Trust in Indian tutor marketplaces

Student tutor marketplaces feel obvious in India. Fragmented supply, high stakes demand, and big household spend. The tricky part is not search. It’s trust, outcomes you can measure, and unit economics when content is cheap and attention isn’t. 🎓👇

Then math met reality. Liquidity is local and time bound. You need depth by grade, subject, language, and slot. Quality is fuzzy, ratings drift while outcomes lag, so diagnostics and mastery maps help. CAC vs LTV is tight near exam peaks. Keeping great teachers is everything.

Under the hood you ship heavy ops: onboarding and background checks, scheduling and attendance, WebRTC low latency video, UPI payments, LMS and syllabus mapping, outcome analytics. Solve trust and pedagogy well and you stop being a pure marketplace. You run school ops.

2016 to 2025 moved the ground. Recorded content commoditized. Edge shifted to live doubt solving, cohort cadence, and neighborhood centers. Refund and consumer rules got stricter, so claims need proof. Aakash, Allen, Byju’s, Unacademy, Vedantu, PW went hybrid. Listings lagged.

Lessons and open questions: Build a marketplace, or run a school and use the marketplace as a lead engine? Can outcome guarantees be honest without gaming? How should we size TAM: spend, time on task, or attainment gains? Original post: https://anandchowdhary.com/blog/2016/30-billion-opportunity