How to Create a Website Like LRNKEY

Starting an online tutoring business is a profitable business, especially if you are inclined towards making a positive impact and have had a career as an educator. The online tutoring market industry is expected to reach $41.19 billion by 2032 from  $12.14 billion in 2024.

The increased demand for personalized learning, technological advancements, and flexibility are the key reasons for the growth in the online tutoring industry. LRNKEY is one of the leading one-to-one online tutoring marketplace with significant growth in recent years. 

If you’re planning to build a website like LRNKEY, here’s a detailed guide on how to create a website like LRNKEY.

So, let’s delve deeper and carve a detailed roadmap for building a website like LRNKEY!

What is LRNKEY? How Does it Work?

LRNKEY is a global online tutoring marketplace offering one-to-one tutoring sessions for over 25 focus areas. Founded in 2019 by Hayro Hambardzumyan, the Canada-based platform offers tutoring for different subjects, including arts and crafts, business, digital arts, finances, and information technology.

Hayro first thought about LRNKEY when he moved to Canada from Armenia and was looking for a French tutor for his children. Although he hired an online tutor, the idea of building an online tutoring marketplace struck him.

LRNKEY closes the industry gap by connecting learners with tutors for varied subjects, including foreign languages, coding, and other hobbies. With over 943 tutors, 11032 users and 432 subjects, LRNKEY’s success journey has been fascinating!

LRNKEY’s Workflow & Revenue Model

Let’s understand how LRNKEY works! The platform is divided into three major user categories : tutors, learners, and admin. 

• Learners can browse through extensive tutors on the platform and choose a tutor. After going through introduction lessons and reviews, learners can book the tutor. 
• Choose a preferred time slot for your tutoring session based on your availability.
• Connect one-to-one on the live interactive session through video conferencing software. Free trial lessons are included in these interactive sessions.

Commissions are LRNKEY’s primary revenue channel. The tutoring platform cuts a 10% sales commission from tutor earnings. For instance, if the tutors decide on a $10 per hour price, they receive $9 after the commission cut.

Other than commissions, you can incorporate subscriptions, featured listings, and related advertisements into your tutoring marketplace.

Why Build a Website like LRNKEY?

Building a website like LRNKey has several benefits. Some of the key benefits are given below:

Earn Revenue

Creating a tutoring marketplace is a profitable pursuit. While commissions from tutor payments are the primary revenue stream, advertisements, feature listings, and subscriptions are other channels to monetize.

Easily Accessible

Online tutoring offers quality education beyond the geographical barriers, making education more accessible. Also, learners can connect with expert tutors from any part of the world.

Low Startup Cost

The startup cost for building an online tutoring business is lower than traditional learning. It eliminates ongoing expenses for traditional learning, including rent, transportation costs, etc. 

Scalable Business Model

Your platform can quickly scale to accommodate more students without additional infrastructure costs.

How to Create a Website Like LRNKEY?

Creating a website like LRNKEY requires careful planning and research. Here’s a detailed step-by-step guide for building a similar online tutoring marketplace:

Step 1: Define a Profitable Niche

You need an immensely profitable tutoring niche to build a successful online platform. While you might be drawn to skip niching down and go broad, there are too many players in the broad market. To win the audience and build credibility, you need to pick a sound niche.

This helps to adopt a targeted marketing approach that easily resonates with your audience. Choose a suitable business model — one-to-one or group tutoring model. Once you have settled on a niche it’s easier to decide your specific audience demographic.

So, how do you pick the right niche?

• Think about your experience, passions, and interests – Something you are inclined towards.
• Leverage your existing expertise and skills – Something you’re good at.
• Discover an existing market gap that you monetize – Something that has significant market demand and is profitable.

So, you can find a niche that aligns with your interests, involves your expertise and has market demand.

Next, you need to identify your target audience and investigate their real problems. Segment your audience and choose a specific group based on their age, demographics, or behavior.  

Identify 2-3 direct and indirect competitors vying in your niche market. Look at their offerings, features, marketing strategies, and pricing modes. Find their strengths and weaknesses and capitalize on their shortcomings. 

Lastly, keep an eye on the current market trends and target where the demand exists! Use tools like Google Trends, Exploding Topics, and BuzzSumo to gain data-driven insights. These tools offer insights into what people are searching online and maximize your profits! 

For example, 

Understand what people search for and discuss through online forums, communities, and social media groups.

Step 2: Choose a Business Model 

A business model is essentially how your platform drives revenue from your audience! The right business model helps you grow your business and maximize your platform revenue. Determine your business model based on your goals, target audience, and expertise.

The popular business models for growing your tutoring marketplace are as follows:

• One-to-one Tutoring

In this model, an expert tutor offers personalized tutoring to learners in an interactive environment. Learners can book their preferred tutors as per availability via video conferencing tools. The platform cuts a fixed commission on tutor earnings and forwards the remaining to tutors. 

For example, Verbling and Wyzant adopt a one-to-one tutoring model.

• Group Tutoring

Group tutoring involves offering tutoring sessions through collaborative learning. These might be small or large groups of learners. Tutors can teach multiple learners at the same time and maximize their time and efforts. You can fix a standard commission rate on tutor earnings like one-to-one tutoring.

Preply and Varsity Tutors host both live private and group lessons for learners.

• Subscription-Based Model

In this model, the learner pays a fixed subscription fee on a monthly or yearly basis and can access all the sessions and resources. For example, in Preply, learners can take a trial lesson and choose a subscription plan from below.

They can opt the number of lessons they will take per week. Once they choose a subscription plan, they need to pay for the first 28 days and it gets renewed automatically afterwards.  For example, Coursera Plus offers subscription plans to its learners.

• Corporate Partnerships

With growing competition, companies want a skilled and productive workforce. Typically, they partner with course platforms and enroll their workforce in employee development and skill improvement programs. This makes the employees productive, improves their skills and makes them innovative.

In exchange for training, the platform gets a share of revenue as a commission from the corporate companies.

Udemy Business and Coursera for Business are two examples of successful corporate partnership platforms.

On the revenue side, advertisements, sponsored tutor listings, paid certificates, and courses are a few direct channels for pumping up revenue.

Step 3: Choose the Essential Features for Your Tutoring Marketplace

LRNKEY is an online tutoring marketplace that connects learners to expert tutors for one-to-one tutoring sessions. Today, the platform boasts over 900 tutors and 11027 users. LRNKEY’s user-friendly interface is one of the key reasons for its popularity.

Below are the essential features for building a website like LRNKEY!

Secure Login & Registration 

Any platform’s user experience starts with a seamless and secure login! For convenience, offer signups with Google, LinkedIn and Facebook. Tutor signups require an elaborate signup involving personal information, credentials and skills, prices, availability, etc.

Profile Management

A compelling tutor profile is one of the best ways to gain visibility and attract learners! Ensure tutors can optimize their profile with right descriptions, showcase their skills, experience, mention availability, list different package plans.

Search & Discovery Filters

Your tutoring marketplace is great for connecting learners to their preferred tutors. As your platform scales over time to accommodate more users and tutors, a robust search & discovery feature could be helpful! Learners can make an effortless search to find their preferred tutors based on subjects, skills, tutoring language, availability, and even price range. Offer detailed tutor listings with descriptions, ratings, prices, number of completed lessons, etc.

Book & Schedule 1:1 Tutoring Sessions

An intuitive appointment booking & scheduling sessions automates booking, seat allocation and session management. Allow learners to book a free or paid lesson based on their preferences, slot availability, etc. Additionally include options to reschedule and cancel sessions.

Calendar availability is a valuable tool for online tutoring marketplaces. For instance, tutors can showcase their availability, prevent session overlaps and also offer real-time updates and notifications. On the other hand, learners can save their time and avoid no-shows. 

In-Built Payment Integration

One of the last things users desire is getting stuck in endless payment loops! Integrate with trusted payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal for a convenient and seamless payment process. Also, offers multiple payment methods, such as credit cards, debit cards, wallets, bank transfers, etc.

Communication & Messaging Tool

LRNKEY’s communication tools include in-app messaging, email communications, and document collaboration tools. In addition, you could also include dedicated discussion forums for online learning.

Reviews & Ratings

A feedback and review section on a tutor profile offers useful insights and makes it easier for learners to choose specific tutors. For tutors, it offers the opportunity to build credibility and win over their audience!

Dashboard & Analytics

A dedicated tutor dashboard helps tutors manage classes, earnings, payouts, and upcoming appointments from a single dashboard. Tutors can also generate detailed reports on different aspects related to the tutoring platform. For admins, a comprehensive dashboard offers a complete view of the business performance and revenue!

Live Interactive Sessions & Whiteboards

Real-time interactivity is one of the key features of an online tutoring marketplace. Integrate your platform with popular video SDKs like Zoom and LessonSpace, which includes live tutoring, interactive whiteboards, screen-sharing, etc.

Step 4: Choose the Right Platform

Now, it’s time you choose a way to put your design into implementation! 

There are two ways to create a website like LRNKEY: building from scratch and using ready-made software. 

Custom Development

While custom development is a common approach, it typically involves building the solution from scratch. This is an expensive approach, and it typically takes a few months to one year to build a full-fledged website like LRNKEY. The overall development cost is around $50,000 to $70,000, which is significant.

Moreover, custom development requires a dedicated development team. Further, customizations to tailor the software to your business needs might cost a few more dollars. 

But, there’s a way out and you can launch a market-ready product within no time! And that’s what the next alternative is all about!

Ready-Made LRNKEY Clone Script

A ready-made solution comes integrated with all the essential features and functionalities to build a website like LRNKEY. It offers a quick approach to launch your tutoring marketplace! 

You have a core product ready, and hence can focus on growing your business! Besides, the cost of the ready-made LRNKEY script is considerably lower compared to building from scratch.The final product is tailored to fit your unique business requirements, with customized integrations

Step 5: Recruiting & Onboarding Educators

Effective tutors are the cornerstones of a successful online tutoring platform! Create appropriate job descriptions as per your platform requirements to hire tutors.

Build a unique business proposition with competitive pricing, a user-friendly interface, or close-knit community support! Leverage social media platforms, job boards, and educational institutions to find the right resources!

Here are a few onboarding strategies for your tutoring marketplace:

Pre-onboarding-  This involves laying clear policies for new tutors related to their roles & responsibilities. Clearly lay the learning objectives for your onboarding training program. Before onboarding tutors, conduct background check-ins to avoid any discrepancies.

Onboarding Formalities – Create a welcome mail with essential policies, procedures, and demo sessions. Record training modules on different aspects of the tutoring platform like profile optimization, scheduling tutoring sessions, and conducting live interactive sessions.

Post-Onboarding – Once tutors join the platform, conduct feedback sessions, performance reviews, and inform about new platform features & upgrades.

Step 6: Promote Your Online Tutoring Marketplace

Developing your online tutoring platform is only half battle! Promoting your platform across the right channels is essential. Focus on building a solid online presence to increase your platform visibility!

Here are some tried-and-tested marketing strategies for your tutoring marketplace:

• Social Media Marketing – Share valuable tips, educational resources, and success stories to attract potential clients. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram are excellent for marketing your tutoring marketplace.
• Paid Ads – Google and social media ads (Facebook and Instagram ads) help to reach a broader audience. Create appropriate ad descriptions and analyze their performance and lead conversions. Tweak promotional strategies to see which ads convert better.
• Referral Programs – Create attractive referral programs for bringing new tutors to the tutoring platform. Word-of-mouth referrals are still a powerful tool! And existing users can earn rewards, discounts or free lessons for every successful referral.
• Email Marketing – Build an email list by offering how-to-guides or free resources. Share newsletters, discounts, course launches with platform users.  
• Content Marketing – Target niche-related keywords to rank higher in SERPs. Incorporate these keywords in your website, blogs, and landing pages to drive organic traffic.

Step 7: Scaling Your Online Tutoring Marketplace

You have hit your initial milestones with your initial set of customers! What next? If you don’t have a strategy to grow your tutoring business, you’ll hit a snag!

Analyze your tutoring marketplace with important metrics and insights. For example, active users, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost are some essential metrics you need to keep an eye on!

Understand the market and discover niche opportunities. This might lead to your next decisive step! Include different revenue streams to drive more money to the platform. For example, if you’re offering one-to-one tutoring, you can include group sessions or courses.

Lastly, foster long-term relationships with your clients and build a loyal community!

That summed up all the steps on how to create a website like LRNKEY! 

Alternatives to LRNKEY

There are several key players in the online tutoring marketplace like LRNKEY. Let’s look at the competitors of LRNKEY and their key platform strategies!

Preply

Preply is Ukrainian online tutoring marketplace offering one-to-one tutoring sessions primarily for over 50 different languages. The platform offers tutoring for different languages, including French, German, Spanish, English, and even the lesser-known ones like Polish, Romanian, Arabic, etc. 

Beyond the languages, the platform also offers tutoring for coding, math, and music. Preply primarily earns 18%-33% commissions charged on the tutor earnings. Other potential revenue streams for Preply are subscriptions, corporate language training, paid promotions, etc.

Varsity Tutors

Varsity Tutors is a leading K-12 tutoring platform offering tutoring sessions for over 3,000 subjects. It provides one-to-one and small group tutoring sessions. It covers subjects related to academics, test preparation, languages, etc.

The platform earns revenue primarily from commissions on tutor earnings. Beyond that, corporate partnerships, subscription plans, also pump in additional revenue. The platform hosts tutoring sessions for 5 million students with 40,000 expert tutors.

Wyzant

Another popular online tutoring marketplace, Wyzant, hosts 65,000 expert tutors for over 300+ subjects. It provides virtual and in-person tutoring sessions for subjects, including English, Algebra, Science, Calculus, Spanish, etc.  Wyzant cuts a 25% commission on the tutor’s earnings per hour.

Until now, Wyzant has offered tutoring 12+ million lessons to over 3 million students worldwide. The platform charges a commission of 25% and credits the remaining 75% earnings to tutors.

Final Words

You could step into the lucrative $12.41 billion tutoring industry by creating a website like LRNKEY. We have covered the detailed steps on how to create a website like LRNKEY. From defining a profitable niche to scaling your tutoring marketplace, we have delved into everything you need to get started!

Have a million-dollar idea? We show how to turn your vision into the next market leader in the tutoring industry! Pinlearn is  a high-customizable white label ready-made clone script for building a website like LRNKEY. From live class management to comprehensive dashboard and in-built payment gateway integration, you can afford all this without breaking the bank!

Our clone script incurs a one-time cost, yet offers 100% source-code access. All you need to do is decide your niche and let us know your business needs over a 15-minute call with our team! And you’ll know if our product is a right fit for transcending your million-dollar idea!

FAQ-Related to How to Create a Website Like LRNKEY

1. How to create a website like LRNKEY?

Follow these steps to build a website like LRNKEY:

• Define a profitable niche
• Conduct market research & planning
• Choose the essential features
• Determine the right development approach
• Onboard educators to your platform
• Launch your tutoring marketplace
• Promote your tutoring platform

2. What are the key monetization streams to drive revenue on LRNKEY?

LRNKEY primarily monetizes from commissions charged on tutor payments. If you’re building a website like LRNKEY, subscriptions, advertisements, and featured listings are other revenue streams.

3. What are the essential features for building a website like LRNKEY?

Booking & scheduling, course search & discovery, profile management, login, in-built payment integration, video conferencing, whiteboard, review and ratings are some of the essential features.