How to Build a Website like Outschool?

The homeschooling market is expected to reach $10.35 billion by 2031 from $5.49 billion. Thanks to changing parental choices, flexibility, safety concerns, technology, and customized learning. While regulatory barriers and social stigma are major challenges, a number of key players are storming the space.

Outschool is one such key player disrupting the industry with an astounding $3 billion valuation. The platform offers an interesting business model, synergizing the convenience of education with subject expertise! If you are planning to build a website like Outschool and reiterate its success, you’re in the right place! 

From dissecting the business model to a detailed roadmap, this blog guides you on how to build a website like Outschool. In the end, we also recommend the most cost-effective and best approach that fits your budget!

So, are you ready to kickstart your entrepreneurial journey?

Is it Profitable to Create a Website like Outschool?

We will discuss the steps to build an Outschool-like website in a while!

Now, let’s understand why you should pursue this profitable K-12 marketplace venture:

• Market Demand for Online Learning

Online learning is more demanding than ever, given the freedom and flexibility it offers over traditional education. Students can learn from anywhere at their own convenience.

• Monetization Streams

Platforms like Outschool operate on a commission-based structure. It relies on both 1:1 tutoring and self-paced courses to drive platform revenue. This brings recurring income to the platform.

• Driving a Positive Change

If you’re truly passionate about positively impacting education, building an edtech platform is a big stride in this direction! You provide a stage for educators to earn money from expertise. At the same time, you impact learners by catering to their personalized and diverse educational needs.  

• Accessibility

Platforms like Outschool make education a more inclusive and global experience, especially for students with neurodiverse needs and language barriers.

How Does Outschool Work?

Founded in 2013, Outschool is a community marketplace connecting independent teachers with students between the ages of 3 and 18. The platform covers a wide range of subjects, such as arts and crafts, language, coding, core academics, music theory and more. Online learning mostly happens through live Zoom interactive sessions involving 1-to-1 private or small groups.

Teachers can register and list their classes on the platform. They design their classes based on their subjects, age groups and class format. Outschool follows a 70-30% commission model, charging a 30% service fee. The payment is made every week after the classes begin.

Parents can browse through the classes and filter them by subject, age group, time, or price and choose at their convenience. They can select from one-time classes, ongoing chat groups, semester courses or camps. Once enrolled, students can join the sessions through a live session link.

How to Build a Website like Outschool: Step-by-Step Guide

Now that you have understood Outschool’s business model in depth let’s move on to the steps to build a website like Outschool!

Step 1: Choose a Niche for Your Outschool-Like Website

The first step is to choose a niche for your Outschool-like marketplace. Choosing a profitable niche ensures the long-term success of your platform! 

Decide whether you’re offering personalized tutoring sessions or courses. Next, you can create a marketplace offering sessions on generic subjects, STEM disciplines, or creative topics. Further, you can narrow down your niche based on the age group, such as preschool kids, teens, or professionals.

Now, this involves some research from your end! You need to consider factors like your passion, expertise, and market demand.

Here are a few steps that could help you through the niche-discovery process!

• Perform competitor analysis; check out their offerings and their revenue streams.
• Research about your target audience — age, demographics, special needs, timezone, etc.
• Review the current market trends and opportunities. Use tools like SEMRush and Google Trends to find the popular niches.
• Identify existing industry gaps and opportunities in your niche and if your solution is capable of addressing them.
• Your niche should be profitable enough to drive good revenue.

You can also survey to determine what kind of platform your target audience is looking for. Creating your niche is crucial because it lays the foundation for your marketplace.

Step 2: Decide the Business Model

Next, you need to find ways to drive money to your platform. A business model is successful execution of your business plan! A platform like Outschool offers one-to-one tutoring sessions and self-paced courses. Once you decide on the monetization streams, you need to figure out how to offer them to your users.

Choose a business model that fits your business goals and aligns with your niche.

Here are a few common business models popular in the educational industry:

Commission- Based Model

Most marketplaces operate on a commission model, taking a percentage of your revenue as the commission. Outschool follows a 70-30% commission structure, charging a percentage from every booked transaction. 

This is a scalable business model. Because overtime the platform revenue grows with the number of transactions. While it’s a win-win model for educators and platform owners, deciding the right commission rate is a significant challenge!

Pay-Per-Class

The pay-per-class model is quite straightforward — you pay for a specific course or module.  This model is easy to understand and offers flexibility to choose the courses as per your convenience. Moreover, students find this model affordable as they do not need to enrol in an extensive membership for a single module or topic.

For example, Outschool allows students to pay per session (for 1-to-1 tutoring sessions) or per class (for self-paced courses). Upselling techniques, such as course bundles and attractive discounts, help increase overall sales. The only disadvantage is that tutors might find it difficult to earn a steady source of income.

Subscription Model

The next popular model is the subscription model. Here, students get access to all the courses on the website for a fixed fee. They can opt for monthly or annual payments. 

Consistently offering engaging content in diverse formats keeps learners hooked on your platform. One of the biggest advantages of this model is steady monthly revenue for educators through premium content. Moreover, it creates a community of loyal fans and drives customer retention.

Ad-Based Model

The ad-based model is an effective one if you’re planning to attract a large audience base. As the name suggests, the primary source of revenue is third-party ads relevant to your niche audience. 

Students can enrol with tutoring sessions and courses free of charge. However, undesirable adverts can hinder their learning experience. Hence, a popular variation is combining the ad-based model with the freemium model. Here, the learners can upgrade to a premium subscription to skip ads.

Step 3: Select Key Features for Your Online Learning Platform

A user-friendly design is one of the essential highlights to attract clients! In this how to build a website like Outschool guide, one of the crucial steps is simulating the key platform features and functionality. Plus, you need to add a unique selling proposition to stand out in the competitive landscape.

Outschool excels with an enriching feature set for educators and learners. In this section, we will explain the essential features needed to build a similar tutoring platform!

Login & Registration

One key feature of an online learning platform is simple log in and registration. Tutors and students should be able to create accounts, sign in effortlessly, and access role-specific platform features. Ensure the entire login and registration process is secure and impenetrable. 

Add an additional option to sign up through Google or social media profiles like Facebook.

Tutor Profile Customization

With over 10,000 experienced teachers on the platform, the only way to stand out is through appealing tutor profiles. Ensure you offer enough options for tutors to optimize their profiles. Outschool offers an option to add a profile image, description, short video introduction, review and rating section, number of classes completed, schedule, etc.

Detailed class listings make it easier for students to choose the right educators.

Class or Course Discovery

Connecting the right educators with learners is one of the most important goals of your platform. Outschool has a robust search feature with advanced filters like age group, time, class size, price, class type or specific keywords. Filters and easy navigation make the entire search process effortless and user-friendly.

Booking & Enrollment

Booking & enrollment is one of the crucial modules of online learning platforms. From availability calendars and ensuring class capacity to booking trial sessions, your platform needs an extensive booking module! 

Payment Gateway Options

Your booking process isn’t complete without completing the payment! You need a trusted payment gateway for a hassle-free payment process. For user convenience, offer multiple payment options like digital wallets, debit/ credit cards, and net banking. Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.Net are popular payment gateways in the edtech industry.

Notification & Messaging

Whether it’s a last-minute reminder for an upcoming appointment, a much-awaited refund, a class cancellation or an exclusive price drop, notifications keep everyone in the loop! In-app messaging within an ongoing session or after classes to clear doubts ensures a smooth learning experience. 

Video Integration

Real-time interactivity is an essential part of online learning platforms. Outschool integrates popular video streaming SDKs like Zoom one-to-one or group tutoring sessions.

Step 4: Determine the Developmental Approach 

Now, let’s move on to the development approaches to build a platform like Outschool. There are two developmental approaches: custom development and ready-made script.

Custom-development

Custom-development involves building from scratch, which is quite time-intensive and expensive. If you wish to build a full-fledged platform like Outschool, you need to integrate all the features, from course discovery and booking and enrollment to payment gateway.

Besides, you need to be acquainted with the right tech-stack for your tutoring business.

Hence, the overall development cost is around $50,000 after a few months of development. Moreover, you should have complete ownership of the entire development process.

But if you’re looking for a way to launch your platform on the go, why not choose  a better alternative!

Ready-made script

Ready-made scripts come with pre-built features and functionalities to launch a platform like Outschool. You can skip the hassles of design and development! All you need to do is determine your business requirements, customize the script and launch the software!

Pinlearn is one such ready-made solution to accelerate your development process. It is a complete white-label online tutoring software that will launch your tutoring marketplace within a few days! On top of that you enjoy 100% control over your product.

Step 5: Launch Your Website

Now, your platform is ready to take ground! Launching your e-learning platform involves many things and can often be tricky!

To ease your job, we have curated a complete list of different aspects for an effective launch:

• Finding a relevant and easy-to-remember domain name
• Choose and secure web hosting to help your website run smoothly
• Testing your website on different websites and screens.
• Ensure your website is easy to navigate to reduce the bounce rate
• Set up a CMS to host the dynamic content of your website
• Check all your website content before the launch.
• Recheck to ensure that all your CTAs are in the proper place.
• Test your website for load time,  speed, and scalability.
• Check the security measures, such as SSL certificates and authentication features.
• Maintain backups of all the website pages
• Install analytics tools like Google Analytics to track user behaviour.

Step 6: Promote Your Outschool

Once you have launched your platform, your job isn’t done! You need to bring more website traffic, for which you need a stellar marketing plan! Identify the top competitors and perform some competitor analysis. Research a bit about their offerings and marketing strategies. 

Let’s explore some tried-and-tested marketing strategies for increasing visibility!

• Market your platform features and product demo on social media profiles. 
• Leverage pre-launch marketing techniques like sneak peeks and teasers to build excitement.
• Create blogs targeting relevant keywords and publish ebooks, how-to guides, or whitepapers.
• Guest blog on niche-relevant websites to improve your SERP with these backlinks.
• Run campaigns to build your email list through effective CTAs and lead magnets to increase leads!
• Collaborate with popular influencers in your niche and increase your brand awareness.
• Leverage SEO practices like optimizing your content, long-tail keywords, meta tags, etc.
• Get your site published on online directories with excellent domain authority.
• Publish niche-relevant B2B content topics on social media platforms like LinkedIn Pulse.

Well, that’s a wrap! And that’s a complete guide on how to build a website like Outschool  for your rewarding entrepreneurial pursuit!

Popular Alternatives to Outschool

Are you looking for Outschool alternatives? Whether it’s coming up with the essential features, creating your ideal client persona, hunting the right marketing strategies, or finding a few alternatives, it could help you through the development process.

Here’s a list of Outschool alternatives that might help you:

• Varsity Tutors: It is a popular tutoring platform offering private and group tutoring and test preparation for academics and professionals. The platform also offers membership for diverse learning needs. It covers subjects such as academics, test prep, languages, arts and music, business, and more.
• Tutor.com: This platform offers personalized tutoring for elementary school and college students. It covers a wide range of subjects, including math, science, test preparation, etc.
• Wyzant: One of the top-rated marketplaces, Wyzant connects students with tutors with its private and in-person tutoring sessions. Covering over 300 subjects,  including algebra, writing, physics, languages, creative skills, Wyzant  hosts an extensive network of tutors.
• Khan Academy: A non-profit educational platform offers video lessons, practice exercises, personalized test preparation for K-12 and high education. The platform is funded by grants from individuals, foundations, and corporations.
• Preply: Preply works as an online learning marketplace that primarily focuses on language learning and academic subjects. These include maths, chemistry, programming languages, psychology, etc.
• Cambly: Cambly is a language learning platform that connects native English speakers with students. It offers a wide range of courses, from beginner to advanced, including academic test preparation and public speaking.

Build a Website Like Outschool Today!

Outschool has found significant success with K-12 and homeschooling. Hence, building a platform like Outschool is certainly a profitable venture. While building from scratch could be cumbersome, ready-made clone scripts save you time and money! Moreover, you can build your own brand and establish domain authority.

Get in touch with our experts, and let us discuss your business idea today! Pinlearn is the right place to start your journey to build a sophisticated tutoring marketplace just the way you like it!

FAQ-Related to How to Build a Website Like Outschool

1. What are the steps of building a website like Outschool?

To build a platform like Outschool, choose a profitable niche, determine a solid business model, decide on the key design features, and choose a cost-effective development approach.

2. How much does it cost to build a website like Outschool?

Building a platform like Outschool like costs around $50,000 to $70,000 if you’re building from scratch. Leveraging the ready-made solutions like clone scripts reduce the overall cost and time for the development process.

3. How do you make money on Outschool?

Outschool is one of the leading tutoring platforms primarily empowering its tutors with personalized tutoring sessions and self-paced courses. The platform supports different class formats like live classes, ongoing classes, pre-recorded classes, short courses, and more. The platform takes a 30% commission-cut from every booked transaction and credits the remaining proceeds to the educator.

4. Is it profitable to create a website like Outschool?

Yes, it’s profitable to start a K-12 marketplace like Outschool for several reasons. Growing market demand in the online learning space, lucrative monetization streams, the opportunity to make a difference, and making education more accessible are the factors that make it a profitable pursuit.