He built a startup right after graduation. Five years later, it’s in 8 countries

Snapask founder Timothy Yu

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Timothy Yu is the co-founder and CEO of Snapask, a Hong Kong-based edtech company that offers online tutorial services. Snapask is dubbed as the “Uber for tutoring,” as students can instantly connect with qualified tutors to receive on-demand academic support around the clock.

In this interview, Yu shares his story building a company right after graduation and how Snapask works.

Give us a background of Snapask

I’ve been working on this company since I graduated. Before that, I was working as a private tutor, just like a lot of students in university. But it’s not very efficient because you have to go door to door and spend about an hour commuting to and from the student’s place. It’s the pain point of a lot of tutors. That’s why we tried to do it online.

I started by recording a lot of videos of myself teaching. I posted them on Facebook, and they quickly caught a lot of attraction. Then, after watching my videos, a lot of students started messaging me their questions. That actually gave me the idea: “Hey, why don’t we just try and monetize this?”

What did your parents think about you going into business straight out of school?

There was some struggle. I was very honest with myself and with them, saying, “This is something I am really passionate about. I think there is a future to this. As long as I can support myself, you guys should support me as well.” That part was pretty clear, so I got their full support.

But along the way, it’s not enough to just have your parents’ support, right? You have to make the business work, work with your team, and build a team and the product. I wasn’t trained to do any of these and I did not have much work experience. So, everything was new to me, which was a pretty big struggle.

Tell us about your team

We went straight into building a team of engineers, building the first Android app and websites. At that time, we were building a platform for students where they could ask their questions, like in a forum. But we learned that no one was using our product. We spent too much time building something we assumed could be useful. We learned that we needed to do a lot of tests/experiments before we built products. We needed to do user research, a lot of mockups, and some prototypes to test our assumptions.

I don’t have a co-founder, so I’ve been working solo since the beginning. Fortunately, I met some good people, so we got our first product manager from Taiwan. She has a lot of experience at Microsoft and in product management in general. We started to build Snapask from the ground up. Eventually, we hired more people from different regions. We also launched in Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and Korea.

Were you funding the business yourself?

During the early days, we were self-funded because I was still earning from tutoring. Then, we got lucky. Some seed investors and angel investors invested even if we hadn’t formulated the entire strategy.

Can you walk us through Snapask’s user experience?

Our core offering is on the mobile app. Once you’re logged in, you can choose the subject that you want to ask a question about. Our algorithm will then connect the student to a suitable tutor based on the subject and the student’s profile.

The entire teaching experience happens within Snapask, where the student and the tutor interacts in a one-on-one session, just like when you’re using WeChat or any messaging app. Usually, tutors and students write down their math solutions (for example), take a photo of that, send it back on Snapask, and elaborate with audio.

The tutors are all from local universities. We do vet our tutors based on their university transcripts, public exam certificates, etc. to ensure credibility. So for example, if you want to teach math, you should have A’s in school to qualify as a tutor on Snapask. It’s kind of an insurance for both the students and parents.

How much does it cost for a student, and how much can a tutor potentially make?

How do you track success metrics?

How do you think education will change in the future?