HeyTutor

The Spec Was One Page. The Engagement Lasted Nine Years.

In 2016, two non-technical founders walked in with a product spec written on a single sheet of A4 paper. They wanted to build an EdTech marketplace connecting students with tutors across the United States.

We extended their one-page spec to 40 pages. We brought on a senior designer with 15 years of production experience to build a full InVision prototype. We committed to building V1 for a defined budget. And our co-founder became their CTO.

Not in title. In practice. He owned the architecture, the infrastructure, the CI/CD, the database, the server management, the hiring, the API selection, and the technical roadmap. HeyTutor did not have a separate CTO because they did not need one. They had ours.

The two founders went on to make the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. The platform grew to become one of the largest EdTech marketplaces in the United States. The engagement lasted nine years.

What We Built

The Full Platform, From Zero

HeyTutor is a two-sided marketplace. Building marketplaces is one of the hardest engineering challenges because you have to balance supply and demand, and every page and every flow must serve both sides.

Student-facing experience. Search and discovery with filters for subject, location, price, availability, and ratings. Tutor profiles with trust scores and verified reviews. Booking and scheduling. Payment processing via Stripe (including handling of fees, taxes, late payments, and refunds). Real-time messaging. Online tutoring sessions. Student dashboards showing session history, upcoming bookings, and payment records.

Tutor-facing experience. Multi-step vetting process with extensive logic. Integration with background check providers. Profile creation and management. Availability calendar. Session management. Payment tracking (with Stripe fee accounting). Performance analytics and trust ratings.

The matching algorithm. This was the hardest piece. Over 100 different metrics feed into tutor-student matching: subject expertise, grade level, teaching style, availability windows, timezone compatibility (critical for online tutoring), location proximity (for in-person), pricing range, ratings, background check status, and response time patterns. The algorithm must find the right tutor for the right student quickly, because every minute of delay is a potential lost session.

Real-time scheduling. Online tutoring means matching timezones. A student in New York and a tutor in Los Angeles need a session at a time that works for both, displayed correctly in both timezones. The scheduling system must account for tutor availability windows, student preferences, recurring sessions, cancellations, and conflict resolution when two students try to book the same slot simultaneously.

Admin dashboard. Tools for the HeyTutor team to manage tutors and students, review applications, block bad actors, moderate content, and facilitate the marketplace experience. Founder dashboards showing revenue, taxes, expenses, and operational metrics.

Thousands of Local SEO Landing Pages

We built thousands of dedicated local landing pages for SEO and discoverability. “Math tutors in Los Angeles.” “SAT prep tutors near me.” “Chemistry tutoring in Chicago.” Each page was programmatically generated with location-specific content, tutor availability, and relevant subject matter. These pages became a primary organic acquisition channel.

The B2B Pivot: School Districts and Google Classroom

HeyTutor started as a B2C marketplace. Then school districts came calling.

The B2B experience was dramatically different from B2C. School districts do not browse a marketplace and pick tutors individually. They need bulk hiring of tutors and tutoring companies, matching them directly to students through a CRM-driven workflow. They need integration with existing e-learning infrastructure.

We built a separate B2B layer on top of the existing platform. Google Classroom integration. E-learning solution connectivity. District-level dashboards. Bulk tutor assignment workflows. Compliance and reporting features required by government contracts.

HeyTutor secured contracts with school districts including LAUSD (the Los Angeles Unified School District), which is the largest school district in the United States. Government contracts at that scale require a platform that is reliable, compliant, and documented. The engineering has to be right.

The CTO Role

Our co-founder served as de facto CTO of HeyTutor for the entire engagement. This was not advisory work. It was operational leadership.

He owned everything:

CI/CD and infrastructure. Pipelines from day one. Multiple environments for QA and staging. Server management. Load balancer scaling (including late-night scaling when the platform hit traffic spikes during growth periods).

Database architecture. Schema design, query optimization, data migration, backup strategy. The database decisions made in year one still supported the platform in year nine.

Hiring and team management. Selecting engineers, conducting technical interviews, onboarding, setting coding standards. The EltexSoft team scaled from a small group to 5-10 engineers at peak, then scaled back down as the product stabilized.

API selection and vendor management. Evaluating background check providers, payment processors, messaging platforms, and e-learning integrations. Talking directly to API providers, negotiating terms, managing integrations.

Product and technical roadmap. Working directly with the founders to determine what to build next, what to defer, and what to kill. We flew our co-founder and technical lead to California to sit with the HeyTutor team and establish the roadmap in person.

In 2023, HeyTutor hired their first in-house CTO. We were happy to hand off the technical leadership to an internal team. That is the outcome a fractional CTO engagement should produce: the company grows to the point where they need and can afford a full-time technical leader, and the handoff is clean because the codebase, the infrastructure, and the processes are all documented and well-maintained.

The Stack

Vue.js on the frontend (an early adoption in 2016 when Vue was still gaining traction). Laravel (PHP) on the backend with RESTful APIs. PostgreSQL database. Stripe for payment processing. Real-time messaging infrastructure. CI/CD pipelines with multiple environments. Thousands of server-rendered landing pages for SEO.

The Numbers

9 years of continuous engagement (2016-2025). Our longest client relationship.

10,000+ tutors on the platform.

10,000+ students on the platform.

Tens of thousands of tutoring sessions per month.

5-10 engineers at different stages, scaling with product demands.

Thousands of local SEO landing pages.

LAUSD contract. The largest school district in the United States.

Forbes 30 Under 30. Both founders received the recognition during the engagement.

Multiple funding rounds from notable West Coast investors.

US continental coverage.

What Made This Work for Nine Years

The founders were exceptional communicators. They provided clear signals for when to scale up and when to scale down. They understood that engineering teams need runway and direction, not just feature requests.

The engineers grew with the product. People who built the V1 in 2016 were still working on the platform years later. That continuity meant no onboarding overhead, no knowledge loss, and no “who built this and why?” conversations. Everyone understood the full system because they had watched it evolve.

Would we do it again? Immediately.

Who We Are

EltexSoft is a boutique software engineering studio. 35-50 senior engineers. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. Engineering team in Ukraine. Founded in 2015.

HeyTutor is our longest client engagement and our deepest EdTech reference. We provide CTO as a service and dedicated engineering teams for companies that need senior technical leadership alongside delivery capacity. We also build for FinTech, FoodTech, HealthTech, and eCommerce. Our tech stacks include Laravel, Vue, React, Django, iOS, and Android.

5.0 Clutch rating across 30+ verified reviews. 200+ five-star Upwork reviews. Top Rated Plus and Expert-Vetted agency status (top 1%). Average client engagement: 3+ years. HeyTutor has been with us for 9.

30-minute technical call. Bring your marketplace challenge, your matching algorithm problem, or your EdTech product idea. We’ll tell you what we’d build and what we wouldn’t.

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