British Startup Teaching English: Shiv Rajendran, Co-founder of LanguageLab, London (Part 5)

Sramana: How many customers were you able to generate using your PPC model?

Shiv Rajendran: Initially we were only getting five or six conversions per day. We were charging a minimum of $30 a month. We sold our product on a subscription model.

Sramana: What were your next steps in building the company?

Shiv Rajendran: We used that PPC model through 2008. It became obvious that we did not have the budget to make it successful via the PPC or SEO route. Big companies were spending a lot of money to dominate those two fields, and they were very successful. At that point we decided to keep the enrollment business going but not spend money on the PPC. Instead we relied on organic growth and recommendations. A typical user would study with us for three to six months, leave for two months and then return. Users came back when they felt their English level dropped.

Once we put the enrollment business on cruise control, we started to target corporations. We wanted to see who would take to our concept. We targeted education, banking and any large companies that needed to do English language training.

Sramana: How did you go about penetrating the corporate space?

Shiv Rajendran: We started by doing anything we could to get our name out. We started attending conferences and approaching schools. We were able to make small deals that would bring in anywhere from a dozen to 800 students at one time through English language schools. English language schools in London have students come onsite for a 6- to 8-week course. When students left after the course is done, those schools did not get any more revenue from those students. We offered them a share of annuity revenue.

We secured databases of customers from the English language schools and emailed those students. We had a fair amount of success in getting those students to convert. We went from a few hundred concurrent users to a few thousand concurrent users within the first year of following that strategy. In the long term, the English language schools viewed us as rivals. There was only so much they were willing to do for us. Data protection laws in the UK also became stricter, so it was not as easy for schools to hand off their alumni lists anymore.

We took on our first full-time salesperson at that point. We went after corporate customers and chased government contracts. Our first big contract was the Brazilian government. They needed to train their air traffic controllers. That was a big part of our revenue during our first year. The Brazilian government was looking for something new, so we put in our bid and came in fifth. In Brazil, the way it works is if you win a contract, then they first test if you are able to deliver. The four companies above us were not able to deliver. That gave us an opportunity to take the contract. We had to go through the process of educating the buyers. We showed them how contextual learning worked and they thought a computer game environment would be far more engaging for their users.

Sramana: How many students were coming in through that channel?

Shiv Rajendran: It started with 300 for one year. They paid for a specialized program.

This segment is part 5 in the series : British Startup Teaching English: Shiv Rajendran, Co-founder of LanguageLab, London
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