Case Study: Connor Ondriska – Spanish VIP

Connor is the co-founder and CEO at Spanish VIP an online Spanish school, which has worked with 1000s of students globally. In the last two years, they’ve grown to over 40 full-time employees with the goal of helping aspiring Spanish learners speak Spanish in the real world.

Connor is in an unusual situation compared to our other interviewees in that he doesn’t teach the course himself – he employs others to do it. So it’s a very insightful case study for all of us on how you can scale your online courses beyond just yourself.

In this interview we cover:

• How his desire to build a sustainable way to create jobs for great people in Latin America led to Spanish VIP and the business model they use.
• How he and his co-founder “bootstrapped” Spanish VIP using income from their jobs and then putting profits back into the business to hire new teachers. And the advantage of doing it this way vs having outside investors.
• How the business was built with an aligning vision of making learning a language both hugely successful and easily affordable for their students. And how by having that vision and a team fully behind it meant they always “found a way” to overcome any obstacles.
• How Spanish VIP offer a customised experience for all students where their learning is tailored and responds to their specific struggles, challenges and goals. And how this type of customisation can be added to any course.
• The guerilla marketing approaches they used to launch their first course without a large marketing budget.
• The one path they send all their marketing leads down.
• How they onboard customers to make sure they have an amazing initial experience and so stay on as members.
• Connor’s advice on the importance of realism when starting out – and in particular, of understanding what you can really do better than others.

Watch the interview here: