Pure hustle
HeyTutor wasn't born as HeyTutor. It started as Beverly Hills Academics, a tutoring company my cofounder Ryan Neman and I started at 19 to serve the local Beverly Hills community.
The early days were pure hustle. We would sneak out at 1AM, and I would stand on Ryan's shoulders to zip tie huge banners high on the local middle school's fence, high enough that it took the janitors a while to get them down. A few hours in the morning was all we needed to land a couple of customers. Our first client: we paid the tutor $21 an hour and charged $22. One dollar an hour, and we felt on top of the world. This was before CRMs, so marketing meant getting creative. We paid kids twenty bucks for school directories, then woke up early and emailed every parent, one by one. Those were the days.
Our first office.
Somewhere in there, once we had a little traction, Ryan's grandfather stepped in with a $50K loan. Not when we started. He waited until we had something real, then backed us. He was the only one who believed in us at that age, and he did it simply because he wanted to help. I will never forget that.
After that first office, we ran the company out of our houses and apartments for years. I would wake up to employees answering phones in the living room. The first three years, the company lost money. We kept it alive with side jobs. Mine were waiting tables and hauling luggage as a bellboy. Tips paid my bills so the company didn't have to.
When we decided to expand beyond Beverly Hills, the name came with us. Beverly Hills Academics became Premier Tutoring, built to work across more cities. Around this time we bought a smart car, wrapped it in marketing, and parked it on busy streets all over Los Angeles. It got towed constantly, so Ryan and I decided the fix was for me to just drive it. It became my main form of transportation. For the record, this strategy sucks. I think it brought us two or three clients over an entire year.
The Premier Tutoring smart car.
The real edge came from somewhere less visible. We found oDesk, the site that later became Upwork, and were hiring overseas developers before most people knew that was a thing. Because of it, we were always ahead of the game on tech. We built our own internal CRM that matched every new client to tutors by preference and radius. A client would sign up, the system would blast notifications to qualified tutors nearby, they would apply, and we clicked one approve button to connect them. That sounds simple today. Back then it was cutting edge, and it's what let us scale into new cities and states. We recruited tutors any way we could, including sneaking onto college campuses with a massive booth setup and signing people up until security kicked us out.
Recruiting tutors on a college campus.
Becoming HeyTutor
As we grew, Ryan and I kept coming back to the same thought: we had to be more than a tutoring agency. The answer was a tutoring marketplace, and the marketplace needed a name. We found it on a phone call. We lived in the same two story apartment, Ryan downstairs, me upstairs, and we still called each other. His dog Fluffy kept barking at my leg, and I said "hey Fluffy!" to quiet him down. Then it hit me. "Ryan, I got it. HeyTutor." The company is named after Ryan's dog.
The HeyTutor office.
The company was everything to me, and the employees were friends. We went out together and celebrated together. It's also where I met Patrick McClure, one of the hardest working and most disciplined people I've ever known, and a great friend to this day. When the real money showed up, things naturally became more corporate. And the bigger we got, the bigger the swings. The ups: big clients, new cities, more revenue. The downs: diminishing returns, bottlenecks everywhere we tried to scale, lawsuits, and more.
Early team, out in our HeyTutor caps.
And it grew
That's when we raised our first $1M from Kevin O'Connor and ScOp Venture Capital (that story has its own page). As a marketplace, HeyTutor wasn't a solid business fundamentally. Customer acquisition costs in tutoring are absurd, and customers are hard to satisfy. After the raise it really showed, because the burn amplified everything. Revenues grew, and the unit economics got worse.
It got to the point where we had to lean out and rethink, and that's when we came across pitching school districts. From there the company grew exponentially. We were winning contracts left and right, raised another $1.5M from ScOp, and grew the team like crazy to handle fulfillment. We reached over 200 employees in Los Angeles and over 2,000 tutors and educators working with students. The company generated over $200M in tutoring revenues, contracted with some of the largest school districts in the nation, and became one of the leading providers of high dosage tutoring for public schools in the country.
In 2026, HeyTutor was acquired by ESS, the largest education staffing company in the country, in a strategic acquisition backed by The Vistria Group.
Last updated September 1, 2026