YouSaid · the spoken record

Sonia Gil

lines on the record: 19
first: 2020-10-22
most recent: 2020-10-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, we're there. We're good. We're solid. We're alive. We actually see a horizon where we can grow. We've a new part of the business has sprung up and that's exciting. But we're still on total bootstrap mode. Do not spend anything that does not need to be spent on right now because you have to have room to maneuver. You have to be able to change if need be.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my god yes the answer is a solid one hundred percent yes first of all the online immersion is here to stay I've no doubt it's something that also had been in their minds but if there's one thing this pandemic has accelerated and it has opened the doors toward is online education I think people are definitely ready and and willing and much more open to it so yeah this is here to stay I think there will be a mix of both so I can see how a lot of people will do an online immersion first before doing an on-site one to you know to really get the most of the on-site one but we'll see right we're figuring it out it's we're growing the team at the same time there's a lot of uncertainty it's definitely less lucrative”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a lot of our students that are in the immersions now crave that connection with other students, right? And right now what we're doing is we're doing live events every month. So history talks and they're free, by the way. Everybody who's listening come to our live events. They're amazing. We have history talks in Spanish and English so that you can practice, but also actually get the information. cooking classes, whatever, all sorts of interest and people come together there to mix and match. Yeah, that's something that It's in the works. Everything's in the works now.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a tough one. Being in the language learning business for so long, I can tell you that the affinity isn't always there, meaning Guy, you happen to like Italian, and that's the language that you'd want to learn. But that doesn't mean that your friend wants to learn that or is willing to put in the time to learn that. It's really hard to hone in on the demographics, thankfully. The way we started with the online immersion is that we have a database. We have all the people that have come to the immersions. We have all the people that had signed up to come in the future. And so we were able to offer this as a replacement in a way. And that got us started. We do campaigns in Google Ads. I talk to anyone that is willing to talk to me, just like when we started digital programs, same thing with the online.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the same time, we have a meeting every week with all of our team members. We discuss every single student. What are they missing? Do we need to change anything? Do we need to adapt anything? So we turned out that this online version of the immersion has been incredibly effective in terms of the learning for our guests because we can be that much more precise and we can individualize it that much more. You had Salman Kan on this podcast. I love him. And he talked about how the best learning experiences are when you have a great teacher that identifies your gaps and then focuses on that. And this online version of the immersion allows us much better to hone in on those gaps and fill them in.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the format. We already knew that 90 minutes is the perfect amount of time to do a chapter. So we knew that. And then we knew a little bit about what the exchange is like online. So step one was, all right, team, let's put together this content from getting everybody together, training and making sure that the exchange through a screen was the correct one. There's some informality through these types of engagements through screens that sometimes bring a little bit less seriousness to the conversation and we want it to bring in the seriousness, which is what we have in the in-person experiences. So everybody has a uniform. There's a system where we know exactly where every student is and what they're going through.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was clear that the way to do it was okay, we got to pivot and go online. We had the digital products and we've never left that alone that exists and that goes on. But it's very different than what we do, the immersion program. And so it was like, what can we do? How do we pivot the face-to-face experiences where people definitely expect much more than just the language of learning, right? It's about a cultural experience. It's about feeling taken care of. How do we translate what we have there into this, right, a screen? And thankfully throughout the years that we've done the in-person immersion, we had been doing some online coaching with people that had already been in the immersion to continue. So we had already a little bit of knowledge in terms of”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was in Mexico City at the time. I have a home there. I'm based there. So I decided to kind of pack my bags and leave and we rented a home in Colorado far away from everything so I could just sit down and have time to focus and come up with something new. Kind of started a new company in 2017 and what that takes. And so like here we are in March. We got to start a company all over again, but we got 30 days. What do we do? What's next”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Returns or postponements like we need to come up with a policy. That was like the first couple weeks just putting down the fire, right? At the same time, being the psychologist and mentor and And shoulder for the team, you know, a lot of our members are quite young and great, amazing people, but they were like up in the air, like, what do we do now? We have nothing, right? So, a lot of it was also that like talking to every single individual person in the team, hi, we're good. We got you covered till the end of the year. What's your situation? Can you make it if we bring it down? What's the deal? I wanted to know every single individual situation so that we could just feel at ease for at least the coming months so we could actually think and come together and figure something out.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my god, are you kidding? Yes, I'm still worried. We're alive and we're good, but of course, yes, absolutely. Step one was just go back to the Excel sheet and just dial down everything. Like, what are we spending on that we don't need to be spending on right now? How do we get to the bare minimum to keep going? And it was important to us to keep the entire team as much as possible. We had no idea what was going to happen. But what can we do? There's a lot of things that we already paid for. What can we do here? Let's negotiate a lot of things we lost, a lot of things we're able to keep. And then, okay, we have all these people booked for the whole year. We need to contact them, do the best we can in terms of”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had relationships with vendors, with hotels, we had commitments that we had already paid for. Local teams, I mean ah Marsh was rough”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had to make really hard decisions. And at the time, our team thought we were being a little bit like we were exaggerating. Our guests, we had to pull out early, and we did. We did in late February. We kind of just made the call and just wrote to everybody like, hi, we're not doing this. We're postponing it. We're figuring it out. One of our guests actually received the email of the postponement while she was on the plane. Go to Barcelona, she was going early. People were not happy. It was complicated. It turned out later that we made the right decision and we were like the coronavirus whisperers. But it was tough. I mean, we had 50 people going to Barcelona opening up a full city. We had programs laid out for the whole year. We were opening up in Oaxaca in April.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Starting this part of the business was like starting a brand new company all over again. It was like going back to the roots, you know, like bootstrapping it, how do we make it happen? How do we build it? Yeah. And that all happened in 2017 and in 2018 we started like with our first groups in Mexico City, we grew 100% plus 2019. 2020 was going to be our big expansion year. This year is when we were opening in Barcelona and Oaxaca. And we had already grown 100%, only selling out till June, like mid-year, right? So it was like our expansion year. And we were meant to be starting our very first group in Barcelona on march eighth. And the entire team was supposed to be moving to Barcelona. On February 25. So if you remember, on February we weren't sure what was happening, right? And Barcelona closed up March 14th.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To go for it and build it and start it, and a big part of that decision and why we hadn't done it before is because, again, the learning part of it is a big component. And that meant that I had to sit down and write the program. Like it's different how you learn through a screen and the programs that we'd written were meant and written and thought of for somebody who is at home alone learning in a computer. You are in our immersion program. That's a whole different notion and a different experience. So it was kind of like I had to reckon with the fact that I had to sit down and not sleep and drink lots of coffee for a long time”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was actually an idea that had been floating around for a while for us. You know, we wanted to do something in person that was, there wasn't anything out there that met our needs that involved not only just great teaching and a great methodology, but also a beautiful place, go to great restaurants, like not have to think about it. There's a lot of immersion programs out there. You know, you can go to Costa Rica for a week and it's super inexpensive and you live with a family and it's cumbersome and you're kind of in a classroom with a lot of people, a lot of young people. So this was thought for like adults. I want to go somewhere where I'm comfortable. I want to go to great museums. I want to hear talks about history and culture. And I just want to have like a whole experience about the language and the culture and the place that I'm visiting. And there was really nothing out there. So finally we just”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On video. That's where we bring the cultural aspects of the language. We always talk about either a particular painting or an artist or a movie or a book or a recipe, like something that ties in the language with the culture. And that was how it all started.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's online, but there was a very big element, which is the premise of everything that we do. And it was how do we bring the magic that an amazing teacher has? I'm sure you've had an experience of a great teacher that you remember. I know I have it. Like, how do we bring that to the digital space in a self-learned program? And every one of our programs has a very strong video component. There's one person that teaches you throughout. I'm actually the video coach for a lot of the languages. And so every lesson starts with an introduction in English explaining like, okay, today we're going to do this. We're going to face these obstacles. We're going to do it together. Then there's a big tutorial where we compare English to whatever language you're learning. This is how we do it. There's a lot of graphics where it's come in and out. And then you go through a battery of workouts that are designed specifically so that you leverage what you learn and you go forward. There's always a conclusion.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you're going to learn Spanish and you come from English, the obstacles you're going to face are going to be very different than somebody who comes from Italian. They're going to learn it quicker, no doubt. You're going to have a harder time. And it seems logical, and you'd think that everything that's out there obviously takes that into account, but that's not the case, actually. Most of the programs and even books and university programs and everything else have one path of learning and that's what it is. And so that makes it harder for us. That means our market is smaller. That also means that every time we develop a language, it's incredibly difficult. It takes resources and time and whatnot. But it also ensures that you have better results and that you feel like it's made for you because it is made for you.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, so we launched our first product Fluence Mandarin in January of 2007. Kind of like if we can teach Mandarin. We can teach anything. This was a while ago. This is pre apps, pre-anything. And yeah, the idea was to have a self-learn digital program that was specifically made for English speakers. And that's the key component there. And that's really what differentiates us from everybody else. We deconstruct the language and put it back together from the point of view of somebody who's an English speaker who is learning that language.”
2020-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT