Introduction
Tutoring services has always been a hotspot for the Hefe platform.
High Schoolers and College students are always on the hunt to find a part-time job to fund their schooling without having to flip burgers, which doesn’t use their knowledge or skills.
While on the other side, parents of small children have had very few resources available to help to find these kids. Mostly word of mouth. Who wants to put $10 on a Craigslist ad to get a bunch of strangers applying? School job boards have become professional platforms that either charge too much or make the process so darn tricky for parents to use. Lastly, those other platforms take so much in fees to pay for their investors, executives, and high priced employees. It makes that $10/hr tutor becomes $25/hr when everything is said and done. Who can afford that?
Personal Needs Becomes a Business
Our showcase is Elena, who has two younger kids. She needed to find tutors for them before discovering Hefe. As she described, it wasn’t easy in her small city to find the tutors she wanted. As she will admit, she was very picky about the tutors. Over weeks and months, she learned to find tutors through friends, parents groups on Facebook, used NextDoor, church groups, and more. Through this process, she discovered that other parents were facing the same problem. Usually, the difficulty had the parents just not doing it.
So when we first were introduced to Elena to the Hefe platform to track hours and pay the tutors she had, the light bulb went off. She could use her knowledge to help other parents in her community and surrounding towns to build her own passive income business. From there, she dove head first into it.
That evening, she began her first adventure with an old piano that her husband just brought home.
Elena created her first Piano Tutoring ad on Hefe and then posted the job link back to the various places she had found tutors in the past. Within an hour, she found eight fantastic kids that were incredible tutors, but she could only hire one. Elena then posted videos of the tutor and her daughter learning back to the Facebook group, exciting other parents. Before she knew it, three other parents had put up postings on Hefe for piano tutors. From the first idea to the first deposit was just over two weeks for Elena.
Now Elena has set her eyes beyond just piano tutors. Presently, her side hustle is earning a few hundred dollars extra income. She re-invests her earning to pay for more tutors and other projects. As she says, she is doing nothing particularly special except talk about the stuff she does. Just basic marketing techniques through her social groups online and in her local community. Now that she has watched a lot of YouTube and Udemy videos on how to do better marketing (she said don’t bother paying big bucks for that content). She envisions it becoming a few thousand dollars a month, enabling her to work less and spend more time with her two little ones.
Some Helpful Hints from Elena
At the end of our conversation, we asked her about some useful tips:
She noted that she added the shorten URL to her postings (https://bit.ly/3fMlZFC), waited until Facebook processed it, then deleted out the text as the bit.ly URL makes people a little hesitant to click on it.
One of the most powerful things that has helped her so far is that she is authentic and truthful. Folks are using Hefe because they trust her. She trusts us to do the right thing.
Some folks ask her if the company is paying her to push the platform; she says yes and explains the movement. That it pays for her time and expenses, but it is really about the movement to make the community better and stronger. As she noted, the part that makes them happy is when she says that they can be part of it. In her observation, the people that are concerned that someone is getting “paid” is someone that wants to be part of the platform as well.
Don’t pay for those online scam marketing classes. Elena had wasted a bit of money on books and classes. She had found all it was on YouTube for free and felt like an idiot for wasting money. However, some of the Udemy courses were quite good.
Summary
We thank Elena for sharing her experience to help the others. She says she is not worried about someone else in her community stealing her idea because the difference between her and others is “talk versus doing.” We are excited to follow her and others as they figure out how to apply Hefe in their communities. If you would like to be featured, we would love to hear from you.