I’m looking to grow a stable roster of 1:1 private tutoring students across the following subjects: English, writing, history, and college applications.
I’m new to this community and am following the format observed from others here; if it’s wrong, I’m happy to change it. Please let me know if there is any more information you need. I greatly appreciate any help you can offer!
Your ideas, intros, strategies, and creative interventions would be what pushes this market to YES.
This market resolves YES if:
I successfully enroll 10 new students within 3 months,
as a direct causal result of help from Manifold users.
If I gain students solely through my usual efforts, existing channels, or unrelated outreach, the market resolves NO, even if my roster fills.
YES includes outcomes like:
A Manifold user gives an introduction that becomes a student
Someone suggests a new channel, niche, offer, or strategy that brings me great-fit clients
A creative idea (post, outreach method, etc.) directly leads to enrolled students
A user helps refine my framing/marketing in a way that measurably increases incoming inquiries
Mana Bounties
I’ll also award mana bounties for ideas that are useful and not already in my playbook. Since I’m still learning the ropes, I assume there are many avenues I have not yet explored that could prove fruitful.
Examples of bounty-worthy suggestions:
New client pipelines (especially parent- or school-adjacent ones)
Underrated places to post or advertise (I already post to Care.com, Craigslist, Nextdoor, and local FB groups for parents; I also put up posters in local establishments)
Creative program structures I haven’t considered
Insightful reframing of my pitch, niche, or messaging
Ideas for partnerships, referral loops, or visibility that result in clients
Creative uses of my background
Clever marketing suggestions
Low-effort lists of random orgs or saturated platforms won’t get mana.
$100 (via Venmo) Bounty
If someone makes a standout contribution and it clearly results in new, high-quality students, I may award $100 via Venmo. Bounties are awarded in a subjective fashion, at my discretion, and are not appealable.
ABOUT ME
I’m Kate, an educator with:
11 years teaching experience (including serving as a Bay Area private school administrator)
~5 years tutoring students in Seattle & San Francisco
A Master’s degree in Anthropology
A soft spot for helping math- and science-oriented students excel in English, history, and writing
My students have gone on to:
Ivy League schools
Top UCs
Elite STEM programs (MIT, Georgia Tech, CMU, UW, and more)
I’m starting my own tutoring business for the first time. With family changes and a cross-country move ahead, I’m looking for more flexibility and the ability to focus on the aspects of teaching that I feel are the most rewarding. Working for myself means I can create the kind of thoughtful, personalized sessions that help students grow quickly and confidently.
Over the years working for tutoring companies and private school administration, I’ve developed a reputation as warm and approachable with a well-organized class structure. I hold my students to a high standard, but I always make sure they feel supported and understood. I most often work with students who consider themselves “STEM people” and find the humanities challenging or exhausting. Through years of working with these students, I’ve developed methods that meet their unique needs.
For example, students usually feel lost when presented with college essay prompts that ask them to discuss their impact on their community and the larger world. Students often mistakenly believe that the best answer to this kind of question is to pursue some short- or medium-term volunteer opportunity that will “look good on a college application,” and then write about their experience. But they hit a wall when they sit down to write about why this experience was meaningful to them, because it wasn’t, and so their effort does not actually produce (1) a good college essay or (2) a longstanding positive relationship with altruistic work.
I think this is sad and a missed opportunity, because not only is a poorly written college essay likely to result in a rejected application, but I believe that every student does intrinsically wish to make the world a better place, but is forced to see any contributions to their community as transactional because of this process. My goal is to help the student bring out their true thoughts and help them get into the colleges they want in the process.
To solve this, I introduce them to the “three takeaways” framework, which I’ve developed over the last decade. First, I ask the student to come up with three takeaways that they want the essay reader to have about them by the end. The more personal, the better - we stray away from “hard-working” and “passionate”, and shoot for things like “compassionate leader” and “endlessly curious”. Then, we work backwards by identifying a story from their life that showcases these qualities. For example, I had a student who identified her desired takeaway trait as “curious”, and the accompanying story wasn’t academic in nature, nor did it contain a typical “college application”-type activity like rowing or canned food drives. Instead, she wrote about her path to becoming a worm farmer. She kept hundreds of worms in bespoke glass containers in her bedroom, simply because she was fascinated by the way they dug holes and thought they should have a comfortable life while she studied them. What she had originally written off as an odd idiosyncrasy turned out to be a strong contributing factor in her acceptance to many major universities.
If they don’t have a story yet, I ask them what can they start doing today that will help them become the person they want people to see them as (because that’s the secret - actually being the way that you want people to believe you are). Then, once we have the core concepts and the story, then we write about it, and it comes much easier. The results speak for themselves: I’ve had a student come back a month later having started a donation-drive nonprofit that they still chair to this day. Another student became inspired to coach a youth sports team and modeled selflessness and discipline to his athletes for the rest of his high school career.
I have developed similar frameworks for helping STEM students understand how to analyze poems, novels, multiple-choice problems, and other areas of the humanities that they find ambiguous. I think that there is a clear logic to the humanities that many students are missing simply because they lack the right teacher, and I want to fill that gap for them.
I believe that everybody has something positive to contribute to the world. What we need most in the current climate is for young people to challenge their assumptions, think critically, express themselves with clarity, and apply these tools to altruistic pursuits. If I can help guide them in that direction, then I’ll have contributed something meaningful to the world and (hopefully) serve as a branch of a “positive impact” tree.
Less altruistically, this is my first time starting a business, so I’ll need to quickly find (1) a client base and (2) consistent, effective marketing with a high ratio of conversions. I’m including a bit more information about what I offer below, and some links so you can see how I currently market myself.
What I Offer
1:1 online tutoring
English, History, Writing (all ages)
SAT/ACT (Reading/Writing)
College application + essay coaching
Guidance with AP Lang, AP Lit, APUSH, AP Gov, and more
Personalized academic + testing timelines
Year-round availability
📎 Website: stembrainstutor.com
📧 stembrainstutor@gmail.com
1,000