Develop product strategy

Tutorly: 12-Month Strategy Board paper, for decision

The problem Bookings have grown 8% while tutor supply grew 60%. We are not short of tutors or students. We are failing to connect them. Students say their top problem is finding the right tutor. Tutors say they lack students, and 70% get no bookings in a typical month. Once a student books twice, 64% keep booking, so the product works when a match happens. The leak is in the first match.

Why not paid student acquisition The board's instinct is to buy more students. I recommend against it for now: - Paid students would arrive at the same broken search and matching flow that already frustrates them. We would be paying to acquire customers we are likely to lose before their second booking. - Our tutor base is already larger than our demand. More students would mainly bring more tutors into the same competition for the few bookings available. - Acquisition spend scales with cost. Matching improvements scale with use.

The bet: fix first-match conversion (£1.2m) Over 12 months we will build a guided matching system and test it against the current search:

1. Structured intake (Months 1–4). Students give subject, exam board, year group, goals, budget, and availability. Required before search.
2. Curated shortlists (Months 2–6). Within one hour, students receive three ranked tutors with a free 15-minute intro call. A small concierge team handles hard cases such as niche subjects and last-minute exam prep.
3. Ranking that rewards fit and responsiveness (Months 3–8). Ranking weighs subject expertise, response time, and student outcomes. New tutors get guaranteed early exposure so that supply does not stall at the bottom.
4. Tutor activation (Months 4–12). Tutors with zero bookings in 30 days receive coaching on profile quality and availability, plus targeted introductions.

Budget (£1.2m) - Product and engineering: £600k - Concierge matching team: £300k - Tutor activation and targeted student tests: £200k - Measurement and contingency: £100k

Targets (12 months) - Bookings: 4,000 → 5,500 per month - Students with a first booking within 7 days of intake: baseline in Month 1, target +50% - Share of tutors with at least one booking per month: ~30% → 45% - Repeat rate (second booking): hold at or above 64%

Decision gates - Month 3: Intake and shortlist live for a test cohort. Confirm the conversion baseline and the uplift. - Month 6: If first-match conversion has not improved by at least 20% against control, stop further build and move remaining funds to a small, controlled paid-acquisition test. If it has, scale the concierge model and begin targeted acquisition in segments where our supply is deepest. - Month 9: Review unit economics. Each booking should contribute enough commission to cover concierge cost.

Runway This plan spends £1.2m over 12 months and leaves about six months of runway for the gates above. If the Month 6 gate fails, we retain the option to pivot without running out of cash.

What we are asking the board to approve 1. Fund the £1.2m matching-led plan. 2. Approve the Month 6 gate and the reallocation rule if it fails. 3. Defer paid student acquisition until conversion data supports it.

The board's instinct is right that growth needs more students. But we already have more tutors than we can match, and the evidence points to the match as the bottleneck. Fixing that first makes every future pound of acquisition work harder.

Tutorly: 12-Month Strategy

Sep 24, 2026 · @Martin Slaney

The problem is matching, not demand¹

Tutor supply grew 60% last year; bookings grew 8%. 70% of our 6,500 tutors get no bookings in a typical month, and our 11,000 active students generate only \~4,000 bookings a month. Both sides report the same failure from opposite ends: students can't find the right tutor; tutors can't find students. Adding supply has made the catalogue bigger and choosing harder.

The bright spot: students who book twice repeat at 64%. The relationship works once it starts.³ The leak is between arriving and the second lesson.

Why paid acquisition first is the wrong bet

Paid acquisition sends more students into the same funnel that already fails to convert most of the ones we have. We'd be buying students at full cost and losing them at the step before the relationship forms. At a 20% take on £30–45 lessons (\~£7.50 per booking), we only recover acquisition cost from students who stick; today too few get there. Fix conversion first, and every pound of acquisition afterwards is worth more.

The bet: managed matching

Replace browse-and-hope with matching we take responsibility for.

• Guided intake. Subject, level, exam board, goals, learning style, budget, availability. Two minutes, not twenty profiles.
• We recommend three tutors, ranked on fit and track record, not on who signed up most recently.
• Low-risk first lesson. A discounted trial plus a "right tutor or your next lesson free" guarantee.
• Curate supply. Stop broad tutor recruitment. Recruit only where demand outstrips supply (by subject and exam level); rank and surface tutors on conversion and repeat rate; move inactive tutors out of results.
• Start with human matchers, then automate what works. The concierge data trains the algorithm.

Budget and milestones

Month 3: matching live for new students in top 3 subjects. Baseline set for first-to-second-lesson conversion (we don't track this cleanly today²; it's the number that matters most).

Month 6 gate: first-to-second conversion up 50% on baseline; share of tutors with zero bookings below 55%. Hit it, and we release £350k into paid acquisition, now into a funnel that converts. Miss it, and we hold the cash as runway.

Month 12: 6,000 bookings a month (+50%), with growth coming from bookings per student, not student count alone.

Ask of the board

Back matching as the one bet, with acquisition as its reward, not its substitute. We're not against growth spend; we're against spending it before the product can hold the students it buys. With 18 months of runway, the month-6 gate gives us a clear read while two-thirds of the budget and a year of runway remain.