The time was the summer of 2020, when I decided to fly to Korea to be with my family after my internship was canceled from COVID-19. Thinking that I need to do something to make the summer useful, I decided to start a side project with my co-founder/sister Chelsea to add to our experience. We soon found a problem that we were already quite familiar with, which was around English teacher recruitment in Korea, and started to make a website to tackle this problem. Little did I know, what started out as a mere side project became something that would be the biggest pivotal point in my life.
As the website we developed started to get unexpectedly large traction, and love from our users we thought that we could maybe take this even further and possibly run this as a business. This is when we decided to apply to Techstars and YC. After a series of interviews against all odds, we somehow managed our way into Techstars.
After graduating college at the end of 2020, I dove right into the unknowns of the startup world with only 3 internships experience under my belt with no prior venture experience. Over the 3 months going through Techstars, I’ve done and experienced things that I never have before, and am still learning valuable skills everyday.
Coming out of Techstars, we decided to pivot out of our original idea given various challenges (which I will get into in another post :D), into a peer-to-peer fluency focused English learning platform, where learners can quickly find the right cohort of peers to practice with through enrolling in a structured English course.
Over the last few months after pivoting, we have already finished a course with 100% retention rate with 1200 students from 67 countries in our course waitlist partnering up with 6 YouTube/Udemy instructors who have in total over 2M followers combined. On the other side of the frontline, we are also training ESL engineers to speak better English using our Immigo method, in which we were able to sign a $4500 deal with a coding bootcamp Holberton School.
Snippet of our students from one of our courses
Things have been rough, but I’ve been pushing through to make small progress everyday. I’m excited to see what will come out of this journey, and I hope you are too. Stay tuned for more :)
