Preparing myself for an upcoming interview with one of my all time favorite teacher rockstars Koichi I thought about the strange fact that the most talented educators I have come across in the past three years quit teaching live lessons.

This led me to the question if there is actually a way how platforms can retain talent on their service or whether teaching live lessons is just a step stone in one’s online teaching career.

Anyone who wants to make a living on teaching on the Internet sooner or later will come to the point where he/she realizes that live teaching, especially 1o1 is not scalable. Even with a decent price per hour there are only so many working hours in a day that you will sooner or later run out of headspace.

Then comes the next question, how long will I be able to keep up this pace. If I slow down and teach less I will earn less. If I raise the price to compensate that loss I may lose clients. Hence every decision leads to basically nothing.

For platforms this is actually a big problem. As soon as their best teachers realize that live teaching is not a long term income or career option, they will lose them as those teachers either choose to build up their own business like Koichi did with the tremendously popular Textfugu textbook or they do something completely different, like I did.

So how can teaching platforms retain their talent? I think the answer is similar to what Google is doing to retain its developers: pay them more (create better leads, raise the minimum prices on the platform) and / or offer incentives (help with marketing, promoting best teachers).

There are more and more possibilities for talented teachers out there and the ones who really want to make money will take the necessary steps by either changing to asynchronous centered services like Udemy and Learnable or by building something on their own.