2021 PolyTripper Changes

Happy New Year!

Mohan and Wanda, PolyTripper co-founders

PolyTripper was born last year and is now over nine months old. We've had a very promising start and are grateful to the teachers and students who've made the platform a success. Thank you so much.

In a world becoming increasingly saturated with language learning platforms, we already feel like we stand out as the platform which treats our teachers the best:

We take less in commissions from our teachers than our competitors.
We don't exploit teachers by doing things that we feel are silly, like making them give their first lesson to each new student for free.

We also treat our students and teachers better by providing outstanding customer service. At PolyTripper, you're never a number and we're sure that any student or teacher who has reached out to us can attest to the level of personal care we give each and every one of you.

In pondering how we can make PolyTripper an even better platform in 2021, we took stock of our own personal values and goals as two polyglots who love languages, the teachers who teach them and the students who learn them:

We are more interested in constantly finding ways to have teachers keep more of their money than lining the pockets of Facebook and Google with paid advertising dollars that are siphoned away from our teachers' earnings.
We want to remove the technological burden of having an online language teacher presence while being so easy-to-use and inexpensive, that a teacher would be happy to permanently use our services and not constantly think of how they can strike out on their own.
We want to value long-term loyalty and commitment and avoid opportunistic relationships.

To this end, we are making the following changes to PolyTripper to better serve and reward our teachers in a way that's consistent with the goals and values above.

2021 Changes

10% → 5%

We are going to reduce the commission we take from teachers from 10% to 5%*. This is absolutely unheard of in our industry and will immediately slash our profits by 50%, but is consistent with our founding goals of loving our teachers and not exploiting them, and will also challenge us to ruthlessly systematize and automate everything we can. This means that for every lesson taught, teachers get to keep 95% of their earnings (minus payment processor fees*), while PolyTripper will retain only 5%.

This change will go into effect immediately and will count for all lessons that are confirmed after this date. If lessons are part of a package, it will count for all package lessons that have not been confirmed yet. The change will not count for lessons that have been confirmed prior to this date.

This is an audacious experiment and we hope that you forgive and understand if in the future, we need to revert to a higher commissions structure.

Referral Program

Because of the amazing reduction in commissions from 10% to 5%, we will have to end our referral program. Your referral links will no longer work starting today. However, we will honor all referrals that are currently pending for the next 6 months. If your pending referrals comply with our rules (your referred students has to buy a minimum of $50 of credits and take at least one lesson with you), you will still receive the $20 referral fee. On July 1st, 2021, we will close the referral program completely, and no longer honor the remaining pending referrals.

Active Teachers

We would like our PolyTripper teacher search to only contain teachers who are active, committed and ready to teach. To help assure this, you will start receiving notices if you have not logged into our PolyTripper website for more than one month. When you receive a notice and want to continue being a part of our PolyTripper teacher community, all you need to do is log into our site within 5 days, to let us know that you are still active and willing to teach. Teachers that do not log in will be deactivated. The reason for this is because we want to value and show our active and committed teachers.

We hope you are as excited about our changes as we are. If you have any comments or questions, please don't hesitate to Contact Us.

* Please note that the 5% does not include fees imputed by payment processors (like Payoneer or PayPal), which PolyTripper has no control over and which will be charged at the moment credits are transferred to your personal account.