Tutorfly is a startup founded by a student to facilitate peer-to-peer tutoring

Meet Parsa Rezvani, the Founder & CEO of TutorFly. Tutorfly is an app and a peer-to-peer tutoring platform for connecting high school student tutors with students. Their mission is to provide an educational alternative to the traditional classroom setting through peer to peer tutoring. The company believes that high school students are some of the most intelligent individuals in their community. Tutorfly is reinventing education by empowering students to teach other students in every age group.

Parsa founded the company in 2017. Parsa is currently a senior at UCLA studying Economics and Entrepreneurship. He’s lived most of his life in Los Altos, California where he developed his love for business analytics and enjoyed participating in Homestead High School’s Chapter of FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America). The skills he acquired in Los Altos and at school at UCLA led him to develop the idea of Tutorfly and, with a stellar team, design an application that would initially pay it forward to the community he came from.

So, how did it all start? Rezvan began tutoring others when he was a freshman. He found that parents were often interested in hiring a tutor who had previously been students of specific teachers due to the likelihood of familiarity with teaching styles and curriculum. Although he was advised by faculty at UCLA that it would be easier to use a nearby high school to test his program, he chose instead to return to Homestead. Parsa Rezvani’s father immigrated from Iran. His father struggled in his high school English class when he until he made friends with some American classmates. In exchange for helping them in their math classes, Parsa Rezvani’s father received help in passing English.

The Tutorfly Team is comprised of current university students at schools including UCLA, Duke, and Babson. They all participated in peer tutoring in high school and are now looking to provide easy access to peer tutoring by collaborating with teachers, parents, and education technology experts in the community. This generation of students learns differently, and no one is better equipped to guide students than their peers, who have been through the exact same academic journeys just a few years prior. Tutorfly.org  facilitates peer-to-peer tutoring within a school and allows parents to tailor their search for a tutor by a number of criteria, such as subject expertise and past teachers. For just $20, students can hire a tutor. For the initial Homestead launch period, they donated all proceeds to Sunnyvale Community Services. TutorFly participanted in the UCLA Anderson Venture Accelerator-2017 Cohort as well as the 2017 Y Combinator Startup Founders program.

“There are a lot of cool features. Parents can filter by subject, class year and teacher. You can have a student who has been in the same exact shoes as your child one or two years ago,” said Parsa Rezvanii, who graduated from Homestead in 2014 and now attends UCLA. TutorFly has partnered with the Homestead High School Chapter of the California Scholarship Federation (CSF) to find the brightest and most driven tutors. To celebrate their launch at UCLA, TutorFly is currently giving a FREE tutoring session to the first 20 UCLA students. If you are interested in partnering with Tutorfly or providing feedback, you can reach out to them at info@tutorfly.org.