MY STORY OF STARTING A COMPANY AT 21

hello guys and welcome to my channel I am filming from Palo Alto today Palo Alto is be centered Silicon Valley and every entrepreneur every setup person wants to come here and raise some money and basically this video will be about studying your own company because many of you asked how I started my company and what did I do to get my company into the States so if you're interested in this topic please continue watching this video now the day when I started my company together with my co-founder was back in 2011 and that was in Russia I was still in my fourth year studies in the university and I was crazy about learning languages and I'm I still am right now and I went when it was 14 I went to the UK to learn English I won this exchange program in our school so I got to go there completely free and then when I was 18 I decided to do the same for German language and I organized the trip myself so found the school and ended up saving a lot of money because there were a lot of offline agents who offered that so you could go to an agency and you know book your trip and they would charge your like 300 dollars for that and I did everything myself took me a while but I figured it out and then I realized that I could help other students do the same and also I was surprised that not many people know that you can actually go to a country where the language is spoken learn it become proficient and some my co-founder was actually the person who told me hey we need to start so that was I was 21 2011 but I still needed a kick in the ass you know because I'm a female so I'm a girl and I fear a lot of things actually I have never worked in a big company so I had no experience and I felt maybe I should get a job first and you know figure out how things work but he said no we're gonna start now and we had a squirrel and then one of the girls that we studied with told me that she wanted to go to London to learn English and she needed help and this is when we went to register a company and I wouldn't say the first client was easy like I've made so many mistakes with her it took me a while to open an international bank account in Russia and you know compared to America a Russian process studying a company is so complicated and you know sending money abroad requires a lot of documents but we started it so we basically started a company and imagine what all of the people who studied with me if they went on to work for a bank they were earning their first salary and I was like sitting at home in my parents house and writing some text for a website without any idea if anyone is going to use it and this was like this was a little discouraging so we had that first climb then we had the second client straightaway also a guy who studied with us but you know that wasn't enough there was just enough to pay for a developer to build a really simple website and that was it and basically many people who surrounded me told me hey marina you should probably get a job because you know people get older and you need to think about your retirement but I'm really thankful to Michael hunter because he said this is real business and we're gonna do that so we were still studying and running the company and I had my office phone which was actually my mobile phone and when clients called I had to run out of the lecture into a university corridor and pretend that I'm in the office and be all professional like hey of course we can need blah blah blah that was super funny and so during the first year we only managed to get three clients and you know very little money and and this was the toughest year ever so if your guys are thinking of studying your own company be prepared that first year will be a complete failure like everybody around is going to tell you you need to stop you need to think of something else and maybe running your own company is not the best thing you can do but stay there like if you think that you know what I did I just read the reviews of those three people who use their service who actually went abroad to learn languages I read the reviews and I read how it changed their lives and I was so inspired to continue and I think this is what you can do like rely on the first clients and see the actual impact that you making with your company so during the second year we got this group from my school where I studied we got that group to travel through us and that was like 15 clients and we were able to rent a table in a co-working space and this is when things started to actually you know grow second year I even hired a person to help me but I still did everything myself like all of the processing all of the marketing talking to clients my co-founder helped me with all of the legal stuff with accounting so basically two of us working on the company just me working with a client and the third year were was amazing that was 2013 we started another office in a different city in Russia instead of the third office in another city in Russia and this is when we realized I'm actually going to turn around here guys because somebody's you know repairing something there and I don't want to that to make noise so during the third year we realized that everyone to grow if you want to build a big company there is no way we want to open offices in different cities because that required a lot of traveling you know back and forth and I hated travelling especially to Moscow like Moscow is a cool town but in winter it gets so cold so in winter when I'm in Russia I try to stay inside so basically we thought we need to build something online and we need to enable people from all over the world to book through a platform and the idea was like if you're looking for school yourself like when I was googling my German school there are so many schools and their websites are so complicated but think of you know we have booking.com for the hotels but there is no like big booking home for those language courses abroad and we were like we should make it especially in russian-speaking countries so we're the first and the only people doing that um and yes so we started building the platform and that took a little while because we were profitable but not that profitable because you imagine how much the developer costs he costs a lot of money so we're only able to hire part-time developers and a first developer he wrote a lot of code but then we realized it doesn't work so we had to fire him we had to so we basically he basically just left and we had to do leave the whole code and you know just admit that we lost a lot of money and then in 2014 we realized okay we might be able to build the platform with our own money but we won't be able to market it so we started to look for investors and we were funding in Russia and many people told us like there was a guy who was a CEO of like of the largest accelerators in Russia schools for startups and he listened to my pitch in his head you know the best thing you can do is close your company I was like thank you I was I was really stressed about that comment and we had a couple of offers from investors and those offers like we're going to take half of your company and you're not going to be managing anything so we had just to say no and for you to realize my co-founder already went to work for another company because we used his salary to pay to our developers into our employees and then we decided to race abroad and we decided to apply for foreign accelerators like Y Combinator 500 startups tech stars and so we were doing a lot of fundraising we're traveling a lot to meet with the investors and finally I go this intro to a meta John Raimi I don't know John if you ever watch this videos but thank you so much she changed our lives he changed lives of three people Bill the company and you basically changed my life yeah thanks a lot and so we met that guy he came to st. Petersburg and I pitched him my company and he was like you know um I know somebody who might be interested he works as she works at 500 setups and I'm going to introduce you to her and you can pitch her company and the next day 4:00 a.m. in Russia I'm sitting my pajamas in the kitchen and having this cup call with Poornima Freneau I don't know if you're watching this video but thank you so much and for anyways was one of the mentors and 500 startups and we talked to her and she was like oh guys I just returned from Chile I was learning Spanish there and and I was wondering why nobody's doing this platform like there are some online agencies but there is nothing like what you guys are doing and we got accepted and this meant that we went to California to Mountain View where the program took part they invested this is not a secret $100,000 and this was like ooh a big big rise for us we were struggling for two years just to arrive at that moment when we came to the States registered a company in the States received investment and we had more Angels joining the round and we started growing basically if you go linguae trip now you can see that we have one three hundred schools all over the world and we provide lower prices than anyone else because we send a lot of clients to particular schools and they say hey because he sent so many students we're going to give you low prices and this is basically how it works so you get an Expedia or booking comm for those language schools abroad and another great thing I was able to we were able to secure work visas in the States because our company sponsored us which is also pretty cool ah and yes right now linguae trip is not just booking platform for language courses will so help people learn English by Skype you know Jonathan he's always present with my channel helping us a lot and will also help them with admissions into American universities and actually my story with MBA like when I got admitted to all of the American universities with full financial aid the idea behind that was I wanted my company to be in the States and because we were trying to raise money but nobody invested I thought maybe I should just take myself to the states and try and call my company from here and but the same month like March 2015 13th of March or something I receive an offer from Johns Hopkins University 17th of March I receive an offer with full financial aid from the University of Florida to do my MBA 28th of March I'm pretty sure I'm going to Florida I'm exploring this Gainesville city and I'm like going to Florida to study and like end on March 30 we receive investment offer from her pound reset ups and there is no way I can do everything together via the decision was obvious that I have to grow my company ah and yeah so I declined offers from the University I feel so terrible about it because we were really and as I said I exchanged a lot of emails with the admissions committee and they were amazing people they also gave me some advice with running company so basically that was it and yeah so this is this is my story of starting my own company it's a long way back in 2011 five years ago we were just you know two people believing in what we do and right now I'm in California in a beautiful in beautiful Palo Alto so I would say guys believe in yourself when you start your company and do not rely on what other people tell you to rely on your customers and their feedback and try to sell as fast as you can because many entrepreneurs do those mistakes when they just build builds building company but they never start selling and so the first thing you need to do is actually sell because we made our first sale when we didn't have an office didn't have a website just nothing which is to her friend on a trip to London so thank you guys for watching this video don't forget to subscribe and like and yeah share what you think about this story and if you ever think of learning languages abroad if you ever think of coming to San Francisco to see me very welcome to buca lingo trip and you know become a part of a great community of people who travel the world and learn languages and get admitted to foreign universities and get jobs abroad thank you so much for watching this and I'll see you in the next videos bye bye

Channel: linguamarina

Views: 224,341

Rating: 4.9239588 out of 5

Keywords: start, company, business, money, investment, entrepreneur, startup

Id: 5koFMrnbWHI

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 26 2016