SDSU at the center of TutorTok Expansion

Less than one year after its creation in January 2023, founder Peyton Max decided to broaden the horizons of his company. 

Created as a platform to help CU Boulder students in specific courses, TutorTok’s success prompted Max to expand to new schools. In May 2023, the company began hiring San Diego State and Colorado State University students to add the schools to the platform. 

When choosing new schools to add to TutorTok, Executive Assistant Marlo Krumbaar recalls that, “you need to have an ‘in’ and you need to have it fit with our target market.”

Larger schools are TutorTok’s target demographic, with CSU and SDSU each having a student body of over 30,000. “It’s a huge audience; you have a lot of demographics there. Realistically, we’re trying to help as many students as possible,” Max said.

In adding Colorado State, Max says it was mostly a matter of proximity and similarity. “The two big schools in Colorado are CU and CSU. If you don’t go to CU, you go to CSU,” Max said. 

However, despite the distance, SDSU has been the main focus and priority in terms of expansion efforts.  

Not only is SDSU a perfect fit for TutorTok’s target demographic, but Max himself feels connected to the campus, having been there a few times. “I thought SDSU would be a great landing space because of the location and San Diego State being a pretty nice school to go to,” Max said. “So I always thought, ‘yeah I would go there.’”

In order to market to a school from so far away, TutorTok takes advantage of social media.

Snapchat stories are a huge selling point for the company for both potential employees and students in need of class help. However, to post on a class Snapchat story, you must be a student of that school.

The SDSU expansion took off from a mutual connection with Nicole Garabedian. Garabedian transferred to CU Boulder from SDSU before getting hired at TutorTok and helped connect Max with students she met during her time at SDSU. 

This connection gave Max his ‘in’ to post surveys on these stories. These surveys gauged the classes that students needed the most help in, as well as how many students might be interested in tutoring employment.

Max had little trouble finding a great team of tutors and ambassadors for SDSU, with the school currently having a larger team than CSU. However, finding clients has been a big hurdle.

In her first marketing campaign for the company, Krumbhaar created the “First for Free” promo code to entice clientele. As the title suggests, this limited-time promo enabled students to input the code into the site to get their first tutoring session for free. 

Another strategy Krumbhaar has employed is promoting content on Instagram and TikTok using certain keywords. Krumbaar described how she tags phrases such as ‘San Diego Zoo’ to promote location, and words like ‘Lululemon’ to reach the target audience. 

Next on the agenda for the TutorTok team is expansion to Arizona State University and Oregon State University, where Krumbhaar hopes to implement similar strategies as the previous expansions.