Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Juan Rodriguez. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Juan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

When Covid-19 hit Houston, and we were all switched to the online environment, I started noticing how online classes were a struggle and decreased opportunities for students to complete community service hours and help the community. Meanwhile, elementary and middle school students showed a high level of distraction in classes and decreased material retention. I started brainstorming how to put both cases together and help the community. The idea was a private tutoring platform for my High School where we would offer multiple classes with free access to any elementary and middle school student. In contrast, High school students earned community service hours and improved their teaching skills. On top of that, I identified that parents wanted information regarding the children’s progress, so we decided to include a parent profile that would get reports and access to their children’s tutors and lessons.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I got involved in the education arena with the project; I knew from a young age I wanted to create something that would help my community. In addition, my main passion is developing websites/apps to solve problems worldwide or help simplify them. We solved the gap between online learning and in-person learning. The transition created a lack of understanding in certain subjects for students who, in upcoming years, will be more propensity to have problems on a particular issue due to the missing material from previous years. On the other side, we provided High school students the opportunity to earn community service hours online (since most community service hour organizations were closed), and we gave parents control and tracked their children’s activity on our platform. I am proud of all the students and families we were able to help through our platform; even though we wanted a formal tutoring service, we created summer camps for students to expand their interactive skills and socialization with other students.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Our team was from a close group of friends; we experienced different arguments, late nights, and topics of interest when we worked on the project. The primary key to our success was the delegation of tasks and the relevance I gave each member to choose their position depending on their interests. We never assigned a job to any member they felt uncomfortable doing. In addition, our time management, schedule, and milestones were specific and executed with the support of great mentors. Our team always sought help from experienced mentors who could provide us with scenarios and detailed feedback. Furthermore, maintaining the motivation and projecting the vision daily to my teammates was an essential task I did every day to keep everyone on track and informed about where we were heading with the project and how we would benefit the students and families at our high school.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Our primary source of attraction was our early partnership with our High school, which allowed us to connect with many tutors from day 1 of announcing our project. In terms of elementary and middle schools, we talked to the principals, and they gave us meetings to present our project and onboard parents to the program mentioning our unique features. We had a significant flow of customers due to the privacy of all the processes being done through our school without allowing any alternative users from other schools.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/studentpower21/?hl=en
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/75524583/admin/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM6-Vd9N3meVImc037EIZzg

Image Credits
Marcos Odelap and Emiliano Lovato are in the picture of 3 males. The Zoom picture was created by Marcos Odelap Marcos Odelap created the Summer Camp schedule