Startup of the Month: Sharing Academy

Sharing Academy is a digital marketplace connecting students with tutors. This platform helps you find your ideal tutor: someone trustworthy and who expertly passed the course you are taking now, at the same university. Feedback on the tutor, client reviews, comments and hourly rates makes the process of selecting the best tutor easy.

Sharing Academy comprises a community of 8000 students and tutors from 53 universities across Spain. In September, Sharing Academy will also start working with a consortium of Swiss universities and global partners.

Listing websites like Milanuncios and Craigslist have been around for years, but these solutions fail to offer both students and parents a level of trust that is fundamental. Sharing Academy excels in this regard, as it performs background checks for both academic qualifications as well as criminal history checks on its tutors.

After a career as a pilot, Sharing Academy’s founder Jordi Llonch went back to university and wrote a thesis, culminating into what became the first version of Sharing Academy. Jordi says, “My university thesis was a computer-based training program for pilots, a simulator with tools and text that would tell you things like how to start a plane’s engines, understand the interactions of flight systems, avionics, etc.”

Jordi is a leading advocate of the sharing economy and in that spirit created a platform that empowers people to share knowledge effectively and efficiently. According to Jordi, “The most important part of a marketplace is the community. When we started out in 2014, marketplaces weren’t the hype they are today. There was only Airbnb, Ebay, and Bla Bla Car in Europe, and Lyft and Uber in the United States. For Sharing Academy the hardest part was to convince people to get on board to build the leading community of students and tutors.”

Today Sharing Academy comprises a team of five passionate individuals sharing a common vision, and interestingly enough, Jordi got to know most of them through the platform. Jordi explains, “In the beginning, we were doing a lot of in-person events to foster a sense of community and that’s how we met some of our most active users. For me that’s key and to differentiate ourselves from any other tutoring platforms. Our Chief Technology Officer was actually the best coding tutor on the platform. We met at one of our events and I asked him to join the team.”

The platform’s go to market strategy focuses on university students, but the platform is increasingly being used by high school students as well. Sharing Academy is a tool for building local communities, so if your university has 20,000 to 50,000 students, it adds value to help initiate and foster this community network.

Jordi’s team has also realized that, “students from online universities need much more help than traditional ones. They really love to be a part of the platform, and not only for finding tutors, but also to offer classes. When you have that aha-moment that helps you pass a difficult course, you want to share it with others and our platform.” This essence is what Sharing Academy hopes will help it go viral.

Parents love Sharing Academy because it both encourages and empowers students who excel in specific subjects to earn an extra income easily and enjoy recognition from their peers. If you need to pass a specific exam, join their platform to find the ideal tutor.

Learn more about Sharing Academy at sharingacademy.com.