Stuck on a homework problem? There’s an app for that

There are few people in this world under more stress than an East Asian high school student. From Singapore to Shanghai – and quite a few places in between – being fifteen means a life of sleep, study, repeat.

There is a lot of business to be done in extending lifelines to struggling students, whether it’s test prep startups, luxury tutoring programs, or massive online open courses (MOOCs).

One Hong Kong startup has taken a unique approach to helping the region’s test-tortured teens – and it got its inspiration from social media.

From brick and mortar to bits and messengers

Snapask takes some key components of social media services and brings them into the world of academic tutoring. The company’s app is like Facebook Messenger or Line – if all of your friends were experts, ready to help you with any homework problems you might face.

Designed primarily for homework help, Snapask allows users to snap a picture of any problem that’s giving them difficulty, and ask for help from someone with expertise in the proper field. A qualified tutor then responds with both the answer and an explanation – not just solving the problem, but helping the user understand how to solve similar problems in the future.

The idea for Snapask came when co-founder Timothy Yu launched a brick-and-mortar tutoring operation in Hong Kong. His company was met with huge challenges – business growth was slow, and Hong Kong’s astronomical rent prices were eating through his profits.

Like many an internet entrepreneur before him, it occurred to Timothy that his business could find a happier home online – so he joined with former Hong Kong University classmates Bradley Chiang and Phoebe Hung to bring his tutoring program into the digital age.

The company is currently getting 1,500 new registered users each day.

Their idea was simple – grow the number of customers by making an easy-to-use app that was more convenient than going to a tutoring company, and grow the number of tutors by letting anyone apply.

“It only took us half a year to bring this idea into a Snapask prototype,” says Timothy. “As most of our members are recent graduates or current students, we are very close to our customers and consumers and therefore have a better understanding of their needs.”

Snapask launched in Hong Kong in January of last year, and by the end of 2015 had expanded to Singapore, Taiwan, and Shanghai. Timothy says the company is currently getting 1,500 new registered users each day, and has about 20,000 users who are active on the platform monthly.

Finding tutors to trust

One of the biggest challenges in launching a service like Snapask is quality assurance. The app is only as good as its tutors – if they are slow, bad at explaining solutions, or simply wrong, then the whole system falls apart.

Coming back to the real world

In Hong Kong, prepaid Snapask cards are now available in nearly a thousand 7-11 stores, giving students – who may not have credit cards of their own – an easy way to refill their accounts.