FindAtutor.ca turns 10 years old!

Back in early 2003, I was feeling frustrated about advertising my tutoring services. A couple years earlier I helped a tutoring friend by driving her around to all the local high schools to put posters up. She put posters and business cards everywhere she could to get her business going. Within a year, she had so many phone calls coming in that she stopped answering her phone altogether. Although the posters likely were taken down, her name had been added to so many lists that no one bothered to update to make current, that she had absolutely no control over her contact information.

When I started tutoring myself, I decided to take the cautious route, and only put posters and give out my contact information on a very limited basis. By this time most places required a criminal record check to be submitted. Fair enough, but being a stay at home mom with a toddler, making a trip to the RCMP station to fill in a form and wait while they processed it was not easy. The cost was not insignificant either, it cost $50 to do, however they would send it out to multiple people as long as all the information was filled in at the time the forms were submitted.

At that time, criminal record checks were NOT given to the applicant, it would only be sent directly to the person it was to go to. They needed very specific information, such as the name, organization, address and contact phone number. As I was only told by a school admin staff that I needed a criminal record check, I didn't gather all this information. I started making phone calls back to the school, and they didn't know who should receive the criminal record check. Head of the math department? Head of the Counselling department? The principal? I'd leave messages, and no one would call back. Finally a teacher would say, “just put down my name and I'll make sure it gets to the correct person”, then they wouldn't be sure of the school's address. When the criminal record check was finally on it's way, I'd make a follow up call, and they'd remember receiving it, but somehow misplaced it. I think it took me almost a whole year to get posters up in only 2 high schools!

I remember standing in the kitchen one evening in early 2003 with James saying, “There has to be a better way than this! What there needs to be is a website!” James looked at me and said “We can do that!” Here we are, 10 years later still going strong.

The date of that conversation was never recorded. In fact, I didn't record many dates at all in the beginning days of findAtutor.ca. Fortunately technology records many of these things. Thanks to the Wayback Machine (also known as the Internet Archive) I was able to see that findAtutor.ca had full capabilities for both tutors to sign up with listings, and for anyone to do searches, starting on August 2nd, 2003.

The web sure was different back then. The term Web 2.0 was only just surfacing, early CMS (content management systems) were not well developed, and forget about smart phones or popular social media as we know it. We started everything from scratch ourselves, and started very simple, and built things up over the years. We now are planning for the future, trying to stay caught up with the evolving nature of how people interact with each other through technology.

There are a few tutors that have had listings on findAtutor.ca for the past 10 years. I thank all my customers from over the past decade. It's all of you that keeps me doing what I do, it'll be interesting to see what the next decade has to bring!