A few months ago, I bought a domain name called TeluguNotes.com. The vision behind this purchase was that I wanted to create high-quality resources for learning the Telugu language, geared towards heritage language learners. That is, people who might have a passive understanding of Telugu, or may be conversational in it, and want to improve their own understanding of the language.
I ended up not pursuing it because I thought it wasn’t “practical.” I was unemployed at the time (and still am partially), and felt like I should spend my time doing more “realistic” things. Specifically, I have been involved in many startup/pitch style things in my life, in high school, college, and through VFA, and one recurring question is “how will you monetize this.” The presence of this question makes me feel like entrepreneurship and starting a company is only worth it if you’re going for unicorn style hockey stick growth, and that if you’re shooting for anything more modest, it’s not worth it. As much as I believe that high quality Telugu resources are important, and there’s a market to pay for it, I don’t feel like that market is going to be a unicorn market. For some reason (which doesn’t make much sense in hindsight), that made me feel like it wasn’t worth it.
But I’m realizing that might not be true, or really not matter.
My understanding of entrepreneurship is that you end up pivoting anyway, and that many successful startups started off thinking they would do something very different. That seems to imply that even if I can’t see the monetization or revenue path right now, that I’ll figure something out to make it work.
Also, I think this is a problem area that is very important. There is a lack of high quality resources that are designed for heritage speakers of Telugu, especially in the west. The resources that are out there are old, technical, or geared towards people hoping to be in India. There’s also a lack of culturally relevant Telugu content for people who live in the west (and a lack of learning resources around it). Most Telugu language material is geared towards Telugu speakers in India, other than a handful of podcasts and YouTube videos. For someone like me, who grew up in the West, there’s also a lot of aspects of Telugu and Indian culture that I don’t understand, and it would be helpful to have a way to engage with that.
Because of how important the problem is – I think the concerns over if it’s going to be profitable or not are overblown. The goal of TeluguNotes is to solve a problem. The revenue used to get the funds to solve that problem – whether that be offering subscriptions, courses, products or getting grant funding – is a means to an end. It’s a means of being able to solve that problem sustainably, not to try to get rich.
Building in Public
To help keep me accountable to working on this, and to connect with people, I’m going to build in public (BIP). Building in public is an idea that’s popular with tech startups. People generally believe that ideas are very valuable, and so if you have a good idea, you should try to hide it. There are many startups that are “stealth” for this reason.
But in most cases, the idea is not the valuable thing about a startup. It’s the execution. It’s actually building the thing that operationalizes the idea. With that in mind, many founders have started to build in public to do two things. First, it helps you build and leverage a support group. If you’re blogging and tweeting about your challenges, others can help you solve them. Second, it helps you grow your customer base. It’s a form of marketing in the sense that as you write about the product you’re building, and the challenges you’re facing, people will learn about your product.
This particular product – Telugu learning – is a very niche topic. So, the internet, and building an ecosystem of people interested in Telugu, is going to be the best way to try to grow and build this.
First steps
The last time I tried evaluating a startup idea was through the Dare to Dream program at the University of Michigan. Through that, I ran through a business model canvas of an idea I had for heritage language learning, identified questions to test that assumption, and conducted 30 user interviews. I synthesized those findings, and concluded that that specific idea did not fit the criteria to advance through the Dare to Dream process.
The takeaway I had from that is that you should start by talking to as many people as possible in the problem space that you’re working in. In particular, I think I want to talk to a few different categories of people:
- People who teach Telugu in a private tutoring company
- People who teach Telugu in an academic context
- Administrators at universities or companies that offer Telugu language services
- Heritage language learners of Telugu who have tried to learn Telugu
- Parents who are trying to teach their kids Telugu, and their exp
- Kids whose parents are pressuring them to learn Telugu
- People of Telugu origin who have no interest in learning Telugu
- Heritage Telugu people in India (i.e., people who have Telugu parents, but are more proficient in another language, and live in India)
- People who offer Telugu translation services, or Telugu language services to Telugu people in the US or India
- Telugu cultural institutions (temples, fine arts societies, etc.)
That’s a lot of people, and I have limited time. I want to set a goal to set-up 5 interviews a week. I want to have 3 of them be in the first two categories, and then have 2 in other categories. I want to send 10 interview requests by the end of next week (assuming a 1/2 response rate)
Before I do that, I want to do the following
- Set up a landing page on TeluguNotes.com with an email sign-up, and brief description of what I’m trying to do. This could be as simple as a Notion page. I want this to be done by next Tuesday at 11:59pm
- Set up a blog on TeluguNotes.com and cross-post this blog post (after editing it) to let people follow along. I want this to be done by next Tuesday at 11:59 pm, or sooner.
- Also find a way to do e-mail updates. I might transition this to Substack in the future
Longer term
This is just the beginning, but here are some decisions I’ll have to make, or things I’ll have to pursue in the future:
- Do I want to do this full-time, or part-time? What’s my runway for how long I can work on this?
- Do I want to extend my runway by moving somewhere with a lower cost of living? Or do I want to find ways to make part-time income?
- How would I think about making money on this long-term? Do I want to structure this as a non-profit, offering courses and subscriptions to augment that revenue? Or do I want to structure this like a traditional language learning / education / tutoring business? How do other organizations do this? What are the advantages and dis-advantages of each?
- Do I want to get more people to be interested in learning Telugu (growing the market) or do I want to focus on the existing market of highly motivated people? If I want to do both, how do I want to split my time between the two?