GlobalEnglish

Brisbane, CA (Bay Area)
Private $18 million market leader in teaching English over the internet

Used SyncDev to successfully develop its product and market and establish a leadership position.

GlobalEnglish started with the Internet boom to teach reading, writing, and speaking English to those in countries whose native language was not English. Founders recruited a small team of language-arts experts from their former company, The Learning Company. The team conducted their SyncDev kickoff, defined their market, and brainstormed “Wow!” features for their Validation Prototype™, a storyboard of software screens as customers would see them in the product.

One team member, a German-fluent Harvard MBA named Amnon volunteered, so to speak, to set up customer meetings in Germany. A week after finishing local off-Broadway meetings to iron out pitch and demo kinks the team landed in Frankfurt on Sunday for a week of meetings at Daimler Benz, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Telecom, BMW, language schools, and consumers. The latter were ferreted out by calling friends of German friends who were studying English.

When the third meeting ended, the four BMW people in unison hit their knuckles loudly on the table. “What does that mean?” one GE person asked, surprised. “Applause. Danke shön,” BMW said, spurring the team on.

By Thursday night, at 9:30 PM, in a professor’s classroom, Amnon sat straight up, his fingers on the home base of his laptop keyboard ready to type the next spoken word into the Voice-of-the-Customer Database™. So exhausted was he from the US preparation and German field work that his keyboard fell silent as he fell sound asleep.

GlobalEnglish dodged the dot.com bust that came early in their fragile life. But it has since prospered and PMDI learned a valuable lesson, coining the idea of the Minimum Viable Product™. In fact, PMDI aided and abetted the making of a large product by encouraging the unfettered brainstorming of features which could easily have doomed a lesser team. PMDI learned to coach teams toward the MVP in the future.