Tech trailblazer Timothy Yu matches students with questions to professionals who can answer them, without ever needing to meet face-to-face.

Did personal experience factor into the birth of your start-up, Snapask?
Yes, definitely. When I was in college, I used to spend a lot of my time tutoring students, so it was part of daily life to travel door-to-door between home tutoring sessions. Around the same time, I also began creating teaching videos and posting them on Facebook. I initially thought to ask people to pay to get this content, but quickly realised that there was no demand for such things. Then, in the comments section, I would often be asked specific questions, so I began charging to answer them instead. That’s pretty much what sparked the idea for Snapask. Funnily enough, it was my first company as well as my first job, and I started it when I was just a second-year student [at the University of Hong Kong].

What exactly is Snapask?
The initial idea of Snapask was to connect students who need help with someone who is qualified, vetted and capable of answering questions that pop up during their day-to-day studies. It’s almost like Uber for tutoring. Students take a photo of their problem, and we automatically connect them digitally with a qualified tutor within 30 seconds, and they can then have a one-on-one discussion about it. It’s an app that supports students whenever they need an answer.

We started in Hong Kong in 2015, and we’ve accumulated about 4.5 million students on the platform. Today, we’re in nine different markets, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other Southeast Asian countries. We didn’t want to give our clients the additional stress of trying to figure out if they can afford to ask that next question, so they pay a monthly fee, and it’s pretty much like a buffet where they can reach out to any number of tutors and have unlimited access to our educational video library.

The idea is to make our platform attractive not only to the students, but also to the parents who are footing the bill. It’s kind of like online shopping in a way, because once you experience the convenience and efficiency of this kind of home learning, especially when compared to travelling to a tutorial centre or calling a teacher to your home once or twice a week, then you realise it’s a better way to get what you need.

“It’s pretty much like a buffet where [students] can reach out to any number of tutors and have unlimited access to our educational video library”

How does Snapask supplement the traditional education system?
In fact, there are a lot of inefficiencies in the education system today, since even after students have spent an entire day at school, they need to follow it up with evenings at tutorial centres and such for additional exam preparation. Most of them may not have access to a private tutor, and they can’t wait around for a day to go back and ask the teacher. So, Snapask steps into that gap by always connecting them to someone who can help.

At the same time, we are also creating a lot of high-quality supplemental content on a wide range of topics. It’s similar to MasterClass [the US-based online education subscription platform]. We build bite-sized topic-specific videos. For example, if a student is struggling with trigonometry, they can take a look at that to gain a better grasp of the subject matter. We don’t just post videos of teachers with a whiteboard; we try to approach it in a more effective way.

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How do you vet your tutors?
Our teachers are all graduates from top universities – that’s a must. They first have to submit their university qualifications and transcripts, and we verify that their identities are authentic. At the end of the day, we are working with a lot of underage students, so their safety and security is the number one concern for us.

In addition, our tutors not only have a very high achievement profile, but backed by artificial intelligence machine learning they also understand how well they are serving our students via user ratings, platform ratings, as well as tutor-to-tutor ratings. This ensures only the good ones remain.

What projects do you have lined up this year?
As we have a lot of virtual learning on our platform, our first priority is to enable personalisation in learning. Right now, we’re collecting a lot of data on how students are learning, and we are trying to apply AI technology to suggest personalised recommendations to ensure each individual learn in the most efficient fashion.

Then, we’re strongly pushing our development of proprietary teaching videos. In fact, I am personally creating some of the content as the teacher – specifically in mathematics – so I’ll be making roughly 180 online videos this year. There’s also a new partnership coming up with a local TV channel, and we’ll be launching our programmes on air through that platform as well.

How has the pandemic affected your business?
When Covid hit Hong Kong in February 2020, we were about to close a round of fundraising, so many investors were calling in to see how we would deal with it. At the same time, it was announced that schools would be closed indefinitely, so we were in a major state of flux. Thankfully, we managed to handle the situation by being as transparent as possible, and reassuring investors that with the shutdown, home learning would become the only educational option, rather than an alternative as it had been in the past.

In the first couple of months, we did experience a dip as students went on ‘holiday’, but by summertime, some schools had reopened in Hong Kong and we saw traffic pick back up. Of course, in some of our markets Covid hadn’t yet had a major impact, so things pretty much were running as usual.

What do you like to do during your downtime?
To be honest, between running Snapask and creating teaching videos, I don’t have much time left over. That said, right behind my desk in my office, there’s a small room which is almost like a greenhouse because I like to do gardening. In particular, I plant Pachypodium gracilius, which is a super exotic-looking root-like plant native to Madagascar. I personally find a lot of parallels between gardening and education, because some plants can take 10 years to mature, and likewise, learning can be a decades-long process.

“I find parallels between gardening and education, because some plants can take 10 years to mature, and likewise, learning can be a decades-long process”

If you were stuck on a desert island, what is the one thing you’d need to bring with you?
I’d definitely need to bring some paper or a notebook to jot down my thoughts. I believe ideas can spark at any moment, so it’s important to be able to write them down when it happens.

Finally, tell us something most people don’t know about you.
There was a time in college when I seriously considered becoming a chef. In my mind, I was torn between pursuing a culinary or majoring in mathematics. Ultimately, as an Asian child, there are always some expectations and I felt like mathematics was the more responsible option.

Thank you.

 

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Interview: Tenzing Thondup Photos: Jack Law Art Direction: Jhoshwa Ledesma Videographer: Kes Lei Venue: Roche Bobois Showroom, Horizon Plaza