Jade Weatherington, 36, has long taught English on various websites when she created two classes on Outschool, an online course platform for kids, in 2018. An art class and craft and the other class teaches how to write a five-paragraph essay fluently.
The business took several months to take off, but by early 2021, Weatherington had added another six classes and was making $10,000 a month from the site, working just 10 to 12 hours a week.
Outschool offers teachers the opportunity to turn their personal profiles into organizational profiles with many educators, and in June 2021, Weatherington decided to do so. She has hired seven teachers through April 2022 and offers up to 60 classes on site, including multi-age essay writing and creative classes like screenwriting.
In 2021, she’s also starting to create courses that teach people how to build an online course on their own. She posted them on her personal website, Teacherjade.com.
Weatherington, who lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her 14-year-old daughter, now makes about $15,000 a month and still works about 10 hours a week. Here’s how she built multiple streams of income and dealt with the hiccups in the process.
‘I scaled too fast’
For the first six months after Weatherington turned her personal Out of School profile into an organizational profile, everything went well. But in early 2022, “registrations plummeted,” she said.
She noticed a $5 loss while she was also working on her payroll. “I remember panicking,” she said, “like, if I lose $5, what if it’s $500” in the future?
Weatherington has contacted Outschool. It turns out that the platform is going through some internal algorithmic changes. She ended up meeting with company representatives in October 2022 to offer some suggestions on how they might fix the problem.
In the meantime, in June 2022, she removed all but 17 classes from the site and started offering some classes on Teacherjade.com instead. She’s also added classes to another platform she’s testing, Allschool, for students around the world.
When she informed her teachers of the change, some decided to switch to teaching on Allschool or through Weatherington’s personal website, and some wanted to wait and see what happens to her. Outschool in the fall.
In January 2023, Weatherington noticed her enrollment in Outdoor classes had returned. She went on to offer those 17 classes on the website and is still offering writing classes on both her personal website and Allschool. All seven of her teachers eventually returned, and she just hired another one.
In her moment of crisis, Weatherington was glad she was able to turn the tide. But realized that the problem would be easier to solve if she had fewer people to manage.
“I scaled too fast,” she said.
If I didn’t have a second business, ‘I would have lost’
Luckily, even as she’s dealing with the risks with Outschool, Weatherington can still bring in some revenue from her courses on how to build an online classroom yourself.
Over the years, she’s had people reach out to say they’d also like to start teaching people online. “When you have something that you’re really good at, you can always say it’s easy,” she says. “But for someone who’s never done it, every step seems like a challenge.”
In her courses, she breaks down how to start an online course including creating content and lessons for the course, as well as doing marketing for the course. She offers various packages on the subject ranging from $25 to $600.
“If it weren’t for that, I would have lost money,” she said, as enrollment in Outschool began to decline.
‘Find a pro in the area’
Her biggest piece of advice as Weatherington has built her business: Find a mentor and heed their advice.
“Find someone who is a pro in this area so you don’t run into those pitfalls and you know what you’re up against,” she says.
Weatherington participates in a program called our village united, helping Black entrepreneurs grow their businesses. As part of the program, she was matched with a mentor, Atlanta-based entrepreneur Cole Jones. After hiring the initial two teachers, she told him she wanted to continue to grow. “It’s possible to stick with the two that you have for at least a year,” she says he advises.
“And I said, ‘No. I’m ready,'” she said. Looking back, she realizes that if she had listened to his advice, it would have been much easier to calculate the logistics around the Outschool challenges.
“I feel like it wouldn’t be so stressful,” she said.
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