Nobody learns to build from someone who has never built.
Every club, every course, every coach comes down to one question a parent should be asking: who exactly will be sitting beside my child?
This is the only page on the site that talks about me, and I’d rather it didn’t have to. But you’re thinking about handing me two hours of your child’s week — on something that, done properly, changes how they see themselves for good. You’re entitled to know who I am.
So — briefly, and only as evidence.
Khalid Saeed BScMentor & founder · Croydon
Looking for a coding tutor in Croydon? The difference here is who is in the room. Khalid runs the vibe coding sessions himself — not a coding class, and not a curriculum bought off a shelf. He builds real software, and he teaches the way he works.
The question underneath
Every parent eventually arrives at the same question.
It isn’t “can he build websites?” It’s “would I be happy if my child became a little more like him?”
And underneath that, the one that really decides it:
“When it gets hard — and it will — is this the person I’d want sitting beside my child?”
That’s what this page is for, and what the Discovery Meeting is for. Please don’t take my word for any of it. Come and judge for yourself.
So you know where I stand: I’m not trying to be the best AI builder in the world. I’m trying to be the mentor I wish every young person could have.
12 years
teaching Croydon children
1,000+
children taught
100+
grammar school places won
4.5★
from 31 parent reviews
AI Builders Club is a new venture from an established Croydon tuition centre. The record above is the centre’s, built over twelve years in the same room, by the same mentor who will be sitting beside your child.
Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela
Part one · The teacher
Twelve years. Over a thousand children. One Croydon room.
Twelve years running my own tuition centre in Croydon — Year 4 to A Level, one-to-one, small groups, large groups, even a football academy. Wherever children are, I’ve found a way to reach them.
Over a hundred of those students won grammar school places — Wilson’s, Sutton, Wallington, St Olave’s, Nonsuch.
images/mentor-teaching.jpg 1120×587 · re-cropped 2 Aug from the GCSE video — face and board visible, subtitles removed
Here is what those numbers actually mean.
You cannot drag a child into a grammar school. Every one of those places belonged to a child who decided, somewhere along the way, to trust someone — and then to work harder than they wanted to.
You don’t teach a child into a grammar school. You draw them out of themselves.
That’s the part nobody puts on a certificate: working out what makes this particular child tick. The quiet one. The one who’s already decided they’re rubbish at it. The one who’ll work like anything for someone they trust, and not at all for someone they don’t.
Twelve years is a long apprenticeship in that. It’s the half of this job I care about most.
Young people walk in certain they aren’t the sort of person who can do this. Watching that belief come off them has never once got old.
“Mr Khalid is patient, friendly and knows what he is doing… the lessons are interactive, made fun and engaging.”
— Saira Gill
“Before I joined, my previous tutor told me I was ‘under-average’ and ‘mediocre’. As soon as I joined Tutor Croydon I saw major improvements.”
— Rayan Khan, student
“Great tutor who is always motivating students and he is very passionate about tutoring.”
— Asma Ahmed, Google review
Same mentor, same room, from the tuition years — and not proof I can teach building. That comes further down. I’ve kept years of parents’ messages and results: ask at the Discovery Meeting and I’ll show you. I’d far rather show you than ask you to take my word for anything.
Tomorrow’s illiterate is the one who has not learned how to learn.
Alvin Toffler
The turn
Then the world changed. And I became a student again.
I’ve always told parents my job isn’t to hand a child answers — it’s to change how they think. Then AI arrived, and I realised something uncomfortable: everything I believed about learning was about to be tested on me.
The easy thing would have been to add a module, call it “AI for kids”, and keep the business running. I wasn’t willing to stand at the side of the pool shouting instructions about water.
So I stopped talking about it, and went and built something.
You cannot give a child what you have not first earned yourself.
Part two · The builder
Eleven months. One system. I’ll keep this short.
My own interest is markets, so I picked something genuinely hard: a live platform reading several markets at once — a working system, not an idea on paper.
Eleven months, day and night. No course. No teacher. No textbook. Nobody to ask — because for this, none of that exists yet. Every bit of it self-taught.
Solve one problem and two more grow back in its place. Nights when the thing that worked yesterday simply didn’t, and nobody on earth could tell me why.
At one point I nearly stopped. Not dramatically — quietly. Sitting there thinking: this might be beyond me.
I kept going. I built it, and I’m still building it.
The system, live — eleven months in the making.Built by one person, still running, still being improved.
So I know from the inside exactly what a long build asks of a person. That turns out to matter far more than anything technical I learned.
What I’m actually handing your child.
Not the platform. Not the code. Not the tools — those change every few months anyway. Five things I paid for in months of frustration, that your child gets in weeks:
How to keep going when it breaks. I know how that week feels, and how to talk someone through it.
Thinking before building. I rebuilt for weeks what I should have planned in hours. Your child skips that.
A real partnership with AI — not asking it for answers, but pushing back, questioning, building on what it gives you.
That walls are the path. Every wall taught me more than every success did.
The spirit that won’t let a vision stay invisible. The rarest one, and the only one you can’t get from a book. You catch it from someone who has it.
I paid for that in months of frustration. Your child shouldn’t have to. That is what one generation does for the next.
And this website? I built it myself, in days. When I need something that doesn’t exist yet, my instinct is to go and make it — and that instinct is exactly what I’m trying to grow in your child.
Why both halves matter
The hard part was never the code.
Ask most people what makes building difficult and they’ll point at the technical bit — the jargon, the syntax, the stuff that looks impossible. It isn’t. It never was.
Building is hard because building is slow. Real things get made over weeks, through a long line of problems. Every builder alive goes through it. I went through eleven months of it.
Nothing worth building ever goes smoothly. That isn’t a warning — it’s simply what building is.
A young person who knows that in advance doesn’t panic when it happens. They stop reading a problem as proof they’re not good enough, and start reading it as the next step — the whole difference between a project that gets finished and one that quietly stalls.
The young person who expects it to be hard isn’t frightened when it is.
Teaching that isn’t a technical job. It’s knowing when someone needs pushing and when they need leaving alone. Telling stuck from disheartened. Being the person a young builder will actually say “I don’t get it” to, without feeling small for saying it.
One half of me knows how to build. The other half knows how to keep a young person moving on the day building stops being fun. Your child needs both — and they are very rarely found in the same room.
It’s already happening
This didn’t start as a business plan.
For the past three months I’ve been building websites, apps and games with the teenagers of family and friends — quietly, no syllabus, no fees. Just a young person with an idea, me beside them, and an afternoon.
That’s where the club came from. Watching what happens to a young person’s face when the thing they imagined actually works.
That face is why this club exists.
Every child deserves one adult who looks at their biggest idea, believes they can do it, and says: “Right — let’s see if we can build it.”
Two parents, unedited
You have just read a page of me describing myself.
So here are two people who have no reason to be generous about it. Both trusted me with their children for years before this club existed. Ask them the awkward questions you would ask me — they already have.
▶Video oneTo come
[ Parent’s name ][ How many children, how many years ]
▶Video twoTo come
[ Parent’s name ][ How many children, how many years ]
These are tuition parents, speaking about the teaching. They are not proof I can teach building — that is what the rest of this page, and the children’s own videos, are for. But they are the people best placed to tell you what I am like with a child who is finding something hard.
And this is the whole of it
Children rarely become what they’re told. They become what they’re shown.
I can’t lecture a child into becoming a builder. Nobody can. What I can do is sit beside them while they build something genuinely hard, and let them watch how a builder behaves when it goes wrong — because it will go wrong, and that is the exact moment everything real gets taught.
Your child is stuck. Three ideas, three failures. They look up from the screen, and someone across the table says:
“I’ve been here. Try this.”
They watch someone stay calm at a wall, and reach for a fourth idea after three have failed. And slowly, without anyone announcing it, they start doing the same.
Before children believe in themselves, they borrow someone else’s belief. I’ll lend your child mine — for as long as it takes them to build enough of their own.
This whole page answers one question: can he do what he says he’ll do for my child? That’s the last you’ll hear about me.
One day your child won’t remember every session, or every project. But they will remember how it felt to sit beside someone who believed they could make something extraordinary — before they believed it themselves.
That’s the kind of mentor I hope to be.
— Khalid
Come and see for yourself
Bring your child to a free Discovery Meeting.
Sit down with Khalid, see the studio, and find out exactly how the club works. Best of all — bring your child’s ideas. If they’ve already landed on one, mention it when you ring and I’ll have thought about how we’d build it before you arrive. And if they haven’t got one, that’s just as good a place to start — working it out together is the first thing we do.
It’s relaxed, it’s free, and nothing is sold at it. Most families leave simply knowing a lot more than when they arrived.
Prefer to talk first? Ring Khalid — you get me, not a receptionist. A friendly chat, no obligation, and I’ll answer every question you have honestly and in plain English. Ask me anything. Rather write? Email hello@aibuildersclub.co.uk.
