Academics Work — Project Tracking on Airtable

Challenge

Academics work is an educational service provider for university students. The company works by matching university students with professionals and teachers for the needs of their thesis and annual university projects. 

The company receives the thesis' or projects' requirements from each student, while at the same time the project is offered for bidding to platform’s engaged tutors. Tutors participate in the bidding process, giving their price for the project and based on fields like tutor's experience, reviews, project deadline and tutor availability, the administrators of the platform assign the project to the best suited professional to consult the student. Every single order coming from a student counts as a project which may take more than 6 months to be completed while others may be one week projects. 

Requirements

Main business requirement is the bidding process per project from tutors.

• Every project is visible for bidding to all tutors, while personal notifications goes only to studying domain tutors based on their own expertise
• Admin can manage the bidding offers per project and choose the best for the assignment
• After the project assignment, the tutor has access in the details of the project and is able to upload documents
• The admin can keep track of the deadlines and uploads for every project.
• Admin can track for every project the uploads, and deadlines‍
• Admin required also payment tracking for each project and cost tracking for tutors
• Tutors must not have access to to other tutor's data, projects and further information.

Solution

As every startup on the ground, academics was a low budget idea where founders didn't want to invest money for the development of a customized platform that usually requires coding from software engineering agencies. They needed an MVP to test their market and capitalize their idea with the minimum possible cost.

We used Airtable as the main system where all project submissions come in and added the following structure: 

1. Orders table to store all projects
2. Tutor table where admin adds tutors and professional teammates
3. Bidding offers where all bidding offers comes for each project 
4. Project tracking table -> where admin can track each project’s data 

Due to the data privacy and budget limitation we didn’t want to give full access to the admin’s systems while tutors should be able to upload their deliveries and make their own updates on their project. So we created personal syncing views in personal bases so every tutor has a personal system to upload documents and performs updates without having access to other tutor data. 

To send updates from tutors’ bases to Admin’s base we used make and we integrated the two sides. 

The whole system developed in Airtable free plan for the 6 months when the growth rate needed to be upgraded to paid plan only for the admin’s account. All tutor’s systems remain on free plan keeping costs low and the business continues growing. 

No code applications

1. Airtable -> Data base & Interfaces
2. Make -> Automate workflow
3. Slack -> User notifications

Business Achievements

• 0$/ month  system and operational cost for first 6 months
• 50$/ month system and operational cost after 6 months
• Annual turnover + 50.000$ 
• Monthly average projects: 120
• Engaged tutors: 25