Bootstrapping an EdTech Startup with a Paycheck to over $5M: Karyn Koven, CEO of LanguageBird (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is each instructor doing this individually, or have you built AI into your training and systems?

Karyn Koven: Absolutely. Over the past year, we’ve been developing our own platform that integrates all these AI and tech features. It includes scheduling, curriculum customization, evaluation tools, and more. The goal is to bring everything into one platform for a seamless experience.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue level are you operating at right now?

Karyn Koven: We’re between five and ten million. I’m an almost accidental founder, in the sense that I’m just passionate about solving problems in education.

Sramana Mitra: That’s great. I think you’ve done great. You’ve built, established, and validated a business. If you’re doing five to ten million in revenue, you clearly have a business that works and you’re able to do it in a somewhat manual way. You’re using technology, the Microsoft platform, and some AI, but still in a manual way.

You have tremendous opportunity. Now you have some money. I imagine you have some margin to invest in technology; you have an incredible opportunity to turn this business into a far more scalable business using more tech and AI.

We haven’t talked much about marketing. In the beginning, it was difficult, then COVID made it easier. People want online learning. What is your customer acquisition strategy now?

Karyn Koven: Great question. First, thank you. I think it’s important—and I read and learn a lot—you hear the phrase “if you build it, they’ll come,” but I don’t think that’s always the case.

Sramana Mitra: That’s never the case, actually.

Karyn Koven: I went about this accidentally or by intuition – by just focusing on helping kids, having a true mission, and building something fun to participate in and does good things for kids. It’s expanded from there to include college students, adults, and schools.

I think the mindset is important in entrepreneurship. There’re a lot of times when things get hard. If I wasn’t passionate about it, if I didn’t believe that what we’re doing was good and really serving the students, you just wouldn’t be able to muster the energy.

I believe we’re doing good work. As we’re building, I don’t increase expenditures unless there’s student demand and it improves instruction. It’s nice to have fancy things, but I always ask: what’s the ROI?

To your point about marketing, is it about bringing more students to our platform? That’s good, but once they get there, what makes people refer us, become raving fans, and spread the word—which is really key to our marketing—is the experience they have.

So, I’m more inclined to invest and reinvest in improving the experience that our teachers and students are having, and focus on that. We make sure that everything we do, technology-wise, is improving the user experience and that we’re spending wisely.

Sramana Mitra: I understand your philosophy, and it’s a good philosophy. There are many ways to create reusable tools. For example, in the use case we just discussed, a student wanting to learn first level Spanish through baseball—once that curriculum is created, you can replicate it using AI and make it available to your instructors so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Anytime a curriculum has been created, you want to market it. You have a kid who wants to learn Spanish with baseball analogies. You can write blog posts so people searching for that experience can find you.

Karyn Koven: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: It could be baseball, art, music—so many possibilities. There’s tremendous scalability you can achieve given how far you’ve come. You have a ton of assets in your company that can be leveraged with some technology, some AI, and strategic marketing.

Karyn Koven: Our instructors collaborate within each language. They’re not solo tutors—they share with each other in our inner instructor school. Part of making instructors better instructors, more engaging instructors is having them share these resources so it all can go into one database for them to use and pull out of. If you used it for your class, I can use it for mine.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Excellent story. I wish you all the best and thank you for sharing your journey.

Karyn Koven: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping an EdTech Startup with a Paycheck to over $5M: Karyn Koven, CEO of LanguageBird
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