About
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The Marketplace of Online Go Lessons, or in other words the booking platform for connecting students with teachers for online go lessons, has been launched at https://polgote.com/
Who is this platform intended for?
a) For every player who wants to improve in go as much as possible while investing their time as efficiently as possible.
b) For every player who is interested in earning money by teaching go online.
What sort of functions does the platform offer?
The students can, for example, filter, sort and find go teachers, book lessons directly in teachers' calendars, make the payments, watch recorded videos from their past lessons and post reviews about the teachers after each lesson.
What kind of lessons are there?
There are two kinds of lessons available on the platform: individual lessons and group lessons.
For individual lessons, each teacher can choose their availability (days, time, prices, languages, breaks between the lessons, minimum notice period, preferred go servers, communication tools, etc.).
Based on the options chosen by a teacher, students are able to book lessons with a teacher depending on their availability.
For group lessons, each teacher can decide all the details about the lessons.
Then, each student is able to decide whether they want to sign up or not.
What about the content of the lessons?
It’s entirely up to you – you can tell the teacher what you'd like to learn or you can also let the teacher decide.
Who can become a teacher?
Everybody: polgote doesn't directly hire the teachers. Anyone who wants to advertise themselves as a teacher can do so! The students themselves will verify the teachers by submitting reviews after lessons.
What is the history of building this platform?
In 2018 a professional go player from Poland – Mateusz Surma – started a very basic list of teachers available for go lessons with an opportunity to book the lessons by sending emails.
Then forms for booking lessons were added to the listings.
And after 2.5 years of running the listings, having an online school and analyzing the market of go lessons in general, Mateusz decided to build a professional platform dedicated for booking the online go lessons.
In March-June 2021 a document consisting of 69 A4 pages of guidelines of what should be coded for the platform was written.
In July 2021 a contract with a software house for building the platform was signed.
In October 2021 a crowdfunding campaign for building the platform was launched.
In November 2021 the crowdfunding campaign failed and the costs of building the platform had to be covered from private funds.
In May 2024 the platform was launched.
What will be next?
You will start booking go lessons through polgote.com :-)
I’m very glad that the platform can finally be released to the public, and I invite everyone to go to the site and test it out!
