their phones on them nearly 24/7 and it’s important for us to make use of this technology. We’d like to build out an iPhone application with the same core functionality as our website. The mobile platform offers a unique perception. People often expect location aware, and real time applications. This may be something that could really enhance the user experience. Naively, imagine that you express interest to learn tennis and next Saturday you get a push notification with an invitation to learn on a court near you. Time permitting; we may also consider building an android application, but will weigh the tradeoffs as it’s important to focus.
We intend on establishing a foothold in the MIT graduate community by outreach and spreading through our users. There is an incredible network affect associated with our service – a single user can very easily bring on board 3 to 5 friends. We have a unique service, offering free education or skill building. The activation energy for someone to try out our service is lower than traditional services of the sort that cost money. Additionally, it’s really easy for a user who has a good experience to share LearnTo to their email lists and on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Further, we’d interviewed many graduate students and without telling them our mission, they express the desire to learn and teach like-minded people. They also really want to meet new people outside of their lab or classes.
In addition to growing though the MIT, we plan to gain users though our publicity efforts at local coffee shops. Both Voltage in Kendall Square, and Tosconini’s in Central Square have agreed to promote us with business cards on their counters.
Both Dhruv and Jeff have experience with mobile development. Jeff worked on Android for Amazon and Dhruv is teaching iOS on LearnTo. We believe that this will help us build out our mobile application quickly and efficiently. Further, from the beginning mobile apps have been a consideration. Because of this, we have taken effort to design both the UI/UX and the backend service with mobile in mind. A big challenge that we avoid in having done this is synchronizing data across platforms. This is avoided by making a single API (interface) that both mobile and web applications can use.