When Dr. Karyn Koven launched LanguageBird® in 2016, she had a vision for her language instruction platform and trusted its development to a local technologist in Los Angeles. Dr. Koven isn’t tech savvy and thought she needed a pro. She invested $10,000 in building the platform, but the technologist pocketed the money and disappeared. It was an outsourcing nightmare come true.
Dr. Koven was back where she’d started: with a great business idea and the experience to execute it. A doctorate in Educational Leadership, Dr. Koven focused on curriculum building, college counseling, teaching, and articulation for nearly two decades. Her students in high school and middle school had always struggled with foreign languages. There aren’t enough language choices and scheduling options in schools, packed classrooms fail at building conversational skills, and students move at different paces.
So, Dr. Koven launched a fully-accredited online language school where students can master languages with one-on-one instruction delivered on their schedule and at their pace. In retrospect, the $10,000 robbery might have been a blessing in disguise. It sent Dr. Koven on a journey to build LanguageBird with a mishmash of online tools, one step at a time.
Dr. Koven’s story is a model for how entrepreneurs, regardless of their digital chops, can approach technology as a way to experiment with the essence of a business.
The map
Dr. Koven is not a programmer or engineer. Her talent is working with students and their parents to achieve their educational goals. With $10,000 spent and her technologist missing, Dr. Koven restarted LanguageBird with a homemade WordPress site, her minimum viable product (“MVP”). Understandably, Dr. Koven was hesitant to hire anyone else. After getting burned, she says, “It was hard to trust people and my own judgement.”
She began to research technologies online. She hired a friend’s firm to redo the website. As an ecommerce-oriented consultancy, they could only take it so far. Academic tech was unfamiliar territory.
Dr. Koven began mapping out her technology ‘stack’ on a wall at home. The key was to ensure that her systems could pair with each other.
For instance, her original WordPress site used JotForm (my company’s technology) to gather information about students because they integrated together easily. Without coding experience, Dr. Koven could design forms to collect student information: the language they study, previous experience, availability for lessons, and more. That pair worked, so they became a foundation for her stack.
In v2.0 of LanguageBird, Dr. Koven chose Stripe for credit card processing because it integrates with JotForm, which integrates with WordPress. Through JotForm, she lists different course packages – a full year, single semester, tutoring and test prep lesson, conversational lessons, and so forth – then processes payments on the backend with Stripe.
The LanguageBird stack
Over a year and a half, Dr. Koven added to her cloud-based technology stack, integrating each piece. She’d test new tech and change course if it didn’t fit. Her stack now includes:
- WordPress, a website creation tool and content management system (CMS)
- JotForm, a system for collecting information and payment data
- Stripe,a payment gateway for securely processing payment data
- Trello, a project management app repurposed to manage student onboarding and measure progress with simple checklists.
- MailChimp, an email marketing platform
- HubSpot + Zendesk,for filtering marketing and support leads
- Zoom, Skype, and Google Hangouts, to host classes and faculty meetings
- QuickBooks, for accounting
The diversity of the stack makes it reliable. There are one-size-fits-all educational platforms Dr. Koven could use, but choosing one would force her to settle on a user experience that doesn’t check every box for LanguageBird. And, using one service is risky. What if one vendor closes, gets acquired, or changes its model drastically? The piecemeal stack safeguards LanguageBird against the rise and fall of tech companies.
11 different services power every aspect of LanguageBird. For reasons Dr. Koven will share, that piecemeal platform has many advantages beyond mitigating risk.
An experimental mindset
Dr. Koven is the first to admit that “…the system is cumbersome, but it does the job. When you’re starting a business and just proving a concept – without $100,000 handy – you have to start somewhere.” Sure, Dr. Koven has a lot of usernames and passwords floating around, and no doubt she’ll streamline the stack soon.
Maybe it seems like she should just take one educational platform or invest in her own again, but maybe not. “The value of our approach is that it teaches us how we want things to work,” Dr. Koven says. “Yes, we wish it was more automated, but when you do things by hand, you see the process you want.”
In other words, the stack is educating Dr. Koven about the platform that fits her business. From this angle, the point of architecting a technology stack is not just to get it “right” and stop. There is no stopping point. Rather, technology becomes a means to test business ideas.
For us or for them?
Most business owners, says Dr. Koven, approach problems of digitization and automation “…from the standpoint of, we have more clients, how do we scale!?” The entrepreneur’s first reason to automate is to reduce her workload. Automation makes it easier for the businessperson, but what about the customers?
Almost any technological choice can be seen analyzed through that lens: is it for us, for customers, or for both?
Dr. Koven gives a good example. Today, she reviews every student’s application to determine which language instructor would be the best match based on the student’s background and schedule. It’s a manual, time-consuming process.
Dr. Koven is considering automating the matching process, but that could have unintended consequences. Should students choose which teacher they want based on profile pictures, videos, and written bios? What if students flock to one teacher, who becomes overloaded, while two others don’t have enough work? What if a student’s learning style would fit much better with one of the two other teachers?
“There are times when entrepreneurs, aiming to lighten their workload, make changes that have adverse effects on their customers,” says Dr. Koven. “When you think, ‘Ok, what can we automate?’ you have to consider the effect on users.”
By automating the process. Dr. Koven might lessen her workload. However, she might get saddled with new responsibilities: coaching her teachers on their intro videos, managing students and parents who got a poor match, and so on.
The matching process will take trial and error. The good news is that, with a piecemeal stack, Dr. Koven can add technology without changing or breaking anything else. “The curse and blessing of not having things automated in the beginning is discovering how you want the flow to work,” says Dr. Koven.
Don’t forget your differentiator
Dr. Koven urges other solopreneurs to do it yourself, initially. The experience of figuring it out and choosing what to automate was invaluable.
Long-term, the key for Dr. Koven is to never lose sight of LanguageBird’s differentiators. Parents and students come to LanguageBird because the courses are accredited (i.e., students get school credit), the lessons are one-on-one with a real person, and they can be scheduled for the most convenient time of day. Moreover, Language Bird offers 11 languages, a much wider selection than the average high school. LanguageBird students study the languages and cultures they’re passionate about – not what their high school offers by happenstance.
“When thinking about tech,” says Dr. Koven, “Ask why your customers come to you. An automation isn’t worthwhile if it threatens what attracted people to the business in the first place.”
On that note, Dr. Koven has no plans to automate conversations with students’ parents. Often, they want to verify the details of the program and ask questions about what Language Bird states on its website. Those 20-minute conversations give parents the assurance they need to buy a $2,000 product.
For a final thought, Dr. Koven has a clear message: “Experiment. Don’t be afraid to lose things that don’t work. Test and get rid of the tech that doesn’t do it for you.”
