Weekly parent updates for tutoring centres
Weekly parent updates for tutoring centres is a SaaS idea for owners of tutoring centres with several tutors and regular weekly students, priced to test at $2 per active student a month. Parents pay every month but rarely hear what happened in sessions. With it, tutors write a short note after each session, and parents get a weekly update on what their child covered.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
Parents pay every month but rarely hear what happened in sessions. Tutors forget to send updates, and the owner can’t see which students are slipping until a parent complains.
Why now: Parents already get regular updates from school on their phones, so a silent tutoring centre feels behind.
What do they use today?
Most centres rely on a quick word at pick-up, an occasional message from a tutor’s own phone, or a report written in a rush each term. Owners usually hear about gaps from a worried parent.
How does it work?
After each session a tutor fills in a short note on their phone or laptop. Each week every parent gets one email built from their child’s notes, and can sign in to read past notes and reply. The owner opens a view of missing notes by tutor, and a timeline for each student shows their progress.
What goes in the first version?
- Short session note form for tutors, on phone or laptop
- Weekly email to parents built from that week’s notes
- Owner view of missing notes by tutor
- Progress timeline for each student
- Parent sign-in to see past notes and reply
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Owners of tutoring centres with several tutors and regular weekly students
- Price to test
- $2 per active student a month
A small price per active student follows the centre’s own count of regular learners, so the bill rises and falls with enrolment. Owners already charge parents per student, so the cost lines up with that.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask five centre owners how parents hear about progress today and what they complain about.
- 2Write one centre’s parent updates by hand for a week and ask parents what they thought.
- 3Ask in online tutoring business groups how owners keep parents informed.
Where to find the first customers
- Tutoring business owner groups on Facebook
- Tutoring subreddits
- Regional tutoring associations
What are the risks?
- Tutors skip extra work after a long evening, so a note must be quick to write.
- Notes about children are sensitive; each parent must see only their own child.
How to build it on shipanysaas
4 of the parts it needs are already in the kit. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.
- Already in the kit
- Teams and roles
- Billing
- Emails
- In-app notifications
- You build
- Session note form and weekly parent email
- Parent view of their child’s notes
- Missing-note report for owners
See the starting prompt
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase. Help me build the first version of Weekly parent updates for tutoring centres. Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it. ## The product - What it does: Tutors write a short note after each session, and parents get a weekly update on what their child covered. - Who pays: Owners of tutoring centres with several tutors and regular weekly students - Their problem: Parents pay every month but rarely hear what happened in sessions. Tutors forget to send updates, and the owner can’t see which students are slipping until a parent complains. - Price to test: $2 per active student a month (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. Short session note form for tutors, on phone or laptop 2. Weekly email to parents built from that week’s notes 3. Owner view of missing notes by tutor 4. Progress timeline for each student 5. Parent sign-in to see past notes and reply ## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it - Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations - Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments - Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer - In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app ## New code it needs - Session note form and weekly parent email - Parent view of their child’s notes - Missing-note report for owners ## How to work 1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK. 2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files. 3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next. ## Rules - Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel. - Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are. Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
Guides for the parts it uses
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