What do Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Jacob Jolis have in common? They’re all college dropouts! Finishing his last semester at Stanford this past spring, Jolis has pursued his startup Verbling, an online means of practicing speaking a language with a native speaker, which has been met with incredible success.
What is Verbling exactly?
Verbling is a website where language learners practice verbal skills with native speakers of the language that they’re learning. So, if you’re learning Spanish we connect you instantly in the browser with a native Spanish speaker. It could be in Colombia, Spain, Argentina, Chile, wherever in the world and you’ll practice Spanish for 5 minutes with that native speaker and that Spanish speaker is in turn learning English so you’ll speak English for five minutes so that they learn too. Everybody wins.
How did you get the idea?
It was not my own idea. I have two amazing cofounders: Michael Bernstein and Fred Woolf. Michael pitched it to me and I thought it was amazing.
Do you have other staff?
We’re very happy to have just hired our first full-time employee. We’re hiring very heavily right now. That’s our number one focus at the moment. We’re looking everywhere we can, meeting programmers and designers and when we find exceptional ones, we shoot them an offer.
Where do you work from?
Currently, we work out of our apartment in Sunnyvale. The 3 co-founders live together and work in our living room which is basically an office, but we are in transition mode and are about to get real office space in Palo Alto downtown.
Are you backed by venture capitalists?
We were part of Y Combinator over the summer, a startup program that provides seed funding for very early stage startups. From that we were also backed by SV Angel, a venture capitalist firm and Start Fund. We did that program over the summer, and then we went out and fundraised. We were then backed by more venture capitalists and “angel investors.” We recently completed that round of funding. It went very well, and we’re very happy with the way things went. So we’re all set on the funding side.
Where do you see Verbling going in the future? What is your primary goal?
We are very, very much heads down in product development. We are not currently focusing on marketing or even sales for that matter. We are just trying to connect with our users, understand what they want, their true desires and iterate based on that. We’re never satisfied with where the product currently stands. That is really our primary goal to understand our users and make something that they want. Taking several steps to make Verbling a more social experience to give our users the information that they’re seeking about the other people they’re meeting on the site.
When did you drop out? What was that decision like?
I finished sophomore year at Stanford this past spring quarter. The decision came in April or may to focus all 100% of my time and energy on the company. I’m very, very glad I made that decision. I really do love Stanford, but this opportunity is something that a little Swedish boy from a family who lives in a countryside in the south where there are only farms and cows can only dream about.
Were you a CS major? What’s your academic background?
I’m more of the language geek/business guy side than the computer side. I was born in Paris, grew up in Sweden and took Spanish here at Stanford, so I’ve always been extremely interested in languages for my own sake. We actually built Verbling a lot for ourselves because we all felt this pain point learning languages but not being able to speak with native speakers of the languages that we were learning and we were not getting enough out of the classroom experience. So we use Verbling ourselves because we feel like we need it.
What’s the transaction like for users?
Currently we are only launched for Spanish and English, but we plan to launch more languages in the future. On Verbling.com you are only asked to provide your name, email, password, what language you’re a native speaker and what language you’re learning. The next button is a button that says, “start talking.” You have timers on the right side of the screen that start at 5 minutes and tick down. The first 5 will be in Spanish and the banner blinks after 5 minutes for the next language. We also provide users with conversation topics that they can click if they need stuff to talk about. It’s a super simple product that solves a very real problem.
What’s your biggest challenge or what has been your biggest challenge?
Some of the things that are extremely difficult we’ve solved -like finding good people to build a company with, which is by far the most important –more than money and everything else combined. But we’ve found truly amazing people to pull this off with a unique set of skills. We’ve been extremely lucky in getting together. As far as challenges currently, our product requires you to match in real time lots of people on completely different sides of the world. It’s called the classic chicken and egg problem for a startup –which means your service is only valuable if a lot of people are using it so at the beginning you need to get a lot of people really quickly and we used some nifty ways.
How did you solve that problem?
We literally wrote handwritten letters to bloggers who write about the language learning stuff in Spain and begged them to write about Verbling. When they actually saw it and tried the product, they started writing about it. And when you get one big blog, ten other blogs follow. We’ve been in other big news too like “Tech Crunch,” the Spanish newspaper “El Pais,” which is the equivalent of the New York Times, and recently in Ink Magazine. That was only the very first week. The only sustainable growth for a startup that I believe in is building a product that’s good enough that your users tell their friends about. We spend zero dollars on marketing. The cheapest way and the only sustainable way is through recommendations. Another way is teachers recommending it for them. I might only tell two or three of my friends, but a teacher will tell like 100.
What has been the most rewarding?
There is no question in my mind that the most rewarding thing is making users happy. There is a lot of stuff around the core that comes with building a company like incorporating, hiring, getting funding and talking to investors. All that’s fine but at the very core is the product and user experience. By far the most rewarding thing is when a user tells you that your product has changed their lives. When you get an email like that or you log onto Verbling and tell them you’re a cofounder and they say “This got me a job because now I know English and can put this on my resume, and I have a better economic outlook” -that beats everything else. For example, there is major financial crisis in Spain right now where unemployment is through the roof, and our biggest user base is in Spain. And when we ask why they use Verbling, they said they need to learn English to get a job. Being a part of that is cool.
What has the startup community been like? Do you have other friends doing similar stuff?
Through Y Combinator we met a lot of great people with truly amazing products and companies that ranged from the next security system for huge companies to protect their servers to a lyrics website for rap songs. Those people have been great, but at the end of the day I think startup people are better off spending more time working with their startups and products than just meeting each other. But it’s also really great there is this community and that there is the climate in Silicon Valley where all the capital, all the talent and all the risk mentality is in the same place.