Start a waiting list.
Before you even have a name for your English school, before you even know how you are going to teach a lesson, where you are going to teach it, who your students will be or anything at all beyond the vague notion that you think you might want to start your own school, just set up an online waiting list.
The waiting list doesn’t have to be anything special. It could be a one-paragraph promise to start English classes in a month or two if enough people express an interest. Write one or two sentences about yourself or what you plan to offer. You could write that in English, get ChatGPT to translate it into Japanese, paste that all up on a page on Substack (or any one of numerous other free newsletter sites).
That takes 10 minutes and costs nothing.
Then promote that waiting list. Print off a free QR code link to the waiting list and hand it to everyone you meet in the area you are thinking of opening a school. Put an ad in the weekly paper with a link to the waiting list. Put it on a business card and post it through letterboxes in your target neighbourhood. If you are going for an online school, promote the link to English exchange or student groups on Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, Insta, wherever you think your customers might be.
Why?
Before you have spent much time and money and committed yourself to the grand course of action of opening a school, you will have a fantastic idea if it is viable or not first. If you reached out to 1,000 people, say, but got only one email address in exchange, maybe you need to rethink what you are doing. But if you get a healthy number of sign-ups, you can proceed with your school, confident that you will attract enough students.
And even better than that, if you get any responses at all you can ask them what kind of lessons they are interested in, how much they would be happy to pay for lessons, any number of questions that would help you shape the school to fit the market before you’ve committed yourself to anything potentially expensive and mistaken.
Make the waiting list something exclusive and desirable (tell people they can only join the waiting list if they can prove they are motivated to learn English, say, but if they are accepted they can join the exclusive learners’ chat group). You will have created something valuable for your customers that should fill you with confidence that you can make a go of it.
Full disclosure, I have not used the waiting list as a marketing tool as I was pretty sure I’d open a school come what may, but I saw this excellent interview with Daniel Priestley last week and thought about how I could apply his ideas to teaching English in Japan. If I was starting out again, or starting a new business idea that I was unsure of, this is definitely the way I’d go about it.
What do you think? Would this work for you? Why or why not? Do leave a comment for others to see.
See you on Friday for the Free Talk Staffroom podcast.
Patrick
Pretty cool. If you already have a school you could use this to promote special courses or to just try attract new customers.