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
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
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
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
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
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
Sramana: All together, how many people did you have working on the project? You had an outsource engineering and support team, an SEO expert, you, and your wife. What was the headcount? Curt Keller: When we first started it was just me, a support guy in India and three programmers. A few years later we
Sramana: When you got your first product done, how did you get it out to market? Curt Keller: We started with Google PPC. That is where we focused all of our energy. It started to get some traction. We got a lot of traction that first year. Sramana: How much funding did you put into