My approach was just to ask what would help it grow and cause the least resistance to those using it (people hate monthly fees so this was a good to get rid of, then again there is a temptation to take cash at the end of the session too, to it’s a trade off).

Luckily, I have nothing to lose (other than my time) for testing it out :)

I’ll be posting up the results after it’s run for two months. I’m as curious to find out as you are :)

Thanks for the well thought out comments! I can tell you are approaching it in a similar way to my own.
Brian

This is really fun. I applaud the way you are putting this out there. It is fantastic to learn by watching.

Having said that, I’d like to play devil’s advocate. Frankly I don’t mind at all being proved wrong (that is what is great about you blogging this – we get to follow along).

I tend to be a little cynical on three fronts. 1) I think the tutors will view this as coming out of their pocket – they know the student is willing to pay $6 more bucks – $6 bucks not going to them. 2) I’m not sure how meaningful the ratings will be to the tutors. I tend to think a local personal service like this is purchased differently than an outsourced service provider from India on eLance. 3) I’m not sure the teacher’s are going to want to separate the timing of the payment from the timing of the service.

Your style seems to be a nice combination of well thought out, instinct, and testing. What was your approach here? How, or was it even possible, to test any assumptions? It is easy for me to be wrong – I am just commenting. How do you minimize the risk of being wrong?

David

They can put phone number, email address, or any contact o the experience session. Or, one of the trick that I used for my LinkedIn, is putting my email address in the Surname (ex. surname = Smith(john-smith@mail.com), and that will open the possibility of other user contact me directly.

With free account, everybody will play fair. But once you ask them to pay, it will make them think how to cheat a system.

Hope this help…

Right now the free account has no cost associated with this, the client pays the markup and the tutors gets all the rest for free. Let me know…

That said, they might as well migrate to a paid account in that case.

I’ve really been enjoying following your journey with this!

Yep, clients and tutors sign in to one page. It was probably a good 3 weeks from idea to finally launching it. People are slowing starting to use it. I will continue to tweak little things as it goes forward. I’m impatient and just wanted to get it out there though! :)

I like your single sign on page. So clients and tutors both sign into the same page? Then the back-end system determines if a user is client or tutor? Nice.

How long did it take you to do all of this last feature? From idea, to sketches, research, and final live product?

I ended up going with ACHDirect.com because there were VERY few which would also allow me to do direct deposit (sending funds to people’s bank accounts). They ended up being very inexpensive (no setup fee, 2.09% + 30 cents for credit card and only flat 24 cents to sent an electronic funds transfer into someone’s bank account). However, I’m not sure if I’d recommend them yet. I haven’t used them for very long – and their documentation was not really done very well.

If you only need credit card processing there are way more options. One I stumbled across in my searching was paysimple.com – never used them because they didn’t offer the direct deposit but otherwise they seemed good. No setup fee, fairly simple.

Let us know how it goes. Thanks!