0:00Introduction

Welcome to the show. Thank you, thank you. We are here at Melbourne Business School, first time we have filmed here. Let us talk about you. Why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience, who you are and what your business does.

Absolutely. My name is Joey Moshinsky. I am one of three founders at Tutero, and at Tutero we are building a range of digital education products to connect with and optimise every minute of STEM teaching and learning.

1:30Where the business is today

So let us talk about where the business is right now. We spent our first nine months figuring out exactly what problem to solve and the best way to go to market. There were a number of pivots and even a rebrand in there. Then we launched our first education product, data-driven tutoring, in January this year. We have been growing about 50% a month since we launched that, and we actually just completed our seed round about a month ago.

4:00The origin story

So you are pretty young. What got you into entrepreneurship? It all really started during COVID because my brother and I were living under the same roof. We ran out of things to talk about, so we started discussing our respective experiences with maths education at two or three in the morning, literally standing around the whiteboard in his room having a yarn. We had two different perspectives on the problem, and that allowed us to validate there was a problem space. One thing turned into another and we started building. I had a grad job lined up and said no to it. My brother dropped out of university as well.

7:00Bringing in the CTO

Richard and I had actually been working together at a previous startup. We called him up and said we would love for you to come join as our CTO. He said yes within ten minutes, on the condition that we delete 25,000 lines of code that Sunny had written and start again on a new stack. That tells you everything about his high conviction in the way he thinks about technology.

9:00Nine months of pivots

We started with the hypothesis that we could empower education providers through a B2B SaaS product. We quickly learned there were one too many stakeholders. You have tutors, students, parents, and now this other organisation to bring together. We learned that going direct to consumer first and marrying our software with a tutor was where we could deliver the greatest learning enhancement. Since launch we have seen how impactful our software can be, and that has allowed us to really expand our ambition.

12:00The virtual global team

The first three to four months was the founding team sitting around the kitchen table. We were originally called Maths Gaps and printed out five posters of that name and put them all around the room. That was day one. We read maths textbooks and wrote our first lines of code for about three months, then got a co-working space. We are now a much bigger team but still almost entirely a virtual company. We have team members in the Philippines, India, Nigeria, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. We have a virtual office which is like a 2D metaverse where everyone has their own avatar, meeting rooms, and desks.

15:00Raising the seed round

We have been really lucky in the sense that we have had great mentors supporting the capital raise process, people who have been working in finance and M and A for a long period of time. Our mentors are a combination of family and family friends who had good networks into a family office. They were some of our original investors. If you communicate well with your investors, you are building for the next round from day one. We implemented investor relations and reporting systems early, and all the new investors in this round saw that work as a positive signal.

18:30Accountability and investor pressure

I think it is very healthy to have a high degree of accountability and an element of stress in work, obviously not overwhelming stress. But you need to get up in the morning with a bit of fire in your belly. We have composite metrics that are the core elements of our investor forecast, and you can break those down into component variables. I think of leading a team as allocating certain variables to different teams and different individuals. Owning a metric and ensuring it moves in the right direction is the goal for every team member.

21:00The product roadmap

Over the next nine months we are releasing two more product lines. The first is lesson-planning software for teachers. Rather than the traditional top-down sales motion into schools, which is long and arduous, we are thinking about it differently. How can we provide an incredible amount of value for free to teachers and let that disseminate within a school? Once you reach critical mass there are opportunities for monetisation. The second product is a gamified learning app for students that lets teachers set 30 minutes of personalised homework targeting the exact gaps blocking each student’s learning pathway.

24:30The hardest year

As a company, the year between launching and getting our first dollar of revenue was really difficult. There was no money, not much validation, and high opportunity cost. We were facing external pressure questioning whether we were doing the right thing. By the end we had all burned out from working so tirelessly. But because we went through that experience, every time we face a challenge now we have greater levels of perseverance. The ability to frame problems as opportunities and get up day after day no matter how many knocks you have taken is when you start achieving something really cool.

27:00Family co-founding dynamics

Some of the most important elements of a family team are deep trust and honesty. Sunny and I obviously have that as brothers. Richard has this incredible ability to listen and then provide really considered responses in a non-judgmental way. Because we have been working so closely with him, we have both been able to grow to an incredible level of trust with him. We also have very different skill sets. I am probably a little more creative, Sunny is very systems-oriented, and Richard is somewhere in the middle. That leads to clashes sometimes but has allowed us to capture the best elements of each work style.

29:30Why join Tutero

There are two key reasons. First, we are an incredibly purpose-oriented organisation. Anyone passionate about building the future of education can apply that passion to the work every single day. Second, we have a cultural value that work should be designed around life, not the other way around. We have embedded an incredible amount of flexibility into work for every team member. Going to work does not feel like going to a traditional office. It feels like spending time with a team of incredibly talented and passionate people trying to build something they really care about.