The Educator Business Model Canvas, with five real businesses and a money check behind it
This is where everything from this week comes together. You already have your canvas from Lesson 3.1 and your one-pager from Lesson 3.2. Today you put your whole business on one page: who buys, what you offer, how people find you, how the money comes in and what it costs you. Then you check whether the money and your hours actually work. You'll leave with your first business model, and on Saturday we build a second one together, so you can compare them.
Learning outcomes
Rate yourself now, and again at the end of the lesson.
Guess first
The same expertise, two formats, 240 hours a year to give. A 1:1 package costs €480 and takes 9 hours per client. A cohort course costs €300 and takes 2 hours per participant. Which brings in more money in the first year?
Watch
Read · about 6 minutes
Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) put a whole business on one page, in nine blocks, and today their canvas is used in business schools and companies all over the world. The right side is about your customers: who they are (customer segments), what you offer them (value proposition), how they find you and buy from you (channels), and what kind of contact you keep with them (customer relationships). Revenue streams show how the money comes in. The left side is what you need to deliver all that: key activities, key resources and key partners, and under them the cost structure.
In this course we use the Educator Business Model Canvas. It's the same nine blocks with one change: in customer segments you write the buyer and the user separately, because in education they're so often different people, as you saw in Week 2. And you've already done a big part of the work. Your canvas from Lesson 3.1 gives you the customer segments and the value proposition, and your one-pager from Lesson 3.2 gives you the channels and the customer relationships.
Fill it in from right to left, and then read across it, because that's where the problems show up. For example, a low price per teacher together with a channel that needs a personal visit to every school won't work, because the visits cost you more hours than the price pays for.
Your hours
David Teece (2010), one of the researchers who made "business model" a serious term, describes it as the way a business delivers value to customers, gets them to pay for it, and turns those payments into profit. When you're a teacher starting out, though, you'll usually run out of time long before you run out of money.
The Netherlands Chamber of Commerce (KVK) counts about 1,840 working hours a year for a full-time self-employed person, and it tells starters to be happy if they can invoice 50 to 60% of them. The rest goes into finding clients, admin, learning and preparing. You probably still have a job, so let's do the sum with your week:
The first time I got a contract for 10,000 euros for curriculum development, I had only one month to do it. I went to my bookkeeper, super happy. And he started counting. He said: honestly, if we count how many hours you work and what you get, it's maximum 50 euros an hour. Do you realise that's like nothing here in the Netherlands for an entrepreneur? You'll pay 35%, then there's a cost for this and a cost for that. And I was like, oh, okay. This isn't exactly what I imagined.
I'm still trying to balance my own capacity. I do a lot of things at the same time, and sometimes I suffer from it. Some days I work two or three hours, because I'm just too tired. The next day I work twelve. Then five, then fifteen. It depends on so much: I need the right atmosphere, I need good food. It's all about your mental state and everything around you.
So when you fill in your hours below, think of an average week across the whole year, including the bad ones, not your best week.
Revenue streams · five real businesses
Tap through the tabs. These are all real education businesses whose numbers are public, and each one gets paid in a different way.
italki connects language tutors with learners around the world. The tutor sets an hourly price and the platform finds the students, handles payment and keeps a commission: 21% of a single lesson, 15% of a 15-lesson package and 30% of a group class.
It's the easiest model to start with, because someone can pay you the same week. But your income is limited by your hours, because you have to be on camera for every euro you earn.
Koehler, Shelton, Carpenter and Greenhalgh (2020) analysed every store on TeachersPayTeachers up to 2019: about 208,000 teacher-sellers and $3.9 billion in sales. A worksheet costs almost nothing to sell a second time, which sounds like the perfect side income.
But now look at how unevenly it's spread. The top 1% of stores made about 81% of all sales, and the typical store sold $131 in its whole life.
Susie Seaton was a teacher. In 2010 she and her husband Jonathan started Twinkl in the back bedroom of their home in Sheffield, making classroom resources. Teachers can join for free, and they pay a subscription for full access, while schools buy whole-school plans.
Its parent company reported a turnover of £98.9 million for the year to April 2025. They also employ hundreds of people now, so please don't compare your first year with theirs!
Eneza was started by Toni Maraviglia, a former teacher, and Kago Kagichiri, a developer. Pupils use any basic phone to get curriculum lessons, quizzes and an "ask a teacher" service by SMS. In 2016 they launched it with Safaricom, Kenya's largest mobile network, for 10 shillings a week, a few cents.
By then they had reached over 572,000 learners. The partner made a huge difference here, because the network already reached the families, so Eneza didn't have to find them one by one.
Jennifer Gonzalez has written on Cult of Pedagogy since 2013. The blog, the podcast and the videos are free. Around them sit paid online courses, teaching materials, a book, a membership community and even mugs.
Take a look at the prices in her online classroom: a free on-demand webinar, then a $39 course, an $89 technology course and a $155 lesson-planning course. It's exactly the before-and-after idea from Lesson 3.2. People come for the free content, and whenever they want more, there's a next step waiting for them.
Which of the five is closest to your offer from Lesson 3.2? And which catch worries you most?
People do come back when they need something, and that's why it's so important to do your job properly. When I develop a curriculum, I always offer a retainer: you can hire me for about a third of the price, and for six months I help you implement it, add something or remove something, because if you struggle with implementation, you might need my help. Teacher First Aid works differently: people pay for a yearly subscription, and then they decide whether to renew.
The costs nobody warns you about
Between what the client pays and what actually reaches your account, there's tax and a whole row of costs that are easy to forget when you set a price. This is the list from my own business. Which ones will you have?
Ask a bookkeeper or your tax office how much to set aside in your country. My bookkeeper counted about 35% for my case in the Netherlands, and yours might be very different.
Your template · 15 minutes
If you did Lessons 3.1 and 3.2 on this device, four blocks are already filled in from your canvas and your one-pager, so check them and change what you need. Then fill in the other five, from right to left. Keep it short, a few words or a line per block is enough. When you're done, the money check below tells you whether the revenue and costs actually work with your hours.
How to fill it in
Concentrate on three things: how buyers will find you, what exactly they pay for and how often, and the hours every block costs you.
The buyer from your canvas, plus the user, even if it's the same person. Keep it to one segment for this model. If you want to sell to schools and to parents, that's two models, and the second one can be your model B on Saturday.
Your two promises from Lesson 3.1, nothing new. If you notice you want to change them, change the canvas too, so everything stays the same.
Think of three steps: how they first hear about you, how they buy, and how they receive it. "Instagram" alone isn't a channel for school leaders. Ask yourself where your buyer actually looks: LinkedIn, a conference, a colleague's recommendation, their association's newsletter.
How much of you do they get, and what do they come back for? A follow-up call, a community, a yearly refresher, a retainer. This is where the repeat money comes from.
Write the unit, the price and how often: "€1,200 per school, once" or "€15 per teacher per month". Who pays matters too: the school budget, a teacher's own money, or a grant.
What you must have (materials, your portfolio, a platform, your network) and what you must do every week to keep it running (deliver, sell, update, answer messages). Selling is a key activity. Most teachers forget to write it down.
Who already has your buyers' attention? A subject association, a school board, a platform, a publisher. One good partner can save you months of finding customers one by one.
Your hours first, then money: tools, platform fees, bookkeeper, travel, printing, promotion. Use the cost list from this lesson so you don't forget anything.
Read across it before you finish: can your channels reach the buyer in your segments? · does the price pay for the hours your activities need? · does anything on the left exist that no customer on the right needs?
The Cult of Pedagogy example is my reading of what Jennifer Gonzalez shows publicly, not her own canvas.
The money check
Fill in your week first, then your offer. If you did Lesson 3.2 on this device, your price is already there. Please count the hours you spend finding each customer too, all the messages, calls and proposals that go nowhere. Nobody pays you for them, so they're the hours everybody forgets. Then add your yearly costs and how much you set aside for tax. At this stage almost every number is a guess, and that's completely normal.
How to fill in the money check
Use an average week across the whole year, including the bad weeks, holidays and exam periods. Most people write their best week and then wonder why the plan doesn't work.
This is the number everybody guesses too low. Count the messages, calls, coffees and proposals that go nowhere. If you don't know, start with 3 to 5 hours per new customer for a service, and ask someone who already sells something similar.
Be pessimistic. Count the people you can actually reach and how many of them might say yes, then take the lower number. It's much nicer to be surprised in the good direction.
If you don't have a second offer yet, leave it at 0 and see what happens to your hours. Then add a realistic repeat offer and compare.
Your week
One sale
Costs and tax
They come back
The two examples use invented numbers. The tutor pays a platform commission like italki's, and the materials pack is sold directly to schools with a yearly update. The tax share in the examples is only a placeholder, so put in your own.
Your checklist
Emilia's tips
Check yourself
Go deeper, only if you want to
You don't need any of this to finish the lesson. Open whatever you're curious about, or come back to it later.
Ash Maurya (2012) adapted the canvas for early ventures. It swaps four blocks for problem, solution, key metrics and unfair advantage. Your Week 2 problem statement drops straight into the problem block.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is what you spend to find one customer, and for you it is mostly hours. Customer lifetime value (LTV) is what a customer brings in over all the time they stay. Gupta, Lehmann and Stuart (2004) estimated that keeping 1% more customers raised a company's value by about 5%, against about 0.1% for finding them 1% more cheaply. That is why the "they come back" part of the calculator matters so much.
Your library
The canvas, with many examples of how businesses make money.
See the canvas →The study of every TeachersPayTeachers store.
Read the PDF →How to build an offer worth a higher price, using his value equation: the dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs the buyer. Built on his own businesses, not on research.
See the book →Where the 1,840 hours and the 50 to 60% come from.
Read the guide →Hover over a book to see what it is. On your phone, tap it.
Sources
Your garden
This is the last plant of Week 3, so when you water it, the week is done. Before you do, scroll up and rate yourself again on the two outcomes.