Tueetor Connects Students to 16,000 Educational Trainers with AWS EdStart

Tueetor is a Singapore-based company dedicated to helping students find affordable, qualified tutors and trainers. “Education is the most reliable way to change a person’s—and a community’s—future for the better. We want to make it easier for students of all kinds to get the educational resources and help they need to succeed,” says Han Sing Tan, founder and chief executive officer at Tueetor.

Tutoring fees in Singapore typically range between US$25 and $120 per hour, depending on grade level. Tueetor sought to provide easier and more affordable access to qualified tutors, especially for low-income families and special needs students. The company built a cloud-based platform to connect students and tutors based on a student’s unique learning needs. “Tueetor provides a platform where students can engage honest, caring, and competent tutors quickly, easily, and directly,” says Tan.

Tueetor originally launched its location-based, self-serve, automated matching platform to students in Singapore, but eventually the company aspired to extend those services to other countries in South East Asia. To do so, Tueetor needed a solution provider that could help it scale. Leaders at the cloud-native company also wanted to consolidate disparate providers, which had become difficult to manage. “We wanted everything under one roof,” says Tan. “We also wanted to enable more automation so we could spend less time managing everything. Being a startup with a lean budget and few employees, we needed to be responsible with every hour and every cent we spent.” 

Tueetor chose to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of its diverse solutions and quality of support. In addition to other AWS services, the company uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to set up, operate, and scale its relational database; Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store and protect data; and Amazon CloudWatch to monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.

This combination of AWS services provides Tueetor with a more comprehensive and cohesive solution. “The most important value we see in AWS is that it’s all-in-one. From messaging to mail, storage, database, and even facial recognition technologies, there is literally no need to use third-party solutions. Everything is available on AWS, on-demand,” says Tan.

Tueetor leaders also turned to the AWS EdStart program for support and guidance. AWS EdStart helps entrepreneurs build the next generation of online learning, analytics, and campus management solutions in the AWS Cloud. “Over the years, AWS EdStart invited us to many events, from meeting with potential investors and technology partners to showcasing our startup to accessing technology, user communities, and even government agencies. They also helped us with our product launch, and the credits we received helped us test and stage AWS technologies more affordably. They have always been there to support us,” says Tan.

“AWS EdStart has provided us a lot of opportunities,” adds Jia Ling Eng, head of business at Tueetor. “They helped us at every step of our growth. They helped us share our brand with the public and with people in the education industry. AWS EdStart helped us expand our business by helping us get more exposure, which is very important for a small company with limited resources. The AWS EdStart program has been very enriching for Tueetor.”

Since its launch in 2016, Tueetor has scaled its platform from 500 tutors and trainers to over 16,000 to date. The platform has more than 50,000 student users per month and is now available in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Recently, Tueetor expanded its offerings to include a wide variety of online classes, from core subjects like science and math to electives like music, sports, and art. By partnering with an array of course providers, Tueetor now enables students to use its platform to learn new skills or re-skill in order to pursue new career opportunities.

The company also launched 10-Minute Tutor, a service that connects a student with a tutor instantly over a mobile app or any smart device. Certified tutors are available 24/7 to provide students with quick homework help. The service costs S$10 for 10 minutes and can be extended if the student needs additional time. “A student can type in the subject they need help with, and the system will connect them with subject matter experts in less than 2 minutes,” says Tan. 

Going forward, Tan plans to continue to work with AWS to scale Tueetor to additional countries. “The great thing about working with AWS is we’re always assured that, wherever we want to go, AWS will have our back,” he says. “If we want to launch our platform in China or Hong Kong or even in the Philippines, we are not worried at all. We know we will be taken care of infrastructure-wise.”

Tan says he also plans to continue to work with AWS EdStart and fellow AWS EdStart program participants. “We want to continue to participate in as many AWS EdStart events as possible to further enrich ourselves in the industry—to get to know more people and get to know what technologies they might have that can complement our work. We started with a simple idea of connecting learners to educators and making that process more affordable. Tueetor has come a long way and will continue to help promote affordability and accessibility in education, while promoting job opportunities at the same time.”