How FEV Tutor Went from Free Pilots to $50M in ARR

John, Peter, great to be here. It wasn't just me, by the way. I had an amazing co-founder named Anirudh Bahiti, and amazing people who supported us along the way.

Absolutely. As John said, I was fortunate to be one of the co-founders of FEV Tutor. We started in 2009 and built it from zero to $50 million between 2009 and 2022. The reason I did that tells you a bit about what I'm doing next. I come from a family of public educators. My mom is a 45-year educator in New York State; she still works as an executive director of a BOCES supporting 27 high-needs districts. My sister is a high school math teacher in Rochester City Schools, a high-needs urban district, working on a 13-year transformation plan. My grandmother was a science teacher. My mission is to do anything I can to have a positive impact on K-12 education, specifically closing critical equity and achievement gaps. After those years at FEV Tutor, and three years following our acquisition, I wanted to take that experience and pay it forward. So in April 2025 I founded RP Impact Partners. We find mission-aligned edtech organizations that meet a need-to-have opportunity in education, something that can move the needle for student achievement and has high growth potential. We have a portfolio of companies we help accelerate. A lot of it is go-to-market, some is customer success, but all of it is bringing the experiences I had at FEV Tutor and paying them forward at scale, to bring the best products to market and address critical equity and achievement gaps. It's been almost 10 months now, and it's exhilarating to have a positive influence on other organizations, potentially at even greater scale than I could before.

Tutoring has been around forever, largely in the private sector, where families with means can pay for private tutors. That can make the difference between students who have opportunities and those who don't. My co-founder and I found what we hoped was a great opportunity, which turned out to be a red ocean: the B2C tutoring market, an $18 billion market, and the idea of tech-enabled services, hundreds of tutors on a technology platform. This was when online learning was still in its infancy. The public educator in me asked, what if there were a blue ocean? What if we took high-impact tutoring, delivered it online in a more innovative way, in service of public school districts, to close achievement and equity gaps? When we started FEV Tutor, there were no online high-impact tutoring companies designed specifically for K-12. Massive achievement gaps existed, and we were tangentially close to product-market fit, just in the wrong market. So one day I walked into the office and said, Anirudh, I think there's something here to help school districts.

Two things. One, we didn't know any better back then, so we started giving it away for free. I probably wouldn't do that again if I were teaching new Ryan what old Ryan learned. But it gave us efficacy and research data. We found an early customer, a large virtual charter school in Georgia with carryover Title I funding. Ninety percent of their students were free-and-reduced lunch, with massive achievement gaps, and they needed to meet students where they were. They were virtual, we had virtual tutoring, personalized to help bridge gaps through Georgia Milestones. The most important part: they only paid us when we provided the tutoring. That forced us to build a customer success motion that would drive usage.

Absolutely. I'll never forget, we were using relationship door-openers to get at-bats in the market. One of my mentors, Kevin Howell, got us a meeting with the chief academic officer of a roughly 200,000-student district in Florida. I got on a Zoom and gave a pitch with about 15 slides, reading features: you do it online, you chat with a tutor, all of that. I bombed it, and this was his personal connection. I'll never forget what he said: Ryan, in K-12 education you need to sell results, because that's all that matters. It's the why, not the what. You need a research foundation, deep relationships, and references, and all of those are driven by real, measurable, repeatable outcomes. K-12 leaders don't have time for a feature dump. They need to know why this matters to them and what results they can expect.

Schools and districts need skin in the game. If they invest zero dollars, assume they have zero invested in the program. Every founder should believe they bring value and that someone should pay for it. It doesn't need to be $100,000, it could be $20,000 or $10,000. We evolved from pitching PowerPoints to, let's have a 15-minute strategy conversation where I ask about your initiatives, strategies, and goals, because once I understand those, I can attune the product to them. Then there's a plan with expected outcomes and milestones. A paid pilot is everything. Before hiring a bunch of sales reps, invest in someone who knows education. Our third employee, Daniel Hebert, was functionally our third co-founder, an educator by trade who built our customer success and net revenue retention playbook. And set realistic, attainable goals. A lot of companies hinge everything on an unrealistic outcome. Usage is the main indicator of renewals, so hit small milestones, build the relationship, show up differently, visit them. Our greatest growth lever was customer expansion: our top 40 clients let us grow 50% year over year.

Here's what didn't work: hinging everything on an account executive, and sending blast outbound emails across the country hoping something comes back. Not all districts are created equal; there are 13,000 districts and 90,000 schools, so you could spend your life emailing them. We identified an ICP, looked at where we were winning, and looked for the fastest path to a decision. We found pattern-recognition districts between about 5,000 and 40,000 students, applied a Title I filter because we were going after achievement gaps, and could reach a chief academic officer, superintendent, or deputy superintendent without a giant decision matrix. Second, this was before BDRs and SDRs, when it was all called inside sales. That, combined with our conference strategy, let us forecast bookings quarter by quarter and year by year within about 3%.

We were fully organically built, so we focused heavily on relationships. I don't think we told our success story well enough, even up to the end people couldn't believe how many districts used FEV Tutor. At one point 35% of the top 100 districts were our partners. A lot of the brand building came through strategic partnerships with superintendent networks, like ALAS, the Latino superintendents network, and by establishing ourselves at conferences, showing up with the same people, and telling mission-based stories. Alongside that, evidence and research: at our height we had the most evidence in high-impact tutoring, including the first AI-based edtech study with Stanford and the National Student Support Accelerator. Those two things, mission-based stories of district success and selling the outcomes, not just that we did tutoring but what it did for math and ELA achievement, raised our brand profile.

As a founder, breaking off from a K-12 niche into a B2C or corporate market is like starting another company. Focus is key. Invest where you win, and when you see it work, double down, including on your existing clients. If you get distracted, it can have big consequences.

Our original ICP was anybody who would buy, including individual schools. We'd sell to principals to keep the lights on, to any size district, to charter schools. What we found is that it takes as much effort to sell a $10,000 school as a $100,000 pilot at the district level. Principals turn over quickly, and unfortunately district leaders are turning over faster than we'd like too. But when there's buy-in at the district level, multiple schools, and a strategy, you have a much better chance to succeed in the pilot and expand. So we chose to be efficient with limited go-to-market funding: sell value and enter at the district level as often as we could, because that means larger contract values, longer terms, and more buy-in. One caveat: at the largest districts, the top 50 or 100, there's decentralized purchasing, Dallas, LA, New York, so you may still need an account-based motion selling school by school to get a foothold. But redefining and evolving that ICP, spending our time to win $100,000 contracts instead of $10,000 ones, really accelerated growth and helped us serve more students.

I'd argue you should do both at the same time. There's no reason you can't sell to individual schools and smaller districts simultaneously and see what happens, because not every product has the same ICP.

This is a strategy I've used for a long time. I'd find superintendent leadership academies for emerging superintendents, because I wanted up-and-coming K-12 leaders. Dr. Alex Marrero of Denver Public Schools once led a small district in New York; that's where I met him. When you meet innovators who want to change education, you can see it. Green flag one: they lean into the conversation and engage meaningfully. It's not a PowerPoint, it's a strategic conversation. Green flag two: they're listening and quickly come up with two or three ways they could use it. Green flag three: they want to get other people in the room. In K-12 you often have a two-minute clock, so you have to engage them and read those flags, and you can move quickly if you're talking to the right people.

Well said, Peter. And ones willing to take some risks for students. The urgency is only to move the needle on student outcomes. Achievement and equity gaps have existed in K-12 for 200 years; the pandemic didn't create them, it exacerbated them. When you and the leader share that mission and speak the same language, you can speed up a bias-toward-action conversation. Enter in a way that has common, measurable goals, where you can succeed or fail quickly.

Companies spend too much time thinking about pricing models. Bring one to market, see how it goes, and evolve it. We had human beings tutoring, so we asked how tutoring is priced, and in B2C it's hourly. We started at $25 an hour, then sold banks of hours, say 1,000 hours for $25,000. No implementation or activation fee, even though we did a ton of back-end work customizing curriculum and integrating with single sign-on, Clever, ClassLink, and benchmark assessments. And it was pay-as-you-go, so we only got paid when tutoring happened. That kept us healthy but didn't keep districts honest, because a contract that doesn't move money loses the investment in the product. The rollover hours wreaked havoc on our books, there was no clean way to recognize revenue, and it was a challenge for our acquirers in 2022 because it was a services model, not ARR. But we learned: districts wanted flexibility, integrations, and a purchase order for a set amount. When Alpine Investors acquired us in 2022, they applied a subscription flip: an academic-year subscription, July through June, an up-to bank of sessions priced at $36 a session, with a 10 to 20% design-and-delivery fee, which is industry standard, and no rollover hours. If we'd had more confidence earlier, we'd have charged the implementation fee districts are used to. That took us from 2009 to 2025 to fully learn.

Mentors taught me that we don't have funding for this is code for we don't need it, we don't want it, we don't understand it, we don't think it'll get an ROI, or we need more information. Dr. Rudy Crew, former chancellor of the New York City DOE and superintendent of Miami-Dade, who's on our strategic board at RP Impact Partners, would say: Ryan, as a superintendent, if I understood the product would move the needle on a priority, I could find any money I wanted. With younger companies and undertrained account executives, what comes back is there's no money, and leadership frames it as a headwind. That headwind is real coming out of ESSER, but a lot of companies never operated outside the ESSER window. ESSER is like 2% mortgage rates: it existed, but it's an unreal reality. For the long game, there are sustainable budgets for products that demonstrate an ROI on student outcomes or priorities. So no money is often a polite way for K-12 leaders to say, I'm just not seeing it. Educators are nice people; they won't tell you no, so you spend all this time and can't get to a no.

Where the rubber meets the road in edtech is adoption at the school level. Selling at the district level is only as good as schools buying in and the product actually being used. At our height we were tutoring close to 2,000 students a day in Clark County at 18 Title I middle schools that had no certified math teachers at the start of the year. Think about teacher shortages: your highest-need schools with no certified math teachers, kids ending up in the gym, students already behind grade level. After one or two weeks of online tutoring, we'd send an update, we tutored 200 kids last week, and people couldn't believe it. To us it was just what we were hired to do. But it was a flag that this was the right product at the right time: stakeholders were buying in, using it, and there was data to support it. And if they couldn't believe tutoring was even happening, imagine when we showed them it was driving NWEA MAP growth for their Tier 2 students. Sometimes you have to show people the future.

All of it. When you start a company you see everything, you fail forward, and hopefully you fix it quickly. The hardest part early was finding enough of the right people to tell our story to. As we got bigger, scaling human capital broke next: keeping tutoring quality high across time zones and millions of sessions, which meant real processes and sometimes giving students new tutors. Then curriculum and instruction, keeping it fresh and scaling it across every state. At our height we hit technology limitations; some tech debt is normal when you build for 100 kids and end up serving millions. And customer success was the trailing piece, because sales moves faster than customer success can catch up, so the question becomes where you get that human capital and how you make training repeatable. Most important is a bias toward action and a solutions-oriented mindset, because in high-growth companies things go wrong early and often. Hire for attributes, and hire people you want in the trenches with you, who'll level up their minds for a common goal and get their hands dirty.

Number one, the founder should always be selling, out in the field networking, because that's where you'll find hires two through five, get your brand out, have conversations, and learn. Second, a sales-forward customer success person. Daniel Hebert was an educator by trade with a growth mindset, so he could help develop, implement, and sell the product. Customers don't care if you have a C-level team; they care that the product works and you show up. Then some conference motion, which could be fractional, maybe a fractional marketer or a BDR to bring in leads. So sales, some customer success bandwidth, then maybe an operator. I'd be careful about hires four and five; I've seen founders get over their skis hiring full-time leaders. Less is more until you prove it and put money back in. You'd rather be healthy and growing than hit a runway and have to pump the brakes.

Two ends of the spectrum. One is over-indexing on product, hiring a bunch of product people and a CTO too early. You can have the best product in the world, but if you can't sell it or articulate the value, it's only as good as the product itself. The other is hiring a bunch of AEs and sales reps to solve bookings, often so the founder doesn't have to sell. And getting caught up in titles: I need a CRO, a CMO, a CTO. My title at FEV Tutor was vice president, even though I was a co-founder running all of go-to-market. Building a C-suite too early, or hiring five AEs off a spreadsheet with no enablement, messaging, or strategy, is just throwing people at the wall. Those are the two extremes I see.

One thing a mentor shared about starting a business: it's two-thirds relationships and one-third belief, and you can't have one without the other. You can have all the relationships in the world, but without belief you won't succeed, and unlimited belief without relationships won't get you there either. So bet on yourself, believe in what you're capable of, and outwork people. Eighty percent of life is showing up. These might sound like clichés, but the older I get, the more I believe every bit of it. Go all in, give it your greatest focus and effort, and if you can combine relationships with belief, you've got a shot.