SeeGuru — Learning Platform
A live-tutoring marketplace that matches a learner to the right guru and runs the whole lesson around them.
How this started
SeeGuru is a fast-growing US-based online tutoring platform — learners meet a “guru” over live video for English and other languages and subjects, from kids' classes to IELTS/TOEFL prep and business English. We've been their long-term engineering partner since 2022 and still ship with them today.
Challenge
A tutoring marketplace only works if three things feel effortless at once: finding the right tutor, booking a slot across two timezones, and paying safely across borders. Under that simplicity sits real complexity — thousands of tutor profiles, availability, trial lessons, payments, and tools tutors actually want to use for planning and progress.
Approach
We built the platform around the lesson, not the database. Matching surfaces the right guru by language, level and goal; scheduling reconciles timezones and free trials; payments handle cross-border safely. Tutors get lesson-planning and progress tracking; learners get a clean path from “I want to learn” to a booked session. We work as an embedded team — shipping continuously, not handing over and leaving.
The hard decision
We could have leaned on an off-the-shelf booking-and-payments stack and shipped sooner. But a tutoring marketplace lives or dies on the trial-to-paid moment across timezones and borders — so we built that flow ourselves, the one part a template would have made "fine" instead of frictionless.
Built around the lesson, not the database
A tutoring marketplace only works if three things feel effortless at once: finding the right tutor, booking across two timezones, and paying safely across borders. Under that simplicity sits real complexity — thousands of tutor profiles, availability, trial lessons, cross-border payments, and tools tutors actually want to use.
We built the platform around the lesson itself. Matching surfaces the right guru by language, level and goal; scheduling reconciles timezones and free trials; payments handle cross-border cleanly. Tutors get lesson-planning and progress tracking; learners get one path from "I want to learn" to a booked session.
An embedded partner, not a vendor
We've shipped with SeeGuru continuously since 2022 — an embedded engineering team that keeps building, rather than a shop that hands over a build and walks away.
One flow
Discovery → free trial → booking → paid lesson — across timezones, without the learner ever feeling the machinery.
Before / After
Before
Manual
After
Matched
Find the right tutor
Before
Painful
After
One flow
Cross-timezone booking
Before
Elsewhere
After
Built in
Tutor tooling
The Impact
Quantitative
Qualitative
Long-term partner — shipping continuously with SeeGuru since 2022.
One flow from discovery → free trial → booking → paid lesson, across timezones.
Tutor tooling (planning, progress, assistant) tutors actually keep using.
They ship like part of our own team. The product just keeps getting better, release after release.
SeeGuru · Product lead, online tutoring
Team
Stack
