I’m not a developer. I teach English online and got tired of tracking lessons and chasing parents for payments in a spreadsheet, so over a few weekends I built a little app with Claude and Cursor. Tutors log lessons, parents get a monthly invoice with a pay button. That’s the whole thing

I put it online in August for $10 a month, mostly so a couple of tutor friends could use it

Last week it crossed $100 in a month. Ten paying tutors, seven of them strangers

One of the new ones sent me a message saying she found it because ChatGPT recommended it. I assumed she was being nice or confused it with something else. Nobody knows this app exists. My X account has 90 followers

So I opened ChatGPT and asked for an invoicing tool for private tutors. It listed four apps and mine was the third one, with a description that sounded weirdly close to my landing page

It took me a while to figure out why. Before launch I paid for a press release through MediaBoost. I only did it because a friend said tutors and parents would trust it more if there were a few news logos on the page. It got syndicated to a few hundred news sites that nobody reads, and I got maybe 8 visits from all of them combined. Same week I added their directory package to get listed on a bunch of software directories

I’d written both off. Apparently AI tools read those pages even if people don’t

I asked the other strangers too. Four said ChatGPT or Perplexity, two found me on a directory, one came from a tutor friend

The $100 is going straight to the Claude subscription that built the thing