Teaching at Sleight School

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I'm not trying to recruit just anyone, I built Sleight School specifically so I could work with magicians whose teaching I trust, and I'm reaching out because I think you'd be a great fit.

I hope you'll see this as an entrepreneurial opportunity — a chance to take advantage of the platform to put your lessons, classes, and tutorials out there in the world, and, not incidentally, make a little money on the side.

This page isn't a pitch deck. It's just my attempt to explain — in one place — what the platform is, what teaching here would actually look like for you, and how the financial side works, so you can decide whether it makes sense for you. Take your time with it, and come back to me with whatever questions you have.

— David

Sleight School is a small, intentionally curated platform where magicians teach one-on-one lessons, host live group classes, and sell their own video tutorials. The whole site is built around the lesson experience — booking, payments, video room, recording, transcript, AI summary, follow-up emails — all of it handled.

Four things happen on the platform:

• Private lessons — students book 1-on-1 sessions with tutors like you. This is the heart of the school.
• The Shop — tutors can publish their own on-demand video tutorials, with a 70/30 split.
• Group classes — small live cohorts (capped at 10 students), occasionally run by tutors who want to teach a deeper subject over multiple weeks.
• Seminars — ticketed webinar-style events for large groups, sometimes led by our in-house tutors and sometimes by guest lecturers.

There's also a community side (a Circle community, a blog, a private 24/7 Teachers Lounge video room for tutors and admin) — but those are the supporting cast. The lessons are the point.

The homepage is where every student starts. They land, they pick a specialty and skill level, and the tutor grid reorders itself to surface the best matches. Your card sits there alongside the rest of the roster — photo, rate, specialties, a one-line bio. Clicking a card opens that tutor's full booking page.

The rest of the homepage scrolls through featured tutorials from the Shop, upcoming group classes, a live feed of community activity, student testimonials, and an FAQ. It's one page, top to bottom — designed so a first-time visitor can understand the whole school in about thirty seconds.

Your Booking Page is the page a student lands on when they click your card on the homepage. Your full bio lives on the left, the booking calendar on the right.

The booking flow is straightforward: the student picks a timezone (auto-detected), then a date and time from your live availability, fills out a short intake form so you know what they want to work on, agrees to the lesson guidelines, and pays. The whole thing takes a couple of minutes.

Under the hood, your availability is the combination of your weekly schedule, any one-off custom slots you've added, and any blocked time. Students only ever see slots that are genuinely open.

Can't find a time that works? Right under the time slot picker there's a "Request a custom time" link. If a student doesn't see a slot that fits their schedule, they can pick a date and time in their own timezone and send it to you as a request. You get notified, add the slot to your calendar if you can accommodate it, and the student completes the booking from there. It's a fallback so you never lose a student just because your open slots didn't line up.

The Shop is where tutors offer digital products. Students can buy on-demand streaming video tutorials and downloadable PDFs. The split on the Shop is 70/30 in your favor.

You don't have to sell anything in the Shop — plenty of tutors stick with live lessons only. But if you've got existing material, it's a quiet, passive income stream that runs alongside your teaching.

Once you're set up, you have a Tutor Dashboard that's the control room for everything — your lessons, your availability, your earnings, your payouts, your products, your messages, your students. It's the only page you really need.

The dashboard has tabs for:

• Lessons — every upcoming and past lesson, with intake forms, video link, recording, AI summary, and session notes
• Availability — weekly schedule, custom slots, blocked time
• Availability Requests — custom time requests from students who didn't see a slot that worked; approve by adding the slot, or decline
• Classes — any drop-in classes you're teaching
• Courses — any multi-week cohorts you're teaching
• Earnings — what you've made, what's pending, full transaction history across lessons, products, classes, courses, and seminars
• Payouts — Stripe Connect setup (required) and payout history
• Products — Shop tutorials you've published, drafts, submissions
• Resources — files and links you've shared with students
• Messages — direct messaging with students and admin
• Promotion Toolkit — embeddable booking widgets, social copy, and visual assets to help you market your lessons

Here's what your week-to-week looks like if you join:

• A student books a lesson with you. You get an email, a WhatsApp notification (if you opt in), and the booking appears in your Lessons tab.
• The day before the lesson, the platform sends both of you a reminder email with the Daily.co join link.
• You teach the lesson — camera, audio, everything inside the platform's video room (no Zoom account needed, no separate link to manage).
• The session is automatically recorded. After it ends, the platform fetches the transcript, generates an AI summary and action items, and emails both of you a follow-up with the recording link.
• The student's payment hits your Stripe account on Stripe's normal payout schedule.

That's the loop. You don't have to handle invoicing, calendaring, reminders, recordings, or follow-up emails — they happen for you. Your job is to show up and teach.

Custom time requests work the same way, just with one extra step. If a student doesn't see a slot that works, they send you a requested date and time. You get an email and a WhatsApp notification (if you've opted in), and the request appears in your Availability Requests tab. If you can accommodate it, you add the slot right from the request and message the student to complete the booking. If you can't, you decline. Either way the student is notified — no one's left hanging.

You set your own rate. You open as much or as little availability as you want. You can take a week off, a month off, a tour off — close the calendar and nobody can book. There are no quotas, no penalties for slow weeks, no "you must teach X hours."

This is the part most people want to know up front. Here's the actual math:

Worked example — a $120 lesson:

• Student pays $120
• You receive $96
• Sleight School receives $24 (and Stripe fees come out of that $24)

You set your own hourly rate. Tutors on the platform currently charge anywhere from roughly $90 to $150+ per hour depending on experience and demand. You can change your rate any time — admin just has to approve the change before it goes live (this is also true for any edit to your public bio / specialties / etc., so the platform stays consistent).

Discounts: the platform supports coupon codes (admin-managed), gift cards, and an automatic 10% discount for Academy tier members of the community. The 5-for-4 lesson package (buy 4 lessons, get the 5th free) is the only exception — it's exempt from stacked discounts since it's already a built-in deal.

The 80/20 (or 70/30) split applies to whatever the student actually pays after any discounts — so an Academy tier member taking 10% off a $120 lesson pays $108, and your 80% is calculated on $108.

Beyond your lesson teaching, there's a small affiliate opportunity built in. You can invite magicians to join the Sleight School community (Academy, Sleight Club, or any paid tier) using your personal affiliate code.

When someone joins using your code, they get $12 off their first month, and you earn $10 thirty days after their first payment clears (assuming the subscription remains active and hasn't been refunded). It's a nice quiet add-on that rewards you for pointing people toward the school.

You can access your affiliate panel directly from your dashboard — send invites to friends, fellow magicians, or people you think would love the community. No quota, no pressure — just an extra way to earn a little on the side.

Every tutor on Sleight School uses Stripe Connect for payouts. It's required — there isn't a manual invoicing alternative. The good news is it's quick to set up (about five minutes), supported in 40+ countries, and your money lands directly in your bank account on Stripe's normal payout schedule (usually 2-7 days after a lesson).

When a student pays at checkout, Stripe splits the transaction automatically — your 80% goes into your Stripe account, the platform's 20% goes into the school's account. No invoicing, no chasing, no waiting on a monthly batch payment.

If you don't have a Stripe Connect account when you start, payouts are simply held until you complete the onboarding flow — you don't lose anything, but you can't withdraw until it's connected.

Your tutor card is the thing students see on the homepage grid and at the top of your Classroom (booking page). It's the first impression. Here's what goes on it and how to think about each field:

• Photo — a good headshot or performance shot. Eye contact with the camera works really well here. If you'd rather use a short teaser video (Vimeo URL), the card will play that instead of a still image.
• Hourly rate — your call. We can talk about a sensible starting number for your experience and specialty.
• Specialties — pick the categories that actually represent your work (more on this below).
• Skill levels you accept — Newbie / Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced. Only students at those levels will be able to book you.
• "Best for" line — one sentence describing the ideal student for you. "Best for intermediate card workers who want to clean up their classic pass," for example.
• Short bio — the snippet on the card (see the next section for how to write it).
• What you can work on — a bullet list of specific topics you teach. Students love seeing concrete examples here.

How edits work: on your dashboard there's a button called Edit My Booking Page. You open it, make any changes you want, and submit. Edits go to me for a quick admin approval before they go live — this just keeps the public roster consistent.

You have two bios on the platform, and they do different jobs. Spend a few minutes on each — they're a real part of why students pick you.

Short bio

One sentence. Maybe two. This is the snippet under your name on the homepage card. It needs to do one thing: tell a student in three seconds why they should click on you instead of the magician next to you.

What works:

• A clear specialty + a hint of credibility ("Card worker, 20 years performing, focused on classical sleight of hand.")
• A teaching angle ("I work mostly with intermediate hobbyists who want to clean up their basics.")
• A personality flavor ("Comedy magician, kids' shows specialist, weekend warrior who loves teaching beginners.")

Avoid: long credit lists, vague phrases like "I love magic," and anything that doesn't help a student picture working with you.

Long bio

Two to four short paragraphs. This is what students read once they've opened your Classroom page and are deciding whether to book. They've already clicked — they're interested. This is where you confirm it.

A good long bio usually covers, in some order:

• Who you are as a performer — what you do, who you do it for, how long you've been doing it. Credits if they're relevant, kept short.
• What you specialize in teaching — and crucially, who you teach best. Beginners? Advanced workers? Hobbyists? Pros? Kids' show performers? Be specific.
• How you teach — your approach, your pace, what a lesson with you feels like. Patient and slow? Intensive and demanding? Lots of theory? Lots of drilling?
• What students walk away with — concretely. Cleaner mechanics? Stronger structure? A working show? A polished routine?

Tone: write the way you actually talk. The students reading this are magicians — they have decent radar for marketing-speak. The bios that land best are the ones that sound like the person, not the brand.

If writing about yourself isn't your favorite thing — totally understandable. Send me bullet points and I'll happily draft a version for you to edit.

These two settings control who can actually book you. They're more important than people realize — they decide how your card sorts in the homepage filter, and they keep you from getting booked by students who aren't a fit.

Specialties

Pick the categories you'd genuinely teach well. Depth beats breadth here. Three specialties you're great at will sort you higher (and convert better) than ten specialties you're "okay" at. Available specialties include:

• Card Magic, Close-Up, Coin Magic
• Mentalism, Cardistry, Gambling, Memorized Deck
• Stage Magic, Grand Illusion, Comedy Magic, Kids Shows
• Performance, Show Structure, Stagecraft, Scripting
• General Magic (use sparingly — only if you really do teach a wide spread)

Students filter the homepage by specialty, so the tags you check are the searches you show up for. Tag honestly.

Student skill levels

Four options — pick any combination of the levels you actually want to work with:

• Newbie — never done magic before, or just started this month.
• Beginner — knows a few sleights, can do a small set of effects, still building fundamentals.
• Intermediate — solid mechanics, performs regularly, looking to deepen specific areas.
• Advanced — experienced performer, often a working pro, looking for high-level coaching, polish, or specific problem-solving.

If you only want to work with advanced students, check just Advanced. If you love teaching beginners, check Newbie and Beginner and leave the others off. The homepage filter uses these settings to help students narrow down their choices and surface the tutors who are the best fit for them.

The intake form (which every student fills out before booking) backs this up by asking their experience on a 1-10 scale plus context — so you'll know exactly where they are before the lesson even starts.

Sleight School has its own blog at /blog — and it's open to every tutor on the roster. From your dashboard you can write posts, save drafts, and submit them for a quick admin review before they go live. Once published, they appear on the public blog and on the homepage's "From the Blog" section, with your name and photo as the author.

Why I'm hoping you'll write: the blog is one of the best ways for students to get to know you outside of a lesson. A bio gives them the headline; a blog post gives them the person. Different posts show different sides of you — the performer, the teacher, the thinker, the human — and that's what makes someone decide you're the tutor they want to work with.

Things tutors write about that work really well:

• Stories from gigs — what worked, what didn't, what you learned in the moment
• Teaching insights — patterns you see across students, advice you wish you'd been given
• Thoughts on technique, theory, scripting, or the craft
• Behind-the-scenes — your creative process, a routine you're developing, a problem you're working through

Active bloggers tend to get more bookings — not because of SEO tricks, but because students read a few posts and feel like they already know you a little before they ever click "Book." It's also a real contribution to the school: every good post raises the value of Sleight School for everyone — students, fellow tutors, and the wider magic community.

No quota, no pressure, no schedule. Write when you have something to say. Even one or two posts a year makes a difference.

The school is small on purpose. I'm in the platform every day. If something's not working, if a student is weird, if you want to change your rate, if you want to try teaching a cohort, if you want me to draft your bio for you — message me. The response time is usually within a few hours, and there are several ways to reach me:

• In-platform messaging — admin shows up in your Messages tab
• Tutors WhatsApp Group — a private group chat for all tutors + admin
• Email — david@davidwilliamson.com
• Text / WhatsApp me directly — 937-232-0613

I also keep a longer, more detailed tutor walkthrough at /tutor-walkthrough that goes feature by feature through every tab in the dashboard. Once you're set up, that's the reference. This page you're reading right now is just the overview.

If this all sounds good, the next step is simple: reply to me. We'll get on a quick call (15-20 minutes), I'll answer anything that didn't get covered here, and if we're aligned, I'll get you set up:

1. I create your tutor profile and send you a login
2. You fill out your card — bio, specialties, skill levels, rate, etc.
3. You send me a high-res headshot you'd like to use (I'll process it to match the look of the other tutor photos on the grid)
4. You connect Stripe Connect (5 minutes)
5. You sign the independent tutor agreement (interactive form, generates a signed PDF)
6. You open availability on your calendar — and we're live

I'm genuinely glad you're considering this. Whatever you decide, thank you for reading all the way down.

— David