How I Built This with Guy Raz - How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz

Episode Date: October 22, 2020

Fluenz helps English speakers learn new languages, both online and with in-person immersion programs. With travel restrictions and a global pandemic, CEO and founder Sonia Gil had to scrap her in-person immersion programs, and create a new system for teaching students remotely. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times. Order the How I Built This book at:https://smarturl.it/HowIBuiltThisSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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starting with online video programs and eventually expanding into language immersion programs. Sonia, let's start with the founding of Fluenz. I guess you founded this like more than a decade ago, and originally the idea was this was going to be an online-only, platform. Is that right? That's right. So we launched our first product Fluence Mandarin in January of 2007. Kind of like if we can if we can teach Mandarin, we can teach anything. Yeah. This was a while ago. This is pre-apps, pre-anything. And yeah, the idea was to have a self-learn digital program that was specifically made for English speakers. And that's that's the key

component there and that's really what differentiates us from from everybody else. We deconstruct the language and put it back together from the point of view of somebody who's an English speaker who's learning that language. So if you're going to learn Spanish and you come from English, the obstacles you're going to face are going to be very different than somebody who comes from Italian. They're going to learn it quicker, no doubt. You're going to have a harder time. And it's seems logical and you think that everything that's out there obviously takes that into account. But that's not the case, actually. Most of the programs and even books and university programs and everything else have one

path of learning and that's what it is. And so that makes it harder for us. That means our market is smaller. That also means that every time we develop the language is incredibly difficult, it takes resources and time and whatnot. But it also ensures that you have. have better results and that you feel like it's made for you because it is made for you. Yeah. And it was like an online program. You'd go to website and then you would basically go through

the different steps in taking the class. Yeah. So it's online, but there was a very big element, which is the premise of everything that we do. And it was how do we bring the magic that an amazing teacher has? I'm sure you've had an experience of a great teacher that you remember. I know I have it. Like, how do we bring that to the digital space in a self-learned program? And every one of our programs has a very strong video component. There's one person that teaches you throughout. I'm actually the video coach for a lot of the languages. And so every lesson starts with an introduction in English explaining like, okay, today we're going to do this. We're going to face these obstacles. We're going to do it together. Then there's a big tutorial where we compare English to whatever

language you're learning, this is how we do it, there's a lot of graphics where it's come in and out, and then you go through a battery of workouts that are designed specifically so that you leverage what you learn and you go forward. There's always a conclusion on video. That's where we bring the cultural aspects of the language. We always talk about either a particular painting or an artist or a movie or a book or a recipe, like something that ties in the language with the culture. And that was how it all started. So a couple years ago, you decided to kind of shift a little bit into in-person immersion courses, courses in Waxaca and in Mexico City and in Barcelona for people to go for like a week at a time to just really immerse themselves in language.

Tell me about that decision to kind of shift some of your focus in that direction. It was actually an idea that had been floating around for a while for us. You know, we wanted to do something in person that was, there wasn't anything out there that meant, our needs that involved not only just great teaching and a great methodology, but also a beautiful place, go to great restaurants, like not have to think about it, right? There's a lot of immersion programs out there. You know, you can go to Costa Rica for a week and it's super inexpensive and you live with a family and it's cumbersome and you're kind of in a classroom with a lot of people, a lot of young people. So this was thought for like adults. I want to go somewhere where I'm

comfortable. I want to go to great museums. I want to hear talks about history and culture, and I just want to have like a whole experience about the language and the culture and the place that I'm visiting. And there was really nothing out there. So finally we decided to go for it and build it and started. And a big part of that decision and why we hadn't done it before is because, again, the learning part of it is a big component. And that meant that I had to sit down and write the program. Like it's different how you learn through a screen and the programs that we'd written were meant and written and thought of for somebody who is at home alone learning in a computer. When you are in our immersion programs, you spend four hours a day,

sometimes five hours a day with an instructor one-on-one. That's a whole different notion and a different experience. So it was it was kind of like I had to reckon with the fact that I had to sit down and not sleep and drink lots of coffee for a long time. So talk to me a little bit about what happened this year, because obviously, immersion programs, you got people going to cities around the world and all of a sudden COVID hits, and you had to shut it down. And we had to shut down, exactly, completely. And we went to zero.

Wow. Starting this part of the business was like starting a brand new company all over again. It was like going back to the roots, you know, like bootstrapping it. How do we make it happen? How do we build it? Yeah. And that all happened in 2017. And in 2018, we started with our first groups in Mexico City.

We grew 100% plus 2019. 2020 was going to be our big expansion year. This year is when we were opening in Barcelona and Oaxaca. Wow. And we had already grown 100% only selling out until June, like mid-year, right? So it was like our expansion year. Wow. And we were meant to be starting our very first group in Barcelona.

on March 8th. And the entire team was supposed to be moving to Barcelona on February 25. So if you remember, on February we weren't sure what was happening, right? Right. And Barcelona closed up March 14th. We had to make a really hard decision. And at the time, our team thought we were being a little bit like we were exaggerating. our guests, we had to pull out early, and we did.

We did in late February. We kind of just made the call and just wrote to everybody, like, hi, we're not doing this. We're postponing it. We're figuring it out. One of our guests actually received the email for the postponement while she was on the plane to go to Barcelona. She was going early. Like, people were not happy. It was complicated.

It turned out later that we made the right decision and we were like the coronavirus whisperers. But it was tough. I mean, we had 50 people going to play. Barcelona, opening up a full city. We had programs laid out for the whole year. We were opening up in Mojaca in April. We had relationships with vendors, with hotels. We had commitments that we had already paid for. Local teams, I mean, ah, March was rough. When we come back in just a moment, more of my conversation with Sonia Gill and how her company had to rethink in-person immersion in a world with no travel. Stay with us.

I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. And one more thing. The New York Times best-selling book How I Built This is now available. It's a great read and a great gift for anyone looking for ideas, inspiration, wisdom, and encouragement to have the courage to put out an idea into the world. It's filled with tons of stories you haven't heard about how some of the greatest entrepreneurs you know and respect started out. at the very bottom. Check out how I built this, the book, available wherever you buy your books. Hey, welcome back to how I built this Resilience Edition. And I'm talking with Sonia Gill. She's the founder and CEO of Fluenz. After travel restrictions, shut down her company's in-person immersion program in Mexico City, Waxaca, and Barcelona, Fluenz had to return

to its roots, online education. But Sonya still wasn't sure if they'd make it. Sonya, was there a moment where you were worried about whether your whole business would make it through this year? Oh my God. Are you kidding? Yes, I'm still worried. We're alive and we're good, but of course, yes, absolutely. Step one was just go back to the Excel sheet and just dial down everything. Like, what are we spending on that we don't need to be spending on right now? How do we get to the bare minimum to keep going? And, you know, it was important to us to keep the entire team as much as much as we're spending on. possible. We had no idea what's going to happen, but, you know, what can we do? There's a lot of things that we already paid for. Like, what can we do here? Let's negotiate a lot of things we lost, a lot of things we're able to keep. And then, okay, we have all of these people booked for the whole year. We need to contact them, do the best we can in terms of, you know, returns or postponants. Like, we need to come up with a policy. That was like the first couple of weeks just putting down

the fire, right? At the same time, being the psychologist and mentor and shoulder for the team, you know, a lot of our members are quite young and great, amazing people that they were like up in the air, like, what do we do now? We have nothing, right? So a lot of it was also that like talking to every single individual person in the team, hi, we're good, we got your cover until the end of the year. What's your situation? Can you make it if we bring it down? Like, what's the deal? I wanted to know every single individual situation so that we could just feel at ease for at least the coming months. So, what? we could actually think and come together and figure something out.

I was in Mexico City at the time. I had a home there. I'm based there. So I decided to kind of pack my bags and leave. And we rented a home in Colorado far away from everything. So I could just sit down and have time to focus and come up with something new. It was like we kind of started a new company in 20, 2017 and what that takes.

And so like, here we are in March. We've got to start a company all over again, but we got 30 days. What do we do? What's next? Wow. So you go to Colorado after, I mean, putting out this huge fire must have been so stressful. And you go there with the idea of like, we've got to come up with a plan to keep our business operating through this economic crisis. So what do you come up with?

Yeah. It was clear that the way to do it was, okay, we got to pivot and go online. We had the digital products and we've never left that alone that exists and that goes on. But it's very different than what we do the immersion program. And so it was like, what can we do? How do we pivot the face-to-face experiences where people definitely expect much more than just the language learning, right? It's about a cultural experience. It's about feeling taken care of. How do we translate what we have there into this, right, a screen. And thankfully, throughout the years that we've done the in-person immersion, we had been doing some online coaching with people that had already been in the immersion to continue. So we had already a little bit of knowledge in terms of the format. We already knew that 90 minutes is the perfect amount of time to do a chapter. So we knew that. And then we knew a little a bit about what the exchange is like online. So step one was our team let's put together this content from getting everybody together training and making sure that the exchange through a screen was the correct one and making sure that the look of what you see is pleasing, is aesthetic,

it looks like it's thought out. There's some informality through these types of engagements, through screens that sometimes bring a little bit less seriousness to the conversation. And we want it to bring in the seriousness, which is what we have in the in-person experiences. So everybody has a uniform. There's a system where we know exactly where every student is and what they're going through. At the same time, we have a meeting every week with all of our team members. We discuss every single student. What are they missing?

Do we need to change anything? Do we need to adapt anything? So it turned out that this online version of the immersion has been incredibly effective in terms of the learning for our guests. Because we can be that much more precise and we can individualize it that much more. You had Solomon Can on this podcast. I love him. And he talked about how the best learning experiences are when you have a great teacher that identifies your gaps. and then focuses on that.

And this online version of the immersion allows us much better to hone in on those gaps and fill them in. This sounds like a really cool thing that you guys are doing. How are you getting the word out about the offerings? And what are ways that you're trying to essentially acquire new users or get new customers? That's a tough one. Being in a language learning business for so long, I can tell you that the affinity isn't always there, meaning, guy, you happen to like Italian, and that's the language that you'd like want to learn. But that doesn't mean that your friend wants to learn that or is willing to put in the time to learn that.

It's really hard to hone in on the demographics. Thankfully, the way we started with the online immersion is that we have a database. We have all the people that have come to the immersions. We have all the people that had signed up to come in the future. And so we were able to offer this as a replacement in a way. that got us started. We do campaigns in Google Ads. I talk to anyone that is willing to talk to me, just like when we started digital programs. Same thing with the online. How big is your team right now? So we are about 20, 20 instructors and growing. You do Spanish, Mandarin, Italian, what else?

German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. For the emergence, for now we only do Spanish, but we definitely want to add. This is a question from Chelsea Ewing Chow. Chelsea asks, do you have any plans to create a feature that enables similar students to interact with one another? So a lot of our students that are in the emergence now crave that connection with other students, right? And right now what we're doing is we're doing live events every month. So history talks, and they're free, by the way. Everybody who's listening, come to our live events. They're amazing. We have history talks in Spanish and English so that you can practice but also actually get the information, cooking classes, whatever, all sorts of interests and people come together there to make some match. But yeah, that's something that's in the works.

Everything's in the works now. And so, I mean, it seems like this kind of pivot that you've made with the immersion program. I mean, do you think that is going to actually impact the way you teach immersion even after we get out of this pandemic? Oh my God, yes. The answer is a solid 100% yes. First of all, the online immersion is here to stay. I've no doubt. It's something that also had been in their minds. But if there's one thing this pandemic has accelerated and it has opened the doors, is online education. I think people are definitely ready and willing and much more open to it. So yeah, this is here to stay. I think there will be a mix of both. So I can see how a lot of of people will do an online immersion first before doing an on-site one to, you know, to really get the most of the on-site one. But we'll see, right? We're figuring it out. We're growing the team at the same time. There's a lot of uncertainty. It's definitely less lucrative. I mean, it sounds like you're doing exactly the right thing. I mean, a moment like this forces constraints, and within those constraints, you have to be nimble and you have to be careful with how you spend money.

and you have to be focused and you're doing all those things. Yeah, we're there. We're good. We're solid. We're alive. We actually see a horizon where we can grow. We've, a new part of the business has sprung up and that's exciting. But we're still on total bootstrap mode. Like, do not spend anything that does not need to be spent on right now, because you have to have room to maneuver. You have to be able to change if need be. That's an excerpt for my conversation with Sonia Gill, founder and CEO of Fluenz, a language learning company. To see our full interview, you can go to facebook.com slash how I built this. And if you want to see all of our past live interviews, you can find them there or at YouTube.com slash NPR.

If you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by Liz Metzker with help from J.C. Howard, Will Mitchell, Bruce Grant, Matt Adams, El Manion, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Farah Safari. Thanks for listening. Stay safe and I'll see you in a few days. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built this Resilience Edition from NPR.