I co-founded Upthegrade with three partners. Paid traffic is our main acquisition channel – so the funnel and the unit economics aren’t a service I sell, they’re the thing my own business lives or dies on.
Every tutoring company in Lithuania runs the same play: “Get your first math lesson free.” It trains the whole market to treat tutoring as a disposable transaction – grab the freebie, ghost, move on. Cheap to enter, impossible to build anything on. We decided to go the other way.
A free lesson attracts everyone and commits no one. You fill the calendar with people who were never going to stay, tutors burn time on no-shows, and you’ve taught the customer that what you do has no value before they’ve even started.
The real product in tutoring isn’t a lesson. It’s the relationship – the right tutor matched to the right pupil, over time. So the funnel couldn’t just generate bookings. From the first touch it had to filter for people willing to invest, and start the matching immediately.
I built the opposite of the market’s approach. Instead of free, we charge €5 for a trial lesson – small enough that no serious parent blinks, large enough that the freebie-hunters filter themselves out. That single price point covers our lead cost and qualifies intent before anyone reaches the team.
By the time a family is paying, they’ve been qualified, understood, and matched. That’s why they stay – and retention is what turns paid traffic from an expense into a compounding engine.
Paid didn’t deliver one big month. It delivered a curve.
This is the one I can vouch for completely – because it’s mine. Every metric above is a number I own and track: lead cost, cost per client, close rate, ROAS. Not a campaign I ran for someone. A business I built.
Most companies buy traffic. Few build the economics that make it compound.