How two happy families can build a whole practice
Why one happy Chinese family is the best marketing a private English teacher can get, why referred families stay the longest, and why retention is a skill.
For independent ESL teachers
The insider tea on teaching Chinese students on your own.
Chinese parents never stopped looking for English teachers. After 2021 they just stopped using platforms and moved to RedNote and WeChat. We have worked that market from the inside ever since. Pull up a chair.
22,500+lessons on record
30+teachers we helped go solo
Since 2021finding Chinese clients without platforms
Three cups
Teach. Travel. Thrive.
Every cup is a promise we could only make after doing it ourselves.
Teach
Your students, your rules
Find Chinese families yourself on RedNote and WeChat. Set your own price, schedule and lesson format. No platform in the middle.
TravelA job that fits in a backpack
Twenty-five minute lessons, Beijing time, a laptop and good Wi-Fi. We ran our own work from a laptop, not an office, wherever we happened to live.
ThriveKeep what the parent pays
Platforms take up to half of your rate. Going solo means the full price is yours, and families stay with you for years.
From the inside
What five years taught us
We spent five years working with Chinese families directly, and these are the things we wish someone had told us at the start.
01
"Too expensive" is rarely about money
In our families that phrase usually meant the mother had not yet seen what she would be paying for, and once she did, the price stopped being the question.
02
A quiet mom is often still deciding
When a conversation went silent after the price, we learned not to read it as a no, because more than once the family was simply talking it over and came back weeks later.
03
The passport matters less than you were told
Parents who look for a teacher on their own write about clear speech, patience and how their child feels in class, and that is what we kept hearing from ours as well.
04
Your account is not your business
Apps and platforms changed their rules on us more than once, and what carried us through every change was the trust of the families who already knew us.
Spill the Tea
All articles →Fresh from the blog
Why RedNote blocks teachers who did nothing wrong
Blocked on RedNote without breaking a rule. What usually gets English teachers blocked: abnormal activity, trigger words and direct selling.
A client asked our non-native teacher for a discount. Here's the whole chat
A client asks a non-native English teacher online for a discount. The real WeChat chat, from the first request to the renewal, and why it worked.
The guide
Teach Solo: Find and Keep Chinese Clients
An illustrated step-by-step system for teachers who want to work for themselves and stop working for platforms. 128 pages, 14 templates and more than 50 real chats with Chinese parents.
See what's insideWhy listen to us
We brewed this the slow way
We started from zero after the platforms collapsed: found parents on RedNote, ran everything through WeChat, took payment in yuan. We filled our schedules, hit the ceiling of hours in a day, and started showing other teachers how to do the same.
That is what TripleTea Academy is: five years of practice from inside a closed market. Everything here comes from real chats, real schedules and real families.
Our story →Free for subscribers
Pick your free tool
Three free tools from our five years with Chinese families. Choose the one that fits where you are, and we will send it to your inbox.
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