How I Automated My One-Man Tutoring School with AI

I run a small tutoring school in Hikone, Japan. For years, holding down a normal job wasn't something I could count on — panic disorder cost me four or five jobs before I turned 30. So when I opened my own classroom, I had no staff, no budget for software, and some days, not much energy either.

What I did have was time to learn, and a stubborn refusal to let my health decide whether my students got taught.

I started building things in Google Apps Script — the free scripting layer behind Google Sheets — because it was the only tool I could afford and the only one I had time to learn on my own schedule. Over about a year, it grew into a full system: student records, payment tracking, a pipeline for trial students, automatic social media posts, even automatic reminders for unpaid tuition. None of it was built by a developer. All of it was built by someone who just needed the school to keep running on the days he couldn't.

This book is the honest version of that build — including the parts that didn't work, the parts I still do by hand on purpose, and the parts that quietly gave me back hours of my week. It includes a practical starting checklist and a set of reusable Apps Script code patterns you can adapt to your own tools.

This isn't a course on Google Apps Script, and it isn't a promise that automation will fix your health or your income. It's one small operator's real build, written by the person who needed it to work.

If you run a one-person business — tutoring or otherwise — and you're tired of choosing between "do it all yourself" and "pay for tools you can't afford," this book is for you.