Sino Tutor (Pty) Ltd, 2025
Sino Tutor
Sino Tutor came to me with a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and four hundred learners. The brief was simple to say and hard to do: turn a manual matching business into a product that runs itself on a Sunday night.
- Client
- Sino Tutor (Pty) Ltd
- Year
- 2025
- Discipline
- Web platform
- Duration
- 14 weeks
- Role
- Product design, Frontend, Backend, Deployment
- Live
- Visit site
- 3.4k
- Sessions booked in year one
- 92%
- Bookings completed without support
- 1.1s
- Largest contentful paint
- 0
- Manual payouts remaining
Matching was done by hand. Every booking needed three messages, a calendar check and a manual EFT. Growth was capped by how many hours the founders could personally give, and the error rate rose with every new tutor.
How the work was actually done.
Three decisions that shaped the outcome more than anything else on the project.
- 01
Model the business before the interface
We spent the first fortnight mapping every state a booking can be in: requested, matched, confirmed, delivered, disputed, settled. Getting that model right meant the UI could stay almost boringly simple.
- 02
Make the marketplace two-sided from day one
Tutors got a real dashboard, not an afterthought: availability, earnings, learner history, and a payout ledger they could reconcile themselves. Trust on the supply side is what keeps a marketplace alive.
- 03
Automate money last, and carefully
Payments went live only once the booking lifecycle was stable. Stripe Connect handles split payouts, with a seven-day hold and an escalation path for disputes.
Sino Tutor now runs bookings end to end without a human in the loop. The founders moved from operating the business to growing it, and tutor onboarding dropped from a two-day back-and-forth to a fifteen-minute self-serve flow.
Angel understood the business before he wrote a line of code. We got a product that matches how we actually work, not how software thinks we should.
Building something like Sino Tutor?
Tell me where you are: an idea, a half-finished build, or a product that has outgrown its foundations. The first conversation is free and usually clarifies more than it costs.
- info@angelmaile.com
- Phone
- +27 (0) 71 000 0000
- Studio
- Studio 04, Bree Street, Cape Town
- Hours
- Mon – Fri, 08:30 – 17:30 · SAST (UTC+2)
Replies within one business day. Cape Town, South Africa, SAST (UTC+2).