THE STORY
In 2019, when I started working in Barcelona, one of the expectations of the company was that I will learn Spanish. To be honest, I have never had an interest in learning Spanish until start to learn. When I was at university, I was interested in learning German and Chinese and took courses but couldn’t do practice enough and forget almost everything about them…
Anyways.. I had to learn Spanish. It was part of the work, I need to visit and talk to researchers/doctor and I was told that there is a possibility to talk only in Spanish with some of them. The company provided me with language courses. In summer, I started going to classes on a language course close to where I work and live in Barcelona.
“Over time, I started to love this language. After completing the course, I did group dance with Spanish music at the graduation ceremony and even sang …;) “
After that amazing concert, as a person who is always hungry to catch business opportunities, I went and knocked on the language school director’s door, of course, I didn’t tell her “I want to sing more”, I am sure she would chase me… 🙂 I told her I saw a lot of kids singing in different languages during the graduation concert and if you want, I could teach these kids coding in the summer school, somehow… Somehow… I think this word is a major part of my life… Although I don’t have an idea how to run it in the beginning, due to being a business guy, I couldn’t stop myself to think about how to create a business.
STARTUP
The idea was very interesting to the director. I brought the ‘coding kit for children‘ product of the startup which is created by my professor from the university in Istanbul.
As soon as I arrived, then set up a meeting, went, and showed a couple of live experiments to the language school director. She was very interested in them and offered to start in September and asked me for some visual materials to announce it on social media accounts and in the local newspaper…
“That meeting was a little expensive for me. The reason is that not gifting to her a small package of Halvah from Turkey, but my laptop collapsed during the presentation… Yes, almost all of the backbone of the whole thing was broken at once and probably I needed to eat a bit from that halvah to accept this situation… “
LOOKING FOR THE FIRST CUSTOMERS
Later, I quickly created a free wix website with my new laptop. I shared the idea with my current professor/boss, he liked the idea and the product. Then, I started to give free coding lessons to his daughter. It was good practice to understand kids’ psychology and behaviors and to see when exactly the student is getting bored. With my boss’s suggestion, I shared a post in a Facebook group of expats at my location. But nothing much happened except few likes…
In September, I had only one student from language school whose family only want to take a trial lesson… Yes, I have a trial lesson with a student who can only speak Spanish which I couldn’t. I was trying to show everything I can to make the child have a wooww, with my little Spanish. In my first trial lesson, I couldn’t run the experiment properly… We were looking at each other with the child. He was asking something in Spanish, I couldn’t understand. Anyway, I tried to explain something in that lesson, and the device worked towards the end of the lesson.
ONE STEP REMAINED TO BE BILLIONAIRE.. 😉
Then, a parent from the Facebook group found me and brought 3 different students in the first class. So, with a trial lesson, I finally earned the first money. In 4 months, I had 7 students in total from 7 to 14 years old students. I gave a course in my institute’s cafeteria on weekend mornings…
Recently, thanks to the one of the teacher parent, I received an offer to give a workshop in a summer camp for a private school. So, let’s see what will happen… 🙂
