Myles Hunter is the CEO and Co-Founder of TutorMe. He and his co-founders struggled to find an effective tutoring option as an undergrad at the University of Southern California, so they set out to create a solution. He quickly taught himself how to web design to help speed up TutorMe’s launch. Now, as CEO, Myles is responsible for business development, strategy, and building an incredible team. He also invests in early-stage startups and acts as an advisor to startups such as LVL.
Prior to launching TutorMe, Myles was a management consultant at EY, serving clients in financial services. As an undergraduate student, he pioneered the modern ambassador program model at Lyft. He recruited and managed thousands of Lyft ambassadors across the country, creating and deploying effective growth hacks. His efforts were a driving force in Lyft’s early success with performance marketing.
Myles is a graduate of the University of Southern California with a B.S. in Business Administration and a minor in real estate finance. He is a native Spanish speaker.
What is TutorMe all about?
TutorMe is all about striving to level the academic playing field by connecting expert tutors with students in a matter of seconds.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
When I earned a scholarship to the University of Southern California, I was the first person in my family to attend college. As I worked my way through USC with a job at the health center, I found outside tutoring prohibitively expensive, while on-campus tutoring was unavailable outside of traditional work hours.
I founded TutorMe in 2015 to connect students with a qualified tutor within seconds. Our business model of partnering directly with schools and corporations means that students at participating institutions never pay for tutoring out of pocket.
Since the earliest days of TutorMe, our mission has been to foster equity in education and help students achieve their academic dreams no matter who their parents are. My mom was a refugee who fled Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship to come to America, and my dad is an electrician who taught me a deep respect for the value of hard work. I was one of the many students around the country who simply didn’t have access to private tutoring.
Before TutorMe, I formed Lyft’s ambassador program. Beginning in the spring semester of my junior year and the entirety of my senior year, while taking full course loads, I spent nearly 60 hours a week testing new growth marketing strategies. The growth hacks I created are still used by Lyft and other tech giants, and now I use some of them to propel TutorMe. With my Lyft earnings, I paid off all of my student loans before I graduated—and, with the help of my co-founder, Victor Kotseruba, built a minimum viable product of TutorMe that we could demo to potential investors.
My team and I eventually raised a $1.3 million round of funding from angel investors, including one of Uber’s first backers, Jason Calacanis. TutorMe was acquired by Zovio (NASDAQ: ZVO) in April 2019, and I still remain the CEO.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
One of my biggest mistakes in the early days was partnering with people who didn’t share my work ethic. Building a successful startup takes a ton of work, and all founders must be in it for the long haul. The average time until an exit often eclipses the average length of a marriage in the U.S. It’s a huge commitment with a lot at stake. You’re going to be working with your co-founders day in, day out for many years. To that point, seeking out good legal counsel early on is crucial so that standard vesting clauses and good corporate governance are in place.
Another mistake was outsourcing too early for some roles. I learned that, at an early-stage start-up, most of the work really has to be done by the internal team. Outsourcing too early for certain functions of the business, such as sales, ends up actually really hurting you. Ultimately, the first salespeople and customer support reps should be the founders. That’s just non-negotiable.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
I read constantly and listen to plenty of podcasts. I try to absorb as much as I possibly can about what’s going on in our specific industry and in tech in general.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel
- The Algebra of Happiness by Scott Galloway
- The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
We don’t really do much traditional marketing. To this point, our most effective growth strategy has been building a great product. As a result, a lot of our prospective clients find out about us by word of mouth, and we’ve really been a product-driven company because of that. In 2020, we did a survey and found that more than 98% of students and parents would recommend TutorMe, and our Net Promoter Score was 76, the best in the industry.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new startup, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I would use most of it to order a ton of Soylent to keep the team fed as we’re building an MVP. Besides paying ourselves minimal salaries, we didn’t need to pay for much at the beginning. AWS offered free credits, and we were building the product ourselves.
I mentioned before that startups needed to get legally set up. I didn’t realize this until after we got a lawyer, but you can convince a good law firm to defer startup payments. If I were to start another company, I’d be able to get a law firm to create our legal documents, but only start collecting fees once I raised my first round of money.
Building an MVP really doesn’t require much money. It just requires lots of sweat equity.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
When building a product, iterating super fast to shorten the feedback loop is critical, and so is talking with your customers obsessively to make sure that you’re on the right path and you’re building the right things.
What is your favorite quote?
I love Ben Horowitz’s quote:
“Take care of the people, the products, and the profits (in that order).”
- Our people
- Slack
- Google Workspace
How is running a tech company different than what you thought it would be?
It can be much more stressful! But in a good way. Things move super fast. Even the best ideas become terrible ideas after a certain age, so we have to be constantly innovating. And there is always more to learn.
How can readers get in touch with you?
I’m on Twitter from time to time: @mylesnhunter.
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