Hear from Mitul - our founder

I first began learning Spanish in Year 7, my school offered both Spanish and French, and I went with Spanish as that’s what my friends from primary were going to pick. I was in top set so when it came to GCSE options, I was heavily encouraged to pick Spanish so that’s what I did. I began to especially like Spanish at the start of year 11, where I would begin learning Spanish outside of class, I vividly remember teaching myself the perfect tenses using The Language Tutor on YouTube. I chose Spanish as a 4th A-Level alongside Maths, Physics and Design Technology. Spanish looks like the odd one out from that list, but for me it was my fun subject.

It was at the start of Year 12 when I posted my first video, about the 90-word question in the old GCSE specification. I’m not sure why I decided to create my YouTube channel when I did, especially starting with a GCSE video, I didn’t have plans to do Spanish tutoring at that point. The A-Level videos I made my first year made sense as I was doing the A-Level myself. It wasn’t until about February 2023 when I got my first student and decided to focus on tutoring for Spanish.

When I started year 13, I hired my first tutor to tutor alongside me. This quickly grew to a team of 5 by the summer of 2024. I was able to do a lot more tutoring myself in my first year of university as I had much more free time. Now as we head into the academic year of 2025-26, I want to continue providing high quality tutoring lessons myself and with a team, because unfortunately (but also fortunately) we get so many students that I can’t do it all myself anymore!

I like being able to have a big impact on students nationwide through the free YouTube videos we post and then being able to have a personalised impact on our 1-1 and group paid students. This allows me to grow a sustainable business and neither side of the business would survive without the other.

Increasingly nowadays, I've found that my time is no longer best spent on 1-1 teaching. Our tutors are highly capable and perform the job just as well. So now I dedicate a lot of my time to strategising for future YouTube videos and developing new opportunities for astarlanguages along with hiring new team members and managing those that work here.

I purposely don’t hire native speakers or qualified teachers, as although they bring some great benefits, I believe students learn better from other students, which is why our team consists of university MFL students who have sat A-Level Spanish/French recently.

Ever wonder how I'm able to share all these resources for free? It's thanks to our YouTube videos being monetised! The income helps keep things going, so a fantastic way to support us is just by watching and interacting with our videos. I'm a firm believer that teachers shouldn't have to pay out of their own pockets for teaching resources. And likewise students deserve high quality resources for their language subjects.