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- The Startup Velocity Question
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British Startup Teaching English: Shiv Rajendran, Co-founder of LanguageLab, London (Part 6)
Sramana: Let’s talk about your financing strategy. How much did you raise from your friends and family? Shiv Rajendran: We started with about a million dollars. In our second round we raised about $1.5 million. Sramana: How did you develop the company after your next round of financing? Shiv Rajendran: The first round of financing
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:
British Startup Teaching English: Shiv Rajendran, Co-founder of LanguageLab, London (Part 4)
Sramana: How did you determine which clients to build custom offerings and courses for? Shiv Rajendran: We selected them based on the market we wanted to target. We knew we wanted to target business people, so it made sense to customize courses for individuals who were business people themselves. Students were another easy category for
British Startup Teaching English: Shiv Rajendran, Co-founder of LanguageLab, London (Part 3)
Sramana: What did you learn from your initial Second Life education experiment? Shiv Rajendran: We learned a few things. First, having 3-D objects around students made the experience more real for them. In a traditional classroom setting, teachers spend a lot of time creating context. They ask the students to imagine that they are in
British Startup Teaching English: Shiv Rajendran, Co-founder of LanguageLab, London (Part 2)
Sramana: So, David essentially conceptualized LanguageLabs by interacting with a gamer who learned contextual English to enable online multiplayer gaming? Shiv Rajendran: That was the eureka moment. His desire to play the game motivated him to learn the English necessary to allow him to play the game. His interaction with other gamers gave him the
British Startup Teaching English: Shiv Rajendran, Co-founder of LanguageLab, London (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Shiv Rajendran is the co-founder and operations director of LanguageLab, a company founded in 2005 aiming to teach English by leveraging the capabilities of virtual worlds. He is a leading educational technologist frequently speaking at conferences on virtual world education. He is involved with the EU-funded
An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 7)
Sramana: You are not in a location that is known for entrepreneurship. Can you talk a bit about that experience? We are very interested in entrepreneurship development in areas where there is not a lot of entrepreneurship going on. When we see companies like yours that have been successful in a region that is not
An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 6)
Sramana: There are going to be a lot of entrepreneurs who are trying to reach a million dollars of revenue. What are the key lessons learned that you would like to pass on to them? Curt Keller: When I look at all the ups and downs, I realize that I have actually dealt with a