Teaching English Since High School: Building a Tutoring Brand at 17

In high school, I had a big fight with my family. The details are fuzzy now, but the gist is that, in the name of "disciplining" me, they leaned on an argument I really disliked: you're still young, you don't understand how things work, we're the ones earning the money that raises you, you're not capable of doing it yourself, so you do as I say.

It made me angry, but in that moment I genuinely couldn't argue back. So once the fight was over, I made a decision: I would earn my own money, if only to prove the "not capable" half of that sentence wrong. So I started seriously looking for a way to do it. Weighing what I was actually good at against the real constraints around me, my English was decent, I could work remotely online, there was no fixed clock-in schedule, and it had to let someone under 18 work. Once I filtered through all of that, teaching English on AmazingTalker was the only option that fit at the time.

Not wanting to depend on anyone

I was still under 18. AmazingTalker was a platform where students could register as teachers using their real age. I'd confirmed that. Facing teachers with degrees and teaching credentials, I had none of the traditional competitive assets.

But I noticed something: most of the "credentialed" teachers had forgotten what it felt like to learn English from zero. I hadn't. I knew which parts a beginner gets stuck on, which explanations seem reasonable but are actually useless. That wasn't talent. It was the only card I had.

I didn't pretend to be a professional instructor. My pitch was: I'm a student, and I know where you're getting stuck. That honest positioning became the differentiator. Tutoring income covered my tutoring fees, extracurricular activities, and event registrations, so I stopped needing to ask my family for money.

Was teaching online before COVID

In 2019, online tutoring wasn't the mainstream. Most people went to cram schools or found in-person tutors. On AmazingTalker, students messaged you, attended class by video, and left reviews afterward. The whole process was remote, but that didn't feel remarkable at the time.

When COVID arrived, the situation reversed. Cram schools closed, in-person tutors scrambled to move online, and many teachers were still figuring out how to use Zoom. By then I already had nearly two years of online teaching infrastructure: workflow, materials, review management, all in place. I took on a lot of students during that period.

My AmazingTalker sessions actually only ran through my first year of university. After accumulating 569 sessions, I stopped taking new students on the platform. Not because I stopped teaching. Once you build to a certain point, students start referring students, and the whole system naturally moves off-platform. No sign, no logo, no website, but a steady flow of students. Through all of university, I almost never asked my family for money again.

Every student's problem looks different

My students ranged from 6 to 40 years old, across conversation English, GSAT, TOEIC, GEPT, and grammar. Almost every person who showed up had a different kind of problem.

I once taught a fourth-grade boy. When his mother brought him to class, she said he "hated English." In our first session he barely stopped drawing long enough to listen. Instead of telling him to put down the pencil, I ordered a drawing tablet online that day. Starting the next lesson, we learned vocabulary through drawing and practiced conversation through drawing. Four sessions later, his mother messaged me: "He'll now go look for English words on TV by himself."

Another student was preparing for the GSAT English section. What she needed wasn't conversation practice but problem-solving strategy. I made my own materials, deconstructing past exam questions one by one so she could understand the logic behind the sentence structures rather than just memorizing answers. I was also preparing for the English GSAT at the time, so the deconstruction process effectively doubled as my own prep.

Using the internet to bypass age restrictions

During the same period I was also taking on other projects: Chinese-English transcription for GoTranscript, and English-to-Chinese translation work for Jonckers and DayTranslations, the latter under NDA. For a 17-18-year-old high schooler, the common thread wasn't how much they paid. It was that none of them existed in the physical world.

Part-time jobs had age restrictions, contracts required guardian signatures, and interviews cost transportation. The traditional paths to income were essentially closed to someone under 18. But online freelance platforms don't ask what you look like. They just want the output. AmazingTalker was the same logic: how does a 17-year-old with no credentials get a stranger to pay you? Not by packaging yourself as credentialed, but by doing what someone your age can actually do, as well as it can be done, and using the internet to put it in front of the right people.

Writing copy, managing reviews, designing a teacher profile page, handling first-contact communication with parents. All of it happened with no one to teach me, no budget, and an age that didn't allow formal employment. The environment forced it. That was my earliest brand-building practice.

The meta-skill of explanation

Teaching a language forces you to develop a structural understanding you never needed as a native speaker. When a student asks "why does this sentence sound wrong?", "it just does" is not an answer. You have to actually know why, clearly enough to state a rule, find an analogy, or build an example that maps onto something they already understand.

That process of translating implicit knowledge into explicit, transferable pieces came back every time I was designing advocacy arguments at EdYouth. Why this issue matters, why the current approach is wrong, why our version would be better: what feels like intuitive social advocacy is actually the same work of "deconstruct, name, reassemble." Later in a business context, it becomes how you outline a complex analysis, or break an abstract principle into executable steps. Different on the surface; same underneath.

What I actually carried away

Tutoring didn't just teach English. It forced me to learn by doing: how do you teach a skill nobody taught you, on the spot, to someone else? How do you read a student's reaction to judge whether your approach is working? How do you teach while adjusting, while looking online for new resources to fill the gaps? That ability showed up in every university project I worked on.

The same with curriculum design. What tutoring forced out wasn't the ability to prepare a perfect lesson plan. It was how to adjust, streamline, and customize in a short amount of time, so that prep doesn't eat your afternoon, but the student still feels like it was made for them alone. That "quickly produce the version that's just good enough" muscle showed up in almost every subsequent job.

Most important was the marketing-yourself piece. What I did on AmazingTalker was get strangers to hand you a few hundred dollars per session and then come back. At EdYouth, the equivalent was getting sponsors to trust a six-figure budget to a young non-profit organization. The scale, the stakes, and the decision complexity were different, but the underlying question was the same: can you get someone to believe in you before they've ever seen you in person? That learning curve, from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars, was built one step, one session at a time. It didn't arrive as a sudden skill.

Tutoring was tutoring. But for me, what was ground out in the space beyond the tutoring. That's the most important thing those six years gave me.

If you're looking for a teacher

I'm no longer taking on long-term students, but if you or your child has a short-term need: English, social studies, GSAT essay writing, or anything else you think I might be able to help with, or if you'd like a referral to someone more suitable, feel free to reach out at me@joshlee.tw.