Tutoring, part 2 of 3
Building a system around the work
Being good at the work turned out to be different from building a system around it.
Context
At first I did everything myself: finding students, talking to parents, writing the curriculum and materials, teaching, scheduling, collecting payments, and the rest of the operations.
Then referrals kept coming. Within a few months I was teaching close to 80 hours a week. Many of my students lived outside the UK, so my day was set by their time zones: early mornings for one country, late nights for another.
The problem
The business had a simple shape. One hour of my time, one hour of revenue. And somewhere along the way it stopped being a teaching problem and turned into five other problems at once.
What I did
| Problem | What it looked like | What I did |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduling | Students spread across time zones | Moved lessons into fewer, predictable blocks instead of fitting each student wherever they asked |
| Customers | The person paying was usually a parent, not the student | Made keeping parents informed part of the job |
| Curriculum | Thirty students learning from whatever I put together that day | One sequence for everyone, so anyone could read a student’s progress the same way |
| Quality | Someone other than me teaching a lesson | Defined a good lesson clearly enough to explain it to another person, then checked that it happened |
| Hiring | I had run out of hours | Hired three tutors |
The business ran from June 2022 to August 2024. At its peak it brought in about $15,000 a month, several months in a row, and about ₩200 million over the two years, roughly $150,000 at the time. It paid for a large part of my first year of college, tuition and living costs.
Even with three tutors, though, it could only grow as fast as people’s hours. That’s what pushed me to try building a platform.
What I learned
Being good at the work is different from building a system around the work. Teaching was the part I was good at. Scheduling, parents, consistency, quality and hiring were the parts that decided whether the business could grow, and none of them were about math.
It also taught me what drive actually is. It wasn’t the long hours. It was having a goal that mattered to me, owning every part of the problem, and keeping going when nothing and nobody was telling me what to do next.