It’s true that these markets are the huge ones today.
But there is another buyer that your post leaves out: parents. This is not the same as individuals/self-learners (the buyer is not the user, exactly) — but the buyer has strong incentives that align with student performance that are different than the others.
Historically, this has been a very challenging market to scale up well — exceptional 1:1 tutors are rare, and hard to train, they’ll be expensive and often form a relationship with their tutees that incentivizes disintermediation of any platform that tries to capture some fraction of the value by offering a two-sided marketplace (YC has funded at least one of these!)
However, AI has the potential to dominate in this market. Most tutors are actually not amazing, but 1:1 tutoring is just so much more effective than basically any other kind of educational context (two-sigma improvements!) that it doesn’t super matter. AI could be a much more effective tutor — at a cost substantially lower than a human tutor. Of course, wealthy families may still want to hire the well-pedigreed, role-model-level, truly exceptional tutors. But folks who are lukewarm about their private (or small-group) tutors may just give the AI tutors a shot—and find that they’re better than what they were paying for.
Or not! That’s what makes it a risky bet. :)
But it’s a large, $50B+ market today, and growing fast — not one to be discounted.
But there is another buyer that your post leaves out: parents. This is not the same as individuals/self-learners (the buyer is not the user, exactly) — but the buyer has strong incentives that align with student performance that are different than the others.
Historically, this has been a very challenging market to scale up well — exceptional 1:1 tutors are rare, and hard to train, they’ll be expensive and often form a relationship with their tutees that incentivizes disintermediation of any platform that tries to capture some fraction of the value by offering a two-sided marketplace (YC has funded at least one of these!)
However, AI has the potential to dominate in this market. Most tutors are actually not amazing, but 1:1 tutoring is just so much more effective than basically any other kind of educational context (two-sigma improvements!) that it doesn’t super matter. AI could be a much more effective tutor — at a cost substantially lower than a human tutor. Of course, wealthy families may still want to hire the well-pedigreed, role-model-level, truly exceptional tutors. But folks who are lukewarm about their private (or small-group) tutors may just give the AI tutors a shot—and find that they’re better than what they were paying for.
Or not! That’s what makes it a risky bet. :)
But it’s a large, $50B+ market today, and growing fast — not one to be discounted.