35 teachers answered one client. Why did most of them lose?

A client called Mia posted on RedNote: “WANTED: One-on-One Spoken English Tutor”, with a little waving hand and four hashtags. That was the whole post. No age, no level, no schedule, nothing about who the lessons were even for.

Thirty-five teachers answered.

We read every single comment, and it felt a bit like reading the same message thirty-five times in slightly different fonts. “Look at my profile.” “Hi you can chooseme.” “You can inbox me. I’m interested.” One teacher wrote just “Hi!”, which takes a certain kind of courage. Another left an 18-second voice message, and someone posted an entire résumé as a picture, flags and all. RedNote folded part of the thread away as possible “ads, hostile, or meaningless content”, so a few of those teachers never even made it onto Mia’s screen.

Look at it from Mia’s side

She asked for help and got a wall of strangers who all say they’re available. Every comment is about the teacher: years of experience, a country, a profile to go and look at. Not one of them is about her. Nobody wondered whether the lessons are for Mia herself or for her child, what “spoken English” means in her house, or when she actually has time to talk. After the fifth “I’m interested”, the comments blur into one, and she has no reason to open any of them first.

That’s the passive way to look for clients: leave a comment and wait to be picked. The client scrolls past almost all of them. Taking the initiative looks completely different, and it’s the part that decides who actually gets the family. We won’t paste a script here, but the difference starts with the very first line, and whether that line is about you or about her.

Was it the passport?

A lot of the comments under Mia’s post come from the Philippines, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and it’s tempting to read the whole thread as “non-native teachers lose”. We don’t think the passport decided anything here. A Canadian native speaker’s comment sits in the very same pile, and it looks just as lost as the others.

Clients who look for a teacher on their own usually write about clear speech, patience and how their child feels in class, and that’s what we kept hearing from our own families too. The passport matters less than you’ve been told, and on the Chinese market native speakers sometimes earn less than non-native teachers. What really hurts a non-native teacher is the sentence many of them write first: “I’m not a native speaker, but…”. That “but” crosses out everything that comes after it.

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Thirty-five replies is the good news

It’s easy to look at a thread like this and decide there’s no room left. We see it the other way round. Clients ask for teachers out loud on RedNote every day, and every one of these posts is an open door. Most teachers walk up to it, say “hi” and stand there waiting. That leaves a lot of space for the one who actually knocks.

And even a client who writes back is only the start. It’s a long way from the first message to the first paid lesson, and we shared our own numbers in Ten clients added you on WeChat and not one booked.