About mdLEARNING
Nicole Daniels runs mdLEARNING, an online GCSE science revision business for students in Year 10 and Year 11. She runs weekly live lessons, offers a monthly membership, and sells weekly exam practice sets, recorded lessons, and downloadable revision guides called Power Pages.
Nicole teaches students at every level, not just the ones aiming for a top grade. In her marketing, she talks about progress: her students typically move up one to two grades, and some move up as many as four.
Her customers are parents as much as students. That shapes everything about how she sells. Her offers have to be clear enough for a parent to buy, and structured enough for a teenager to actually use.
The Game Plan: A Business Built on Retention
Nicole knows the biggest risk in an online course business. People buy, then never log in.
“You set up these courses and they’re amazing, and then nobody ever does them, because there’s no accountability,” she said.
So she designs her offers around urgency and habit. Each week, students get one set of exam questions. On Sunday it disappears, and on Monday a new one appears.
“I give them a week to do some exam questions, and even if they pay £10 for it... at the end of the week, they lose access regardless of when they bought it in that time,” Nicole explained. “The parents are then saying to the kids, you have to do this because it will disappear, and then I make it disappear.”
Then, over the school break, she reverses it. Everyone gets free access to all six past sets to catch up.
“I can then suddenly make people really like me, because I can say, listen, you’ve only had a week’s access, but now I’m giving you access for half-term to all six from the last six weeks... for free, to catch up, and that boosts my retention.”
To run a business like this, she needed a platform that could switch access on and off quickly and keep students moving through what they bought.
The Challenge: Outgrowing a One-Size-Fits-All Setup
Like many solo founders, Nicole started with a patchwork of tools. She used MailChimp early on, then moved to HighLevel, an all-in-one marketing platform that handled email, automations, and course access in one place.
It worked at first. Then her business got more complex. She added a membership, one-off purchases, live lessons, and different versions of the same product for different exam levels.
“HighLevel is still one size fits all, and my business is not one size anymore,” Nicole said.
Three problems stood out.
Login problems ate her time
Students accessed their purchases through the old platform’s portal, and the emails kept coming. “That platform, in comparison to Tevello, is rubbish... I just end up getting so many emails about, oh, I can’t log in, or I can’t find it, or whatever, that was taking up too much time.”
Product versions were hard to sell
GCSE science comes in different tiers and award types, and students need the version that matches their course. “In HighLevel, you have to make 4 products,” she said. She also couldn’t charge more for the bigger version, which has more content.
She couldn’t see a way to scale
“I’m ready to start scaling, and these are the first tentative steps towards that, and I don’t think you can scale with something like HighLevel, because I don’t think it gives you that flexibility.”
The Solution: Shopify + Tevello, Together
Nicole moved to Shopify and Tevello at the same time. Everything she sells is digital, so Shopify alone wasn’t enough.
“When I knew that Tevello would work with Shopify, that seemed to be the best answer... I wouldn’t have been able to go to Shopify on its own,” she said.
She sees the two working as a pair: “My business runs off retention and the psychological triggers of how you use a course, and Tevello allows that, whereas Shopify just handles the actual purchase.”
Here’s how she set it up.
Tag-based access
Nicole runs nearly all access through Shopify customer tags. A tag on a customer gives them a course, and removing the tag takes the course away. That makes her weekly drops and free catch-up weeks simple to run. “The thing I quite like about tags is the ability to take them on and off, and then that changes their access quite easily,” she said. She can pick a segment, add a tag, and remove it when the week is over. She’s also added year labels to her tags, so returning students can keep what they earned as they move from Year 10 to Year 11.
Shopify Flow automation
When someone buys a product, a Shopify Flow automation tags them automatically, and the tag unlocks the matching course. No manual work is needed for each sale.
Free access as a sales tool
Because everything is tag-based, Nicole can give any lesson to anyone in seconds. She often does this when talking to parents. “As long as I know what the tag is, I can just say, right, you can have access to that, and it’s easier.” The tags also give her data. For example, she can see who has bought several weekly exam sets and email them to say a membership would be cheaper.
Locked courses that sell the next step
Students can see the courses they don’t own yet, and how to unlock them. “They have all these blocked things that they can see... how to unlock and stuff, so the upsell is easier and better.”
Product variants in Shopify
Shopify lets her sell one product in several versions, “similar to choosing your t-shirt size.” A parent chooses the tier and award type, and the larger version can cost more. Each version tags the buyer for the right content.
Simple, password-free login
Students log in through their Shopify account, with no password to forget. “That’s in part why Tevello works so nicely, because they never have a password,” Nicole said.
Hands-on support
Nicole is mostly a one-person business, with some admin help. She leans on Tevello’s team when she has questions, and says that working together means “we have that relationship where you understand about my business.”
The Results: More Sales, Fewer Support Emails
Halfway through the month, Nicole was at about £4,000 in revenue. At the same time last year, she says she had basically made no money.
She has about 30 monthly members, the same number she had at the end of last year. No one who has joined has left so far, though the membership has only been running on the new setup for a couple of months.
She hasn’t put any advertising behind it yet. Her small ad budget still sends people to her old checkout. Instead, she’s seeing more organic traffic to her Shopify store and more customers coming back to buy again.
“I seem to get more organic traffic to Shopify... and then more people making second and third purchases, because it’s easier for them to find what they’re looking for, and easier for them to log in.”
Admin has eased too. Nicole has had about three emails about login problems since the switch. These came from people who bought with one email address and tried to log in with another, or who just needed to log out and back in.
She also hasn’t reached the point in the year when students get stressed about exams, which she says is when they “just come running.”
What’s Next
Nicole plans to bring the hundreds of people who bought Power Pages on her old platform into Tevello. That move gives her a reason to email them, a free lesson to offer, and locked courses for them to discover.
She’s also bundling finished lessons, revision guides, and exam questions into topic-based “master” courses. She’s restructuring her weekly exam practice into a single course with scheduled modules. Her approach: “I’m very much up for recording one lesson and selling it in as many ways as possible. But also being aware to not overcomplicate it so parents don’t know what to buy.”
“Probably one of the best things so far is you [Tevello] supplying the support and knowing that there’s somebody else there to help you with that... That’s what I would say to other people that were thinking about joining.”
Nicole Daniels
Founder, mdLEARNING
Where Can You Find Nicole?
Shopify store: https://mdlearning.co.uk/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gcsescience.mdlearning/
An easy-to-use solution in Tevello
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