Tutoring Business 101: How to Start an Online Tutoring Business?

10 min readMar 11, 2024

Are you startled by the success of popular tutoring platforms like Wyzant and Preply? These platforms have indeed revolutionized the traditional education industry! Moreover, technological advancements and radical shifts in educational needs are the catalysts for the change. So, starting an online tutoring business is a more profitable idea than ever!

Online tutoring offers flexibility, accessibility, and enough room for personalized learning. So, if you have been planning to start your tutoring business for a while, this blog is your ultimate guide!

In this blog, we have covered the reasons to start your online tutoring business, how to start an online tutoring business, and the most effective approach to start your tutoring business. So, let’s get started!

Why Do You Need to Start an Online Tutoring Business?

Before moving to the steps, let’s explore the reasons to start an online tutoring business!

Increasing Demand for Personalized Learning: The rising costs of traditional education and rapid changes in educational needs have spurred an increasing demand for personalized learning. Online tutoring leverages different tools to offer tailored learning experiences to students.
Profitable: From pay-per-class to group webinars and subscriptions, online tutoring offers diverse monetization channels to maximize profits.
Convenience and Flexibility: With different video conferencing tools, tutors can take live sessions from the comfort of their homes. On the other hand, students enjoy the freedom to attend these sessions from anywhere, thus saving their time and money.
Low Setup Cost: Unlike traditional classrooms, setting up an online tutoring business involves minimal setup cost. Also, you don’t need not rent or buy a classroom space; this saves a considerable initial investment.

6 Key Steps to Starting an Online Tutoring Business

To start an online tutoring business, you must set a clear roadmap to scale your business. Moreover, you need to define a set of business objectives and adopt a suitable model that helps to establish a solid foundation for your business.

Listed below is a step-by-step process for setting up your own tutoring business:

Step 1: Define Your Niche

The first step to start a successful tutoring business is to choose an attractive niche. Define a niche depending on your skills, domain expertise and the market demand. In fact, choosing the right niche and sticking with it helps to earn profits at an early stage in your business.

So, is there a way to figure out the right niche for your business? Try identifying a niche with a lot of potential and less competition. Simply put, identify a niche market where the demand exceeds the supply. This helps to target the customers easily by addressing their needs early in the sales conversion cycle.

Are you falling short of niche-ideas for your business? Here are a few online tutoring business ideas you can use to get started:

Language Learning platforms like Preply offering one-to-one language lessons.
K-12 Tutoring platforms like GoStudent offering 1:1 tutoring for different school subjects
Health and wellness coaching businesses like The Wellness Coach offering executive and leadership wellness programs
Sports coaching businesses like Sportsplan offering customized coaching plans for different sports

Step 2: Choose a Tutoring Business Model

Once you have defined a niche for your business, the next step is to choose a business model. Business model is the core of a tutoring platform; hence, choose it wisely! Moreover, your platforms’ functionalities, revenue streams, and long-term success depend on the kind of business model you choose.

Choose a business model based on your business requirements, the tutoring services you wish to provide, like private or group sessions, and your initial investment. The best approach is to start small and scale your model over time.

For instance, you can start with one-to-one tutoring sessions initially and later offer group tutoring or seasonal learning programs.

Now, let’s understand the popular online tutoring business model with examples!

One-to-one tutoring: With this model, tutors can host personalized sessions for learners and explain a particular lesson via video conferencing tools. E.g., Preply
Group tutoring: Here, the tutoring sessions are conducted for cohorts, encouraging a collaborative and interactive environment. E.g., TakeLessons(both private and group live lessons)
Course-based tutoring: Apart from the live sessions, tutors can create, record and upload the course materials on the platform. The students can access and learn from these self-paced courses at their convenience. E.g,, Udemy

Step 3: Craft a Tutoring Business Plan

Starting an online tutoring business is indeed a profitable pursuit, but there are many factors that influence your business. So, to establish a sustainable business, you need to have a clear business plan that helps you sail past these business challenges.

To begin with, every company has a unique business plan. But there are a few aspects that are common in most business plans. So, what are the critical elements in a tutoring business plan?

Let’s understand them briefly!

Executive Summary

Begin your plan with the fundamental purpose of your business and a mission statement. This gives a clear idea of the business objectives, values and how your business is unique from its competitors.

Product and Services

This section includes product and service descriptions, details like product lifespan, pricing, features/benefits, etc. It also includes additional factors like patents, proprietary technology, etc.

Market Analysis

Explain the current market state, competitor market analysis and the target audience under market analysis. It helps in understanding where the business fits in the market.

Marketing Strategies

A crucial part of a business plan is the strategies for promoting your business. For instance, whether you are going to promote your tutoring business with advertising campaigns, social media, or email marketing.

Financial Projections and plans

Define a clear target and a financial projection in your business plan. Considering the necessary business costs at an early stage, helps to achieve your goals effortlessly.

So create a well-defined business plan to scale your business in the right direction!

Step 4: Build Your Tutoring Platform

Now that you have defined your niche, selected a business model, and crafted your business plan, you are left with the actual execution of your plan! Yes, we are speaking about the most crucial step — building your tutoring platform!

Entrepreneurs often face a dilemma — whether to build a custom-made solution from scratch or leverage a ready-made one. To make the final decision, it is essential to understand the pros and cons involved in each step.

Building a Tutoring Platform From Scratch

The traditional approach of building a tutoring platform from scratch is ideal for developing a complete software with extensive features. Moreover, this approach offers enough room for customization and scalability.

However, while developing a software from scratch, each step demands complete ownership, and the overall cost of planning, designing, development and testing is substantial.

Additionally, you need a dedicated development team adept with coding, integrations and APIs to develop the software. It will cost approximately $30,000 to $50,000 and take a couple of months to build a custom-made solution.

Now, let’s look at a more convenient method for building your tutoring platform!

Using a Ready-made Online Tutoring Software

The second method doesn’t need coding knowledge, just a basic understanding of the platform and how to operate it. This involves creating software using a pre-existing or off-the-shelf solution.

A ready-made solution helps to build your tutoring platform with all the essential features in no time. Further, it reduces the overall cost of building a tutoring platform from scratch! With a ready-made solution like Pinlearn, you can easily create a platform like Cambly or Verbling by customizing it as per your niche and business model.

Step 5: Hire Educators for Your Tutoring Platform

Apart from the business idea and model, a platform’s success largely depends on its teaching quality. Learners join the platform to gain the best expertise and knowledge and make their time and money spent on the platform worthwhile!

A tutor proficient in their niche can lucidly explain even complex concepts and create an interactive environment! This in turn retains the existing clients and attracts new ones to your platform. You can hire tutors from job portals, social media platforms or through advertisements.

Here are some essential pointers for hiring the right tutors:

Subject Expertise: Hire a tutor with considerable domain expertise and ones well-adept with all the concepts, tools, and problem-solving strategies.
Qualification & Certifications: Determine the relevant qualifications and certifications for the tutoring role. Furthermore, specify them in the job description to attract the right candidates to your platform.
Enthusiasm & Attitude: Assess how well a tutor can interact and solve questions raised by students. After all, a friendly demeanor and an element of humor can go a long way to delivering an engaging session!

Lastly, hiring the best tutors not only accelerates your platform’s success but also boosts students’ academic progress.

Step 6: Market Your Tutoring Business

Now, we are left with the last step in how to start a tutoring business guide! A power-packed marketing strategy to scale your business and spread the word-of-mouth.

There are many ways to promote your tutoring business. Choose a mix of marketing strategies that align with your business objectives and attract new customers from diverse platforms. In this digital age, a solid online presence is essential to catapult your business!

Let’s get acquainted with different marketing strategies to drive more conversions:

Create an SEO-optimized website by including the keywords that are easily discoverable on the search engine
Establish a solid social media presence by posting relevant content like educational trends, tips, and current news regularly
Publish engaging and informative blogs on your website and share your blog updates via email
Never underestimate the power of word-of-mouth marketing; people value genuine connections from satisfied parents and students
Participate in online communities on Quora and Reddit and subtly promote your tutoring services. A few popular subreddits for tutoring are /r/Tutor,/r/ Tutoring, /r/Teaching

Now that we have gone through all the steps for starting an online tutoring business, let’s take a look at the big players in the industry.

Why Use Pinlearn to Create Your Online Tutoring Platform?

Although all the above-mentioned platforms have excellent features, nothing equals the satisfaction of having your platform. And the most effective approach to creating a tutoring platform is through ready-made scripts like Pinlearn.

Now, let’s answer the most crucial question — why choose Pinlearn? It is a self-hosted, white-labeled solution that offers 100% software ownership. It offers a minimum viable product with all the essential features to launch a full-fledged tutoring platform.

Additionally, if your business demands some customizations, Pinlearn has an exhaustive list of addons that seamlessly fulfill your business needs.

Now that you have understood why Pinlearn stands out among the ready-made scripts, let’s understand its core features!

Live Tutoring: Tutors can host 1-on-1 and group tutoring sessions and get paid per class. The two-way interactive session helps to offer an immersive learning experience and clear doubts in real-time.
Interactive Whiteboard Tool: With Pinlearn, you can use Zoom or LessonSpace’s whiteboard tool to simulate a real-time classroom environment.
Video Conferencing APIs: With Zoom API and Lesson Space, you can integrate different features like group and 1:1 chat, screen sharing, internal messaging, screen recording, etc, into your tutoring platform.
Dedicated Tutor Dashboard and Analytics: The comprehensive tutor dashboard has dedicated controls for scheduling and managing appointments, course creation, tracking transactions, etc.
Integrated Payment Gateway: The software has integrated payment gateway like Stripe, facilitating convenient and safe payment transactions on the platform.
Extensive Admin Dashboard: It offers complete control over the platform right from the initial platform integrations to tutor and student management, appointment management, and transaction management.

Final Few Words

Starting an online tutoring business might seem challenging, given the many factors influencing its long-term success. Moreover, you need a solid niche, and a robust business model to scale up your tutoring business.

Hence, budding entrepreneurs are intrigued by this one question: how to start my own online tutoring business? We hope that this blog has helped to identify the key elements to set up an online tutoring business and also devise a clear roadmap for launching a successful venture.

If you have a business idea and tutoring model in place and just need a platform to kickstart your tutoring services, look no further! Pinlearn is an all-in-one solution to launch the best tutoring platform. Our experts are just a call away to answer your queries and provide complete support to launch your platform!

FAQs-related to How to Start an Online Tutoring Business

Is it profitable to set up an online tutoring business?

Yes, starting an online tutoring business is a profitable business idea. As per Preply’s data, the average pay of an online tutor is $18.30 per hour. You can deliver online classes from the comfort of your home. Besides, the cost of starting an online business is minimal compared to traditional classrooms.

2. How to create an online tutoring website?

To create a tutoring website, you need to define a preferred niche, choose a business model, create a business plan, build a tutoring website, and market your tutoring business.

3. How to start tutoring business?

If you want to start a successful tutoring business, choose a marketable niche, identify your target audience, choose a suitable business model and adopt the best approach to build your tutoring platform.