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Tutorfly

Our client for 2018 Spring is a LA-based educational startup, Tutorfly, Inc. Tutorfly is a peer-to-peer tutoring platform that pairs high school student tutors with younger students in the same community. Parents can log onto tutorfly.org and filter by subject, class, and teacher to find a tutor that’s just recently completed the exact same class that the parent’s child is taking. Additionally, peer tutors double as role models, which means that parents of younger children can use our platform, too. Tutorfly has completed over 350 sessions to date and are expanding to reach 10 high schools.


This semester, our data consulting team partners with Tutorfly analytics team to build a data analytical pipeline for their website. We analyze both of our client’s Mongo database and web data to generate useful business insights that can improve their business. Our analysis integrates our team members’ expertise in business, data analytics, web analytics and programming into real business problem solving. Through working closely with client, students gradually gain the ability of identifying client’s critical business needs and applying quantitative methods to solve them.


The project is a process of learning + implementation. Two main statistical tools we are using throughout the project are MongoDB and Google Analytics.

Fitting closely to client’s business goal regarding measuring their success of marketing, branding, customer relationship management (CRM) and financial, our analysis approaches from the following five angles: (i) User Acquisition (ii) User Engagement (iii) User Retention (iv) User Profile (v) Financial Analysis. In each angle, we come up with business metrics through marketing research our own and receive metrics that clients hope us to look at. For example, one of the goal is to measure how actively are users engaged in using tutoring service. Our members then need to figure out how to quantify this activeness in terms of numerical metrics, such as sessions growth rate, average length of sessions schedule per user per week, time interval since last scheduled sessions, etc. While we are implementing these metrics, we increase our familiarity with using Mongo to perform CRUD operations on NoSQL database.


In addition, we care more about knowing viewers of our website, their demographics, their interest and how these conclusions can materialize into something that our clients can do to improve the website design, for instance. However, simply collecting and calculating these numerical numbers is not our end goal. Luckily we have our client working closely with us, which gives us chance to question, test, update with all resources available that confirm the value of our analysis. This allows us to perform our analysis combining our result with business situation. Our end goal is to generate business recommendations that can be utilized by our clients. “By students, for students” is Tutotfly’s mission statement. And we are very glad to play our part contributing to this peer-to-peer tutoring community.

Semester

Spring 2018

Project Manager

Zhongling Jiang