Want to learn from your customers? Infiltrate them into your team

Throughout the course of LingQ’s existence we have tried various marketing initiatives. For the most part, these have been fairly conventional from Pay Per Click Ads on the one hand to quite a bit of content marketing with a YouTube Channel and Blog from my co-founder (and Dad) Steve. We have also spent a fair bit of time promoting on social media and have run the odd contest.

We are now into our second week of a completely different marketing initiative. We have invited three English learners from different parts of the world to join us in Vancouver. We are documenting their experience learning English on LingQ, exploring Vancouver, interacting with us as we explain the things that we do here. Actually getting them to try to feel part of the team and work on real tasks in English.

I have to say the first few weeks are going great and exceeding expectations! Our three students, Emily, Hanna and Tamas are great and fitting in very well and the program is well underway. Unfortunately, our fourth participant Yuleidy was unable to get a visa to come to Canada from the Dominican Republic which was a real shame. Obviously, Yuleidy was very disappointed and likewise Emily, Hanna and Tamas who had been interacting with her in a Facebook group for the month leading up to their arrival.

In the end, we don’t know if we will ever derive any great marketing benefit from this activity but, we are comfortable knowing that we will do everything we can to make sure our students are successful in their English, that they enjoy their time here and that they learn something about startups. We are already having a ton of fun with them, and they seem to be having plenty of adventures on their own as well.

At the same time, by working with them and observing them using our applications and methodology, we are learning a ton. As Steve mentioned at the outset of this adventure, the paradigm of learning is changing, teachers are becoming learners and learners are becoming teachers. That is definitely the case for us as we continue this process. Talk about interacting with your customers and making sure you address their desires! We basically have 3 customers with us all day, every day for 3 months.

What we are finding is that it is very easy to gloss over some of the issues that users face when starting out. It’s easy to spend too much time on building cool new features to improve the experience for power users instead of making sure the basic features that new users encounter are clear and easy to use, are well explained and get people going. We have quite a bit of work to do here, which we already knew, but having reminders of it sitting in our office every day brings it home that much more.

At the same time, we also see that many of the cool features that we have added over the years are often not obvious or easy to find on the site. Everything is easy once you know how it works or, if you designed it yourself! But, for newbies, how can we make it easier to discover all the powerful functionality and capabilities of our platform. The importing feature of the site and how it can be used, is a great example of this. This is a powerful feature that many users never even find out about. This just reminds us that we need to figure out a way to drive more users to this tool to experience the so-called “aha moment” which will keep them coming back.

Of course we would love it if we could attract an audience to watch our LingQ Academy Live vlogs as we document Emily, Hanna and Tamas on their language adventure. We hope people will get into the story and want to see how our students learn and the improvement they will make by the end of their 3-month stay. We hope people will share what we are doing. But, we have little control over this. But, even if we never achieve this kind of benefit, we are already finding huge value in having our students here with us. This value will benefit us while they are here but also long after they are gone.

Please watch the LingQ Academy Live videos on the LingQ Channel on Youtube and subscribe and share with your friends as we continue on this journey. And, please click the heart below if you liked this post.