90m users and 30k new users a day: learnings from Bernhard Niesner, co-founder of Busuu
Emerge’ network gives me the opportunity to share learnings from some of the most successful edtech entrepreneurs around the world. This month in my ongoing series of inspiring founder interviews, Bernhard Niesner of busuu shares his journey to 90m users around the world, advice on sales and finding product-market fit, and the three golden rules to pass on to aspiring founders.
Take time to reflect as you read — these are purposeful long-form interviews. Why? Because we believe “there are no shortcuts to knowledge” (Ben Horowitz) and that “sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut” (Haruki Murakami). So go on — make a coffee, sit back, indulge yourself.
❓If you don’t ask you don’t get; ‘Just be a bit cheeky. I got a lot of things just because I was asking for it, and if I hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t have gotten it.’
🔥 Culture eats strategy for breakfast;‘If you don’t have the right culture in your team, if you don’t have the right team, it will break your company. It doesn’t matter how much money you raise, or what amazing strategy you have, to build the company you need to make sure that you have the right culture within the business.’
💪🏽 Never give up; ‘You need a lot of perseverance, so never give up. Life is short so try to stay positive all the way and “embrace the struggle”’..
It has gone pretty well for you Bernhard. How well? Over the last 10 years, we have grown busuu to over 90 million users, and approximately 30,000 new users sign up every day. We have several million active monthly users and have now also started to sell our courses to large corporates to train their employees.
What is your one line elevator pitch for busuu? We are the world’s largest online community for language learning. We provide courses in 12 different languages, created by experts and powered by artificial intelligence. Self-study on busuu is combined with practice with native speakers from our global community.
So how did it all start? Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur? I was working in Strategy Consulting, for a top consulting firm in Germany. We were advising international clients, and I learned a lot, but became a bit frustrated that I would just hand over my recommendations to the client and move on to the next project. I never saw how things were implemented, I was only advising people what to do rather than doing it myself.
That’s when I decided to do an MBA at IE Business School in Spain, which is very much focused on entrepreneurship. I was immediately infected by the ‘bug’ of creating and growing my own business.
It has clearly been exciting. What has been the best thing about running your own company? Meeting busuu users from all corners of the world random people across the world — one day it might be a user from China, the next, someone from Ukraine or Venezuela! It’s great to hear firsthand how learning a new language through busuu has changed their lives. For some it helped them get a better job, others were travelling around the world or moved to another country and met their life partner. So these random encounters make the the success of the company quite tangible, really seeing how we, as a company, have created an impact across the world.
And the second best thing is seeing how members of our team have massively grown both from a professional and personal level. You set the initial spark that starts the ‘fire’, and then you watch them run off to do all sorts of amazing things.
When we do hackathons, for example, an occasion when crazy new ideas are born — in just 24 hours people come up with a whole new prototype and many of those ideas have tremendously helped the business.
I know its has not all gone to plan. What is the worst thing that happened? Obviously, there’s a lot of hard work involved. People shouldn’t underestimate how much free time you have to give up as an entrepreneur — it’s basically a 24/7 job.
And we also had difficulties in 2014, when we nearly ran out of money and had to do a full restructuring of the business, which was quite painful. But it was necessary and we came out much stronger. It was quite a tough time, seeing my business potentially crashing against the wall, but luckily, we turned it around.
Can you remember back to where the idea for the company came from? I met my co-founder Adrian during our MBA and he initially had the idea of an online platform for language learning and he was looking for a team to join him.
I was looking for an idea at that time, because I wanted to be an entrepreneur. We met at a random networking event, we chatted for a bit and immediately connected very well. I have always had a big passion for languages (I speak four languages myself) and loved the idea to disrupt this massive market by creating a totally new solution. So we worked together on the first concept and business plan and founded the business right after graduating from the MBA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgK4ZFzxhC0
What has been the best thing about running your own company?
Meeting busuu users from all corners of the world random people across the world — one day it might be a user from China, the next, someone from Ukraine or Venezuela! It’s great to hear firsthand how learning a new language through busuu has changed their lives. For some it helped them get a better job, others were travelling around the world or moved to another country and met their life partner. So these random encounters make the the success of the company quite tangible, really seeing how we, as a company, have created an impact across the world.
And the second best thing is seeing how members of our team have massively grown both from a professional and personal level. You set the initial spark that starts the ‘fire’, and then you watch them run off to do all sorts of amazing things.
When we do hackathons, for example, an occasion when crazy new ideas are born — in just 24 hours people come up with a whole new prototype and many of those ideas have tremendously helped the business.
And the worst?
Obviously, there’s a lot of hard work involved. People shouldn’t underestimate how much free time you have to give up as an entrepreneur — it’s basically a 24/7 job.
And we also had difficulties in 2014, when we nearly ran out of money and had to do a full restructuring of the business, which was quite painful. But it was necessary and we came out much stronger. It was quite a tough time, seeing my business potentially crashing against the wall, but luckily, we turned it around.
Where did the idea for the company come from?
I met my co-founder Adrian during our MBA and he initially had the idea of an online platform for language learning and he was looking for a team to join him.
I was looking for an idea at that time, because I wanted to be an entrepreneur. We met at a random networking event, we chatted for a bit and immediately connected very well. I have always had a big passion for languages (I speak four languages myself) and loved the idea to disrupt this massive market by creating a totally new solution. So we worked together on the first concept and business plan and founded the business right after graduating from the MBA.
What were the key milestones you think happened to get to where you are today?
We started in 2008, right before the financial crisis. Shortly after we launched, the economy crashed and the whole world seemed to go into a difficult direction, so no one wanted to fund us, and we had to bootstrap for over two years. We didn’t have a salary for two years, we had to put all our savings in the business. It was quite a tough time, but it also taught us to be very capital-efficient right from the start and to build a sustainable business rather than just raising funds from VCs.
We then got our first business angel investment in 2010 from Johann Hansmann, who has now become one of the most active business angels in Europe, and he also became a mentor and friend along our journey.
In 2012 we were doing quite well, but the financial crisis hit Spain really hard. We decided to move our entire business from Madrid to London as the financial crisis turned Spain into a very difficult place to grow our startup. So the entire team (at that time, 10 people) moved their lives over to London. It was a big effort, we had a moving truck with 200 moving boxes.
The move went well but we made the mistake of scaling too fast. In 2014 we nearly ran out of cash and had to restructure the business. A very painful but important experience.
In 2015 we raised 6 million euros from McGraw-Hill Education, our first strategic investor. This really helped us accelerate our growth.
In 2016 we also started to offer our solution to corporate clients. Since then we have won large international companies such as the Inditex Group (Zara, Massimo Dutti), Adidas and Hilton Hotels as clients.
In 2018, we hit CF-break-even for the first time (after 10 years!), are strongly growing our revenues.
How do you think you knew you had got what people call “product fit’?
Initially, we had some user traction from the beginning, roughly 100 users a day, but then we saw over 1,000 people were signing up to our platform every day and soon we had the first 1 million users. We saw that people were actually using the product and that’s when we knew that we are onto something, that we have a product-market fit.
We were actually one of the pioneers for online language learning. busuu was initially started as a desktop solution, because smartphones didn’t exist at that time, so we added a mobile version later on.
How do you measure the impact of your company?
I guess there are many ways to express it, but our vision is to break down language barriers, we want people from around the world from totally different backgrounds to connect and learn from each other, that’s the open-minded world we want to create.
We have millions of people who have learned languages with us, a lot of them come from emerging markets, and in those countries, language learning isn’t a hobby, it’s their route to success.
We now have several million users using our product every month and we receive excellent feedback from them.
We are also closely working with various research partners (such as UCL, Open University, to name a few) in order to continuously improve the learning efficacy of our product.
The other important impact is the one we have as an employer. We put a lot of emphasis on our culture and strongly invest in our team so everyone in busuu should have a ‘transformational’ experience while working at the company.
Everyone says that selling in the edtech market is really hard — how did you do it?
When we started in 2008, ‘edtech’ didn’t really exist as a category. We were one of the pioneers in this field.
It was definitely hard as consumers were not used to paying on their mobile phones (everything was for free or cost 0.99 USD at most) and we got very bad ratings when we wanted to charge 4.99 USD for an entire course. They thought it should be free, because it’s education. But the same person would go out and spend 5 USD at Starbucks, and not even think about it.
But over the years, things became much easier. Nearly everyone now has a smartphone (especially in emerging markets) and a payment method attached to it (this wasn’t the case in 2008). And users are more willing to spend money especially if the product is really good. They are used to the subscription model thanks to services such as Netflix and Spotify.
Also, the quality of our product has massively improved over the years. When I think about busuu in 2008 and busuu in 2018, there is no comparison. In fact, we have just won an award for being the ‘Best mobile app for language learning’ by an independent study in Germany.
So, the industry has evolved, but we have also learned our lesson, to not try to focus on the academic market. Most people in edtech try to sell to schools and universities but we’ve stayed away from the academic market, because of the whole issue of long sales cycles, different curriculum standards per country and restricted budgets.
Whereas, with consumers, we can scale our solution to millions of people in a very short period of time.
Thinking over the last few years, what would you pick out as the key milestones you think happened to get to where you are today? We started in 2008, right before the financial crisis. Shortly after we launched, the economy crashed and the whole world seemed to go into a difficult direction, so no one wanted to fund us, and we had to bootstrap for over two years. We didn’t have a salary for two years, we had to put all our savings in the business. It was quite a tough time, but it also taught us to be very capital-efficient right from the start and to build a sustainable business rather than just raising funds from VCs.
We then got our first business angel investment in 2010 from Johann Hansmann, who has now become one of the most active business angels in Europe, and he also became a mentor and friend along our journey.
In 2012 we were doing quite well, but the financial crisis hit Spain really hard. We decided to move our entire business from Madrid to London as the financial crisis turned Spain into a very difficult place to grow our startup. So the entire team (at that time, 10 people) moved their lives over to London. It was a big effort, we had a moving truck with 200 moving boxes.
The move went well but we made the mistake of scaling too fast. In 2014 we nearly ran out of cash and had to restructure the business. A very painful but important experience.
In 2015 we raised 6 million euros from McGraw-Hill Education, our first strategic investor. This really helped us accelerate our growth.
In 2016 we also started to offer our solution to corporate clients. Since then we have won large international companies such as the Inditex Group (Zara, Massimo Dutti), Adidas and Hilton Hotels as clients.
In 2018, we hit CF-break-even for the first time (after 10 years!), are strongly growing our revenues.
You say that getting to “market-product fit” was key for busuu. How do you think you knew you had achieved this? What were you measuring to know you had ‘got there’? Initially, we had some user traction from the beginning, roughly 100 users a day, but then we saw over 1,000 people were signing up to our platform every day and soon we had the first 1 million users. We saw that people were actually using the product and that’s when we knew that we are onto something, that we have a product-market fit.
We were actually one of the pioneers for online language learning. busuu was initially started as a desktop solution, because smartphones didn’t exist at that time, so we added a mobile version later on.
We both agree that Impact is really important in Education. How do you measure yours? I guess there are many ways to express it, but our vision is to break down language barriers, we want people from around the world from totally different backgrounds to connect and learn from each other, that’s the open-minded world we want to create.
We have millions of people who have learned languages with us, a lot of them come from emerging markets, and in those countries, language learning isn’t a hobby, it’s their route to success.
We now have several million users using our product every month and we receive excellent feedback from them.
We are also closely working with various research partners (such as UCL, Open University, to name a few) in order to continuously improve the learning efficacy of our product.
The other important impact is the one we have as an employer. We put a lot of emphasis on our culture and strongly invest in our team so everyone in busuu should have a ‘transformational’ experience while working at the company.
You have done well against a background where everyone says that selling in the edtech market is really hard — how did you do it? When we started in 2008, ‘edtech’ didn’t really exist as a category. We were one of the pioneers in this field.
It was definitely hard as consumers were not used to paying on their mobile phones (everything was for free or cost 0.99 USD at most) and we got very bad ratings when we wanted to charge 4.99 USD for an entire course. They thought it should be free, because it’s education. But the same person would go out and spend 5 USD at Starbucks, and not even think about it.
But over the years, things became much easier. Nearly everyone now has a smartphone (especially in emerging markets) and a payment method attached to it (this wasn’t the case in 2008). And users are more willing to spend money especially if the product is really good. They are used to the subscription model thanks to services such as Netflix and Spotify.
Also, the quality of our product has massively improved over the years. When I think about busuu in 2008 and busuu in 2018, there is no comparison. In fact, we have just won an award for being the ‘Best mobile app for language learning’ by an independent study in Germany.
So, the industry has evolved, but we have also learned our lesson, to not try to focus on the academic market. Most people in edtech try to sell to schools and universities but we’ve stayed away from the academic market, because of the whole issue of long sales cycles, different curriculum standards per country and restricted budgets.
Whereas, with consumers, we can scale our solution to millions of people in a very short period of time.
Part of your journey involved raising investment — what did you learn from that? We’re proud of the fact that we’ve only raised 15 million euros in total, which is much less than most of our competitors, and because of that we have a very good equity position as a team. So, I’d advise not to raise too much money. I’ve seen a lot of companies, in general, but especially in edtech, who are super proud of having raised one round after the other, but after five to six years, they realise that they basically own a really small fraction of the pie.
Edtech is a long-term game. I always say that if running a startup is a marathon and not a sprint, then running an edtech-startup is an ironman. Because it takes much longer to create success.
Also, it’s important to choose the right partner — someone who can add more than ‘just’ the money and someone you want to have as a shareholder, if things turn badly. Because, if things go well, it doesn’t really matter, but if things go south, you want to have the right partners supporting you.
And the best way of fundraising will always be generating real revenues from customers.
If you had to pass on 3 golden rules for aspiring or current entrepreneurs, what would they be?
1) If you don’t ask you don’t get
Just be a bit cheeky. I got a lot of things just because I was asking for it, and if I hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t have gotten it.
2) Culture eats strategy for breakfast
If you don’t have the right culture in your team, if you don’t have the right team, it will break your company. It doesn’t matter how much money you raise, or what amazing strategy you have, to build the company you need to make sure that you have the right culture within the business.
3) Never give up
You need a lot of perseverance, so never give up. Life is short so try to stay positive all the way and ‘embrace the struggle’.
As regards learning from others, is there one course or book you think everyone should take/do that as helped you? I would suggest The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, who is one of the founders of A16z, a well known VC fund from the US. It beautifully describes the ‘struggle’ you have to go through to become a successful entrepreneur, I highly recommend it.
In 2014, we had a crisis, when we had to totally restructure the business. At that time I was actually reading the book, and our trouble didn’t seem that bad, compared to the struggles that he’d been through. The book offers solid advice, for every phase of being an entrepreneur. It demonstrates that it’s not just a walk in the park and a great journey, there are also a lot of difficulties that you will likely encounter.
In terms of the key components that founders need to succeed, Emerge focus on the right Network, core Expertise and access to Capital. Which parts were critical to you early on? All of them but the expertise is what I would probably underline the most. You’ll face similar challenges to other entrepreneurs, so it’s important not to repeat the same mistakes. When I was an early-stage entrepreneur, I would have loved to learn from guys like myself who now have the experience. So go out and network and learn as much as you can from other founders who have already been in similar situations. So I think that the expertise is the most important part.
So Bernhard, what’s the next big goal for you? Even after 10 years, we still have a long way to go to achieve our vision to ‘break down language barriers’. Language learning is an enormous market, digital learning is still only a tiny fraction. There are over two billion people learning a language and we only have 90 million users on our platform! There’s a big market out there of people who aren’t using busuu, but they could be.
Topics like artificial intelligence (AI) will have a strong impact on the language learning industry and we want to be at the forefront of innovation in this field. AI will not replace language learning, however it will make it more efficient. We’ve already started using it in our product. It’s a very exciting field and it feels like we are just getting started! :)
This interview was kindly given by Bernhard Niesner, co-founder of busuu to Nic Newman, Partner at Emerge Education.
Thanks Bernhard! — Nic.
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Nic
Nic Newman
