## Founder Snapshot Twelve years of secondary English teaching and three years running an after-school group means this founder already does the hard part — holding a room of teenagers to a standard and converting that into grades parents can see. The scarce asset is not the teaching; it is the 200-parent WhatsApp group, which is a warm distribution channel most tutors spend two years building. The binding constraint is 10 hours a week against a £1,200 monthly target, which mathematically rules out any model priced per hour of the founder's undivided attention at anything under roughly £30 an hour. **Assumptions I am working from and continuing on:** the founder is still in full-time teaching employment (so evenings and Sundays are genuine, and the school contract needs checking for outside-work clauses), delivery is online by default given the laptop and microphone, and the six-month clock runs from now, 31 July 2026, to end of January 2027 — which lands the whole build inside the autumn term, the strongest selling window in the English tutoring year. **Sharpest advantage:** QTS plus 200 local parents who already know the founder's name — trust and distribution solved on day one. **Hardest limit:** 10 hours a week caps delivery at roughly 12 taught student-hours after prep and admin, so any one-to-one model hits its ceiling before it hits the goal. **Realistic ceiling:** £1,500–£2,000 a month gross in term time, falling sharply from late May when exams end. --- ## Opportunity Table | Idea | Model | Buyer | Budget Fit | Skill Fit | Speed | Solo Viability | Total | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | **Grade 9 Essay Lab** | Productised group service, six-week paid block | Parents of Year 10–11 students sitting GCSE English Literature | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4 | **19** | | **Mock-to-Grade Retainer** | Monthly 1:1 retainer | Parents of Year 11 students who missed target grade in the November mock | 5 | 5 | 5 | 2 | **17** | | **Set Text Essay Vault** | Digital product, evergreen download | Self-directed Year 10–11 students and price-sensitive parents nationally | 5 | 4 | 3 | 5 | **17** | | **The Sunday Marking Club** | Recurring membership subscription | Parents of Year 7–9 students worried about writing before GCSE choices | 5 | 4 | 4 | 3 | **16** | | **Saturday English School** | In-person venue-based club | Local Manchester parents wanting supervised in-person study | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | **11** | --- ## What Each Idea Actually Is ### Grade 9 Essay Lab **The offer:** A six-week online small-group intensive, maximum six students, 75 minutes weekly, teaching one exam-board essay structure applied across the three commonest set texts, with one marked essay returned per student per fortnight, sold as a single upfront block. **Who pays and why now:** Parents of Year 10 and 11 students entering the autumn term with a mock in November — they are buying a visible grade movement between two mocks, and the window is open from late August. **Your edge:** QTS and twelve years of marking to the actual assessment objectives means the founder can say what an examiner rewards, which no undergraduate tutor on a marketplace can credibly claim. **Flags:** register as a sole trader with HMRC; obtain an enhanced DBS through an umbrella body since self-employed individuals cannot apply directly; write a one-page safeguarding and online-conduct policy before the first session; do not teach current pupils from your own school without written school permission. ### Mock-to-Grade Retainer **The offer:** Four one-to-one sessions a month at a fixed monthly fee, sold as a grade-recovery programme with a written diagnostic of the student's mock paper up front rather than as loose hourly tutoring. **Who pays and why now:** Parents whose child underperformed in a November mock — the highest-urgency, lowest-price-resistance buyer in the whole education calendar. **Your edge:** The ability to read a marked mock paper and name the specific assessment objective losing the marks, which converts a worried parent in one conversation. ### Set Text Essay Vault **The offer:** A £24 downloadable pack per set text — essay skeletons, quotation grids organised by theme, model paragraph frames and a self-marking checklist — sold on Payhip or Gumroad with no delivery time after creation. **Who pays and why now:** Parents nationally who will not pay £180 for tutoring but will pay £24 in the fortnight before a mock; peaks in November, March and May. **Your edge:** Twelve years of knowing exactly where students lose marks on these specific texts, turned into artefacts that take one Sunday each to build. **Flag:** do not reproduce extracts from the set texts or from past papers — both are copyrighted; write original frames and paraphrase, and check the exam board's copyright terms before publishing anything derived from their materials. ### The Sunday Marking Club **The offer:** £19 a month for a weekly writing task with a rubric-marked return inside 72 hours, plus a monthly recorded 20-minute teaching video, delivered by email and a private group. **Who pays and why now:** Parents of Year 7–9 students who feel writing is slipping but cannot justify tutoring costs at that stage. **Your edge:** Marking is the thing parents cannot do and the thing this founder does faster than anyone else in the market. **Weakness that produced the score:** marking scales linearly with members, so 60 members consumes the entire 10 hours and the revenue stalls at roughly £1,140. ### Saturday English School **The offer:** A weekly in-person two-hour session in a hired Manchester community hall for 12–15 local students across year groups. **Who pays and why now:** Local parents who prefer their child out of the house and off a screen. **Your edge:** The WhatsApp group is geographically concentrated, so filling a local room is plausible. **Flags:** public liability insurance, venue hire deposit, enhanced DBS, first aid provision, and registration considerations if sessions become long or frequent enough to constitute childcare — check Ofsted's rules on out-of-school settings before committing to any booking. Venue and insurance alone consume most of the £500 before a single parent has paid, and travel plus setup pushes a two-hour session past four hours of the founder's week. --- ## Deliberately Rejected | Direction | The constraint it breaks | |---|---| | Recruiting other tutors and taking a margin as an agency | Requires managing, vetting and quality-controlling other adults, which is a team business, and the recruitment and complaint-handling alone exceeds 10 hours a week before any teaching happens. | | An ad-funded YouTube or TikTok revision channel using the microphone | Advertising and sponsorship revenue on a channel started from zero will not produce meaningful income inside the six-month deadline, so it fails the 31 January 2027 date outright. | | Building a tutoring booking platform or app | Even the cheapest developer-built product consumes the entire £500 before launch and leaves nothing for customer acquisition, and no-code assembly plus maintenance eats the 10 hours that should be spent teaching. | --- ## Recommended Move ### Grade 9 Essay Lab **The offer:** *The Essay Lab — six weeks to a better English Literature grade.* Six students maximum, 75 minutes every Tuesday at 6.30pm or Sunday at 5pm, one full essay marked against the assessment objectives per student per fortnight, and a one-page written progress note to the parent at week three and week six. **The price:** £180 per student per six-week block, paid upfront by Stripe link. Two blocks run concurrently on two different evenings. **The first buyer to approach:** The parents inside the existing WhatsApp group whose children are entering Year 11 in September 2026 and who have a November mock in the diary — approached individually by voice note, not by a group broadcast. | Metric | Figure | |---|---| | Price point | £180 per student per six-week block (£30 per 75-minute session) | | Revenue per session delivered, full group | £180 | | Sessions delivered per week | 2 | | Weekly gross at full capacity | £360 | | Monthly gross at full capacity (4.33 weeks) | £1,559 | | Running costs per month | Approx. £55 (video conferencing, Stripe fees, materials) | | Monthly net at full capacity | Approx. £1,504 | | Sales needed to clear £1,200 | 10 of 12 seats held (10 seats ≈ £1,299 gross; 9 seats ≈ £1,169, short of goal) | | Weekly hours consumed at full capacity | Approx. 9 (2.5 live, 2.5 prep, 2 marking, 2 admin and sales) | | Deadline verdict | **Reachable by 31 January 2027**, with roughly £300 of monthly headroom. It requires selling and holding ten of twelve seats from mid-September. | The honest caveat: this reaches £1,200 comfortably during the autumn and spring terms and collapses from late May 2027 when Year 11 leaves. The number that is durable across a full twelve months, without a second product layered in, is closer to £850 a month averaged. The Set Text Essay Vault exists in this plan as the answer to that summer gap, not as a first move. --- ## Validate Before You Build **1. Price the market you are actually in.** Open Tutorful and MyTutor, filter to GCSE English Literature tutors within Manchester, and record the advertised hourly rate of the ten tutors who state QTS. Then search Google for the exact phrase *"GCSE English tutor Manchester"* and note what the top five paid and organic results charge. **This returns a no if** qualified-teacher rates sit at or below £20 an hour, because a £30-per-seat group price then looks expensive rather than like a bargain relative to one-to-one. **2. Confirm the pain is being spoken aloud.** Open the Mumsnet Secondary Education board, the r/GCSE and r/AskUK subreddits, and two Manchester parenting Facebook groups, and search within each for *"English Literature grade"* and *"English tutor"*. Read the last twenty threads. **This returns a no if** parents are asking overwhelmingly about maths and science and English barely appears — a real possibility, since English is often the subject parents assume will sort itself out. **3. Poll the asset you already own.** Post one WhatsApp poll to the 200-parent group with two options: *"My child is in Year 10 or 11 and English Literature is a worry"* and *"Not relevant to us"*. Nothing else, no pitch. **This returns a no if** fewer than 15 parents select the first option, because the group is then too junior or too diffuse to launch from and you need a second acquisition channel before you build anything. **4. Ask eight parents the grade question directly.** Send an individual voice note to eight parents from the poll asking exactly this: *"What did your child get in their last English Literature assessment, and what grade do they need? If I ran a six-week small group that got them from the first number to the second, what would you expect that to cost?"* **This returns a no if** fewer than three can name the current grade — parents who do not know the grade are not yet buyers — or if the price they name unprompted is consistently under £60 for six weeks. **5. Take money before you build the course.** Create a Stripe payment link for a single £15 August taster session, *An Inspector Calls: the paragraph that gets you to a Grade 7*, cap it at eight places, and send it to the parents who engaged with steps three and four. **This returns a no if** fewer than six people pay within seven days. Interest that will not convert at £15 will not convert at £180, and this is the only check on the list that cannot be flattered by politeness. --- ## First 30 Days | Week | Focus | Shipped by Friday | |---|---|---| | **Week 1 (1–7 Aug)** | Validation and legal groundwork | Checks 1 to 4 completed and written up in one page; sole trader registration submitted to HMRC; enhanced DBS application started through an umbrella body; school contract checked for outside-work clauses. | | **Week 2 (8–14 Aug)** | Sell the taster before building it | Stripe account live, £15 taster payment link published and sent, six or more taster seats paid for; one-page safeguarding and online conduct policy written and sent to every buyer. | | **Week 3 (15–21 Aug)** | Deliver and capture proof | The 75-minute taster session taught and recorded; three written parent testimonials collected within 24 hours of the session; the six-week Essay Lab syllabus written as a single page of weekly outcomes. | | **Week 4 (22–28 Aug)** | Sell the September block | Essay Lab sales page or PDF published with price, dates and testimonials; £180 payment links sent to taster attendees first and the wider WhatsApp list second; target of six paid seats banked for a mid-September start, second group opened only once the first is full. | --- ## Kill Criteria - **Fewer than six paid seats by 28 August.** Do not run a discounted or smaller group to save face. Switch immediately to the Mock-to-Grade Retainer at a fixed monthly fee for one-to-one work, which fills faster because it removes the scheduling compromise, and accept the lower ceiling as the price of speed. - **Attendance across a running block falls below 70%, or fewer than half of block-one students re-enrol for block two.** The format is wrong, not the market. Stop selling blocks, run a single paid diagnostic session instead, and ask the four students who left what they were doing on Tuesday evening instead of attending. - **Twelve weeks in and monthly revenue is stuck under £600, or the work is consistently exceeding 12 hours a week.** The model has met a real ceiling that more effort will not move. Stop taking new students, spend four Sundays building the Set Text Essay Vault, and rebuild around a product that does not consume an hour of your evening for every £30 it earns.