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Tips, strategies and stories to help you grow your online teaching business.
Everyone knows marketplaces take a commission. It's baked into the small print, mentioned briefly during onboarding, and then quietly ignored while you get on with teaching. The cut feels abstract — until you do the maths. Most tutors on Preply and iTalki have never actually sat down and calculated
Your online tutor profile is probably beige. Not literally. But "Experienced teacher with a passion for languages and 8 years of teaching experience"? That's the profile equivalent of a magnolia wall. Inoffensive, forgettable, and shared by approximately every tutor on the internet. The good news: most
You've been there. You send a student a message on Tuesday morning asking if they want to book a session this week. By Thursday, after eleven back-and-forth messages, three "what about this time instead?" replies, and one deeply confusing conversation about whether they meant 3pm their
The "How Is Your Student Actually Doing?" Problem Here's a question every language tutor eventually asks themselves, usually mid-session: how is this student actually doing? Not "did they finish the homework" doing. Not "they seemed to understand the subjunctive today" doing. But
If you're an independent language tutor, there's a good chance your "teaching setup" is Zoom plus a browser with sixteen tabs open — one for your calendar, one for the invoice you haven't sent yet, one for that vocabulary list you made in
Nobody told you that becoming a language tutor also meant becoming a small business owner. One day you're explaining the subjunctive, the next you're Googling "how to send an invoice" at 11pm while your student's payment sits unpaid in the void. Welcome
Independent tutors spend $66+/month on 6 disconnected apps. Here's what the fragmented stack really costs — and what it feels like to run everything from one platform instead.
I spent 3 years on Preply. Here's what I learned — the commission maths, the control problems, the dependency trap — and what finally made me leave.
Here's the fear that keeps most great tutors stuck on marketplace platforms forever: "If I go independent, where on earth do I find students?" It's a reasonable question. It's also, thankfully, a very solvable one. You don't need a massive
Let's talk about the number you typed into your profile and immediately felt a little sick about. Too high? Too low? Did you Google "how much do tutors charge" and then pick something that felt vaguely inoffensive? Yeah. Most tutors do this. It's not