How one-off lessons became a business

Context

I grew up in Seoul. At fifteen I moved to the UK on my own for boarding school. I researched it myself: which schools took international students, how the visa process worked, and which ones gave the most scholarship money. The UK track usually takes four years, two for GCSEs and two for A Levels. I finished the GCSEs in one year and the whole course in three.

Somewhere in those three years I became the person other students came to before maths and physics exams. Not for full courses. For short, one-off sessions on exam technique: how to read a paper, where marks get lost, how to manage the time. Word got around.

The problem

Near the end of school I decided to go to college in the US instead of staying in the UK. Most of the industries I cared about were bigger there, and so were the opportunities. US tuition and living costs are also much higher, and I wanted to pay for them myself.

That gave me a goal with a number on it and a deadline that wouldn’t move: whatever I needed had to be earned before my first semester. So after I graduated in 2022, I took a gap year and turned the tutoring into a business. During that year I also sat the SAT myself and scored 1600.

What I did

Charging for something I used to give away

The first change was simply charging. Referrals did the selling, one family to the next, and the informal help I had been giving at school became a schedule.

Selling the path I had just walked

I built the offer around exams I had taken recently, across three systems: A Levels, the SAT, the MAT and TMUA admissions tests,¹ and Oxbridge interviews, for students in the UK, the US and Korea. I had sat these within the last year or two. I remembered which questions eat time, which mistakes repeat, and what the interview room feels like. That memory was the product.

Pricing below the market on purpose

I had worked at a study-abroad consultancy, and I had seen what families paid for admissions help. I set my prices well below that. Partly that was strategy: a new tutor with no track record has to give people a reason to try. But it was also a decision about who would be able to learn from me.

What I learned

I didn’t learn something new and sell it. I packaged a road I had just walked, while the details were still sharp. That has turned into a pattern. A lot of what I’ve done since started the same way: someone wanted to get somewhere I had only just reached, and I knew where the potholes were.

It also set up the next two years. The business worked, and that was exactly what created the next problem.

The MAT is Oxford’s Mathematics Admissions Test. The TMUA is the Test of Mathematics for University Admission, used by Cambridge and other universities. ↩