Develop product strategy

MEMORANDUM TO: The Board of Directors FROM: CEO, Tutorly DATE: October 24, 2023 SUBJECT: 12-Month Strategy: Unlocking Liquidity via Guided Matching

1. The Diagnosis: A Conversion Crisis, Not an Acquisition Crisis Tutorly has stalled at 4,000 monthly bookings, generating roughly £30,000 in monthly net revenue. While the Board has suggested deploying our £1.2m capital into paid student acquisition, the data indicates this would be a fatal mistake.

We do not have a top-of-funnel problem; we have a liquidity and matching problem. We currently have 11,000 active students on the platform, yet they generate only 4,000 bookings. Meanwhile, our tutor supply has grown 60% YoY to 6,500, leaving 70% of tutors with zero bookings a month.

Why are 11,000 active students not booking 6,500 available tutors? User research gives us the answer: students are paralyzed by the paradox of choice, citing "finding the right tutor" as their top barrier. Tutors think there aren't enough students, when in reality, bloated supply is actively hurting student conversion. Pouring £1.2m of paid marketing into a leaky bucket will only burn our 18-month runway faster.

However, our bright spot is retention: when a student books twice, their repeat rate is 64%. Our core strategic challenge is getting existing students from browsing to their second booking.

2. Our One Major Bet: "Tutorly Match" & Supply Curation Instead of buying traffic, we will invest our £1.2m in product-led conversion. We will pivot Tutorly from an open directory (like Craigslist) to a curated, algorithmically matched marketplace (like Uber).

Over the next 12 months, we will execute a three-part strategy:

• Aggressive Supply Curation: We will freeze new tutor onboarding and delist the bottom 50% of inactive/low-converting tutors. By concentrating demand among the top 2,000 tutors, we instantly improve the average quality of a student’s first lesson and keep our best tutors earning and engaged.
• The "Concierge" Matching Engine: We will replace our search bar with a diagnostic intake flow. Students will input their exam board, target grade, and learning style, and our algorithm will present only three ideal tutors.
• The "Two-Lesson" Guarantee: Because a second booking triggers a 64% repeat rate, we will subsidize the friction of trial-and-error. If a student doesn’t click with their first matched tutor, Tutorly will fund the first lesson with a replacement tutor.

3. Capital Allocation (£1.2m) * £650k (Product & Data): Hiring a dedicated squad (PM, Data Scientist, 3 Engineers) to build the matching engine, diagnostic onboarding, and a revamped tutor rating system based on student retention. * £350k (The "Second Booking" Subsidy): Financing the "First-Match Guarantee" and discounting a bundled "First Two Lessons" package to force the habit loop. * £200k (Lifecycle Marketing): Automated CRM flows (SMS/Email) to re-engage the ~7,000 dormant students currently on our platform.

4. 12-Month Success Metrics By fixing the conversion bottleneck first, we build a machine that can profitably scale paid acquisition in Year 2. By Q4 next year, this bet will deliver: 1. Bookings: Increase from 4,000 to 12,000/month (tripling net revenue to ~£90k/month). 2. Student Activation: Increase the percentage of active students reaching their 2nd booking from ~15% to 40%. 3. Marketplace Health: Reduce the "zero-booking" tutor rate from 70% to under 20% (on a curated base of 2,500 tutors).

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.