Breaking Free
How to Quit Your Job and Start Your Own Business
Implementing A Suggestion From A Reader
In: Marketing
17 Feb 2009A few days ago I wrote about a new feature I added to my passive income business, UniversityTutor.com: map based searching. I got some really great feedback from a Breaking Free reader by the name of Tylor who said: Looks good! If you wanted a little user interaction feedback: my first intention, immediately upon landing [...]
Progress On UniversityTutor.com
In: Business Ideas
22 Mar 2009Ok so this week I’ve been working on the new business model for UniversityTutor.com that I discussed in the second half of this post. Basically, charging a percent of each transaction instead of a monthly fee for tutors. I’m hoping this will be better in the long run as most people prefer to avoid monthly [...]
Hey Folks, Here is the video as promised of the new billing features on UniversityTutor.com. For those just joining us, this represented a big change in the business model. Previously I was charging tutors $10/month to keep their profiles on the site. With the new business model, tutors can now have a free account, but [...]
Remember the new billing/invoice system I designed and launched for UniversityTutor.com? Things aren’t looking very promising so far. They started off well and in the first week or two about a dozen invoices got processed through the site. I figured it would slowly trend upwards from there as people started adopting it, but in the [...]
UniversityTutor Revenues Fall By 50%
27 May 2009As you might have seen a few weeks ago, I posted about how the new UniversityTutor.com business model wasn’t working very well. Revenue has fallen by about half during this time. Also, it’s not just the summer time effect. There are still a fairly large number of contacts going through the site (see below). Even [...]
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- Tags: Education
Results Of UniversityTutor.com Price Testing
In: Uncategorized
15 Jul 2009About a month ago I wrote about how I was going to split test the prices on UniversityTutor.com. I thought I’d share some results with you. As you recall, I was split testing two price points. The way it works is that tutors sign up on the site and get three free job requests. After [...]
How To Get More Links To Your Website With User Badges
In: Marketing
22 Oct 2009I had an interesting conversation with Neil Patel earlier this week. I called him to get some advice on UniversityTutor.com and how I could take it to the next level. Neil is a really successful guy in the web business space, so I figured it’d be a good brainstorm. His biggest advice was to get [...]
Things have been growing nicely at my business, UniversityTutor.com, in the last few months. Here are a few graphs that I have auto-generated each week to see what’s going on. I really like the idea of having a “dashboard” for your business like this to help you see the cycles and spot anomalies early on. [...]
How To Get Your Customers To Refer Their Friends
In: Marketing
25 Apr 2010I was reading this presentation by the Dropbox.com Founder, Drew Houston, the other day and the most interesting part about it was that most of their marketing with Adwords and conventional approaches completely failed. Yet Dropbox has over 4 million users. So how did they do it? Apparently it was almost entirely word of mouth [...]
A New Design For UniversityTutor.com
In: Updates
18 Jul 2010I recently put up a project on 99Designs.com to get UniversityTutor redesigned. I put up a $795 prize and got 46 entries from a half dozen designers Most of the designs weren’t very good, but one designer stood out and I awarded him the prize. His name is Jack Herbert and he is in the [...]
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Breaking Free is a blog for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. It's written by web-entrepreneur Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
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