Filling a weekly timetable: terms, waitlists and the quiet weeks

How do I get a term on sale without creating twelve events?

Describe the cadence once — "Tuesdays at 19:00 for eight weeks" — and every session is generated with its own places in a single transaction. It is all or nothing on purpose: a series that half-created itself would sell places in dates that do not exist, and the student who bought one would find out at the door.

The cadence is stored as a rule, not only as the sessions it produced, so extending a term later does not mean re-deriving what the pattern was from a list of dates. One generation is capped at 200 sessions, which is more than a year of daily classes — past that, a mistyped date range is the likelier explanation than a real plan.

How many places should I put on a class?

The number the room and your teaching can actually hold, not the number that would be nice. Places are decremented under a row lock inside the confirming transaction, so the count is the truth and the class genuinely stops selling at it — which only helps if the count is honest in the first place.

A slightly tight count is better than a slightly loose one for a weekly class. A full class with three people on a waitlist sells the next term for you; a room with four spare mats reads as a class that is not working, to you and to the people in it.

What makes a waitlist worth joining?

That the place is actually held when your turn comes. Bindro promotes the front of the queue by putting a time-boxed hold on the freed place and emailing a link straight into checkout, so the promotion is a reservation for 24 hours rather than a notification that starts a race between everyone who signed up.

If the promoted student lets the hold lapse it is swept like any other hold and the place moves to the next person on a later tick. Nobody has to chase, and you do not have to arbitrate.

Waitlist entries are per class, and re-joining does not improve a position — the queue is a queue. It is worth saying that in your copy, because students assume otherwise and some will try.

What do I do about the weeks that never fill?

Look at whether it is the time or the offer before you discount. A Tuesday that never fills and a Thursday that always does is a scheduling fact, and moving the class costs you nothing but a term of patience.

If it is the offer, a capped intro code aimed at new students is cleaner than lowering the price for everyone: the cap is enforced in the database rather than counted afterwards, so a code meant for twenty people cannot go to eighty when a post does better than you expected. And unlike a price cut, it does not teach your regulars to wait for the next one.

A sliding scale is the other lever, and a different one — it fills a quiet class with people who could not pay the full rate rather than with people who were waiting for a sale.

How do I get students to come back next term?

Ask them while they still remember the class. A post-class email goes out after the class completes, and it is the most-read message you will ever send these people — the next term's link belongs in it rather than in a post they will not see.

Class packs do this structurally: a student with three credits left has a reason to look at your timetable that has nothing to do with your marketing. That is most of why packs are worth the trouble of pricing properly.

Every class also has a share link with a generated preview card, so a student who wants to bring a friend can send something that unfurls with the class, the date and the price rather than a bare address.