BWP Ep. 3: Voxy w/Paul Gollash

Let’s talk language learning! And selling EdTech with a B2B lens.

In recent years, the concept of “Education-as-a-Benefit” has become more prevalent. Companies are realizing that in today’s economy, it takes more than just traditional benefits to retain employees.

In 2018, LinkedIn put together a report on the workplace, which indicated that 94% of employees surveyed said they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career. Education is also the 3rd most requested employee benefit (behind paid family leave, and remote/flexible work options).

It’s less expensive for companies to retain existing employees than hire and train new ones, and providing educational options for professional development is a great way to improve retention & employee satisfaction.

Paul Gollash, the Founder of Voxy, has been on the forefront of advocating for global companies and Universities to offer English language training to their employees as an aid to their professional development. Fast forward to today, and four million people in more than 150 countries have changed their lives by learning English with Voxy. I’m excited to share Paul’s perspective on building Voxy, with a unique lens of selling B2B in the education space.

A Conversation with Paul Gollash, Founder & CEO of Voxy

First start with telling me about your mission, and how Voxy was built with purpose from the start.

Our mission is to empower people to achieve their goals by breaking down the world’s language barriers — and this is something that’s very near and dear to my heart. I spent most of my 20s living and working in countries where I didn’t speak the native language. When I was in Spain in particular, I saw the benefit first-hand of learning a second language for myself. But more importantly, for my friends and associates that I met in these foreign countries, English was an incredible enabling skill, and it served as a gateway to accessing better jobs and a better quality of life.

This idea has been proven out over the last decade in my mind in spades. Anywhere that you go in the world, English is very highly correlated with socio-economic advancement. It really allows people to have a leg-up. That was probably Page One or Two of my of my first initial PowerPoint for Voxy — we didn’t have a prototype back then, but we saw this huge market opportunity with over a billion people trying to learn English, and not a lot of people applying really good technological solutions.

Tens of thousands of people from all over the world have written us letters or sent us transcripts of grades that they got or job acceptance letters they received because of studying English with Voxy… there’s nothing better than that!

On a personal note, my grandparents were both immigrants from Italy. My grandmother Diana’s native language was Italian, she studied French in school & became a French teacher in Italy, and also was fluent in Latin. When she came to America at 19, she didn’t speak a word of English and it was very difficult to find a job — despite already being trilingual and incredibly smart. Only after learning a bit of English was she able to find a job in NYC as a tailor, but she couldn’t return to her passion of teaching as a source of income. I wish that something like Voxy existed back then so she could have learned English before coming to the U.S. — Meagan Diana (my middle name is Diana, after my “nonna” who loved learning!)

Why did you choose to start Voxy in NYC? How has that impacted the story & mission of your brand overtime?

New York, for me, was the obvious choice early on. I was a venture investor with Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and was integrated into the New York startup scene. There’s also a really good critical mass of people with a risk tolerance for taking jobs that are clearly speculative when building an early stage company. Also, the skillsets are diverse — you have great folks in design, UX, engineering, and even technology sales. There’s a lot of people here who understand how to market, sell, and service customers, so building in New York was great from a recruiting standpoint.

There is nowhere like New York in terms of the ability to find a risk-loving, ambitious, hardworking, and creative person — the job market in New York is second to none.

A billion and a half people are learning English around the world, which is a staggering number. But the vast majority, even call it 90%+ are living outside the US (a third of them are living in China). And then the rest are in the big emerging markets like Brazil, Mexico, Russia, etc. In the beginning, I was personally selling into an international customer base, so what worked for me was old school entrepreneur hustle — I just got on a plane and went to Brazil, our first market, a lot. There was a 2 year period where I went to Brazil for prospect and customer meetings around 30 times or something. Then I built out local teams which made scaling much easier.

For companies in EdTech selling into enterprises, the ROI story around what you’re selling is so important. How do you think about that with Voxy, and what did that first enterprise sale look like?

I’ll never forget our first enterprise sale! We were still a consumer company at the time selling largely B2C. Before we started selling B2B, I shadowed a few salespeople that worked for Pearson (one of our investors) and learned two things:

1. It is very difficult for a textbook salesperson to sell SaaS.
2. Universities & Corporations were all potential buyers, something I didn’t see initially.

I saw a huge opportunity in front of me — these people want to be buying a technology solution to cost effectively teach their students English, and this sales team can’t do it.

Our first enterprise sale was to a University for a few thousand licenses, offering their students the ability to do self-directed language learning. From that first deal, we sold with ROI first — unlike the textbook salesmen. And a lot of competitors in our markets would sell on engagement, so we were differentiated in that way.

To articulate that ROI, we do a few things:

• Surveys to see productivity improvements
• Reviewing internal promotions
• We look at reduction in churn, especially if it’s a customer with a lot of frontline employees where turnover is a real cost driver for the business

We really use sort of any metric that the customer has indicated they really care about. So the above are particularly important for high velocity turnover jobs. However, if the end customer is a bunch of knowledge workers at, for example, Deloitte, then you’re going to focus on productivity, internal promotions, and things like that.

What are the three things enterprise companies care about / look for in your experience?

When we sell into corporations, it’s typically into learning and development orgs and/or HR managers. Here are the 3 things they care about most:

1. Price: This one you can’t get around
2. Scalability: A lot of learning programs put the onus of management onto local HR managers. With Voxy, we try to make it easy for them. For example, we provide easy-to-read customized dashboards for project managers, and help coach students to stay engaged and study. When somebody quits and someone else joins, an HR manager can automatically swap the licenses vs. tracking things down manually. If a company wants to add a thousand employees, in a new region or new facility, all it takes is a simple email or phone call to our CS team (as opposed to finding a local training company to show up at their office).
3. Personalization: This is the best way to improve outcomes in language education because it’s not a linear curriculum like chemistry or math. It’s more like learning how to shoot a free throw, or learn how to cook or surf. With cooking, it doesn’t matter if you do knife skills first or if you learn to cook sauces first — you just need to be learning, and that’s a lot like a language learning. So the personalization is also something that our clients value a lot. We can personalize it for a frontline worker, someone learning English to work in a call center, or an executive who wants to speak more fluidly when they’re addressing global audiences.

Especially when you were first starting out, how did you figure out your ideal customer profile (ICP) whether it was size, a specific vertical, location, etc.?

When we started selling into universities, the real pitch was (a) employability for your students when they graduate and (b) progression through the course. So as a result, we designed a lot of of test prep courses and thematic courses like Business English.

As we moved into the corporate training market more specifically, we mapped out our GTM strategy to (a) places where we’re seeing gaps in the labor market so we can help fill those positions with non-native English speakers and (b) more tailored course design to fill those needs.

For example, more recently we’ve seen a huge spike in the need for certified nursing courses. We built out a robust, best-in-the-market course on the English that you need to become a certified healthcare professional (where there are half a million job openings right now).

Advice for an entrepreneur building something transformative in education? What would you like to see built?

For any entrepreneur that is trying to build an educational product or service, you really need to allow a lot of time to build something special. Adoption for products like this is different than an Airtable or a Carta — it’s never going to be as much of an acute need, and the sales cycles are so different in education. And the reason for that is because there’s a lot of lag time — from purchase, to the moment of impact to the learner, and then impact at the org level — so plan accordingly. It’s also important to set expectations correctly with your early stage investors so that you’re scaling the business with that in mind.

For what I’d like to see built, early childhood development is interesting me personally. I’ve seen many woeful products so far that I’ve been experiencing with my own little ones.

I also think a lot more about the wellness aspect of education as opposed to the longer feedback loops that I’m talking about with language learning. There are a million different coaching plays right now, but I have lots of ideas on how to do more with personalized, synchronous coaching/guiding vs. instruction. Ie: can you do something for populations of learners that never had access to true mentorship.

A huge thank you to Paul for sharing his perspective on selling into Universities/Corporations and in scaling with a global customer base.

To learn more about Voxy Engineering, follow them on Twitter. And Paul too!

If you’re an entrepreneur building in NYC, in education, or more specifically within early childhood development or wellness/coaching/mentorship as Paul mentioned above, please shoot me a note at meagan@lererhippeau.com. I’d love to help.

Keep an eye out for future editions of Building with Purpose, and in the meantime, let’s keep in touch on Twitter :) https://twitter.com/meaganloyst