Mexican Swine Flu Leads to Virtual Language Lab

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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What's up? Welcome and greetings. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host of Side Hustle School. I've got a great story for you today. It is all about the Mexican swine flu.

Well, actually it's not all about the Mexican swine flu. That's just kind of how it starts. The Mexican swine flu leads to a virtual language lab and a $1.5 million side hustle. Like I said, it's a great story. When disaster strikes, how will you respond?

Will you say, "Woe is me." Will you say, "All is lost." Or will you consider if there's a way to reframe the situation and rise from the ashes. That's why I love disaster and recovery stories, especially when it comes to a small business when something goes terribly wrong, but then ends up leading to a completely new direction that the person might not have otherwise found were it not for that disaster. And this story is especially poignant. Faced with a dramatic loss of income, when language students stop coming to Mexico, this creative engineer reinvents the model and builds that $1.5 million business. So lots of lessons learned along the way.

And he's also offering a free trial lesson to all of our listeners. So if you're interested in learning another language and you'd like to see how this virtual instruction works, well, just stay tuned. Details are at the end of the story and we're gonna link everything up in the notes as well. So stay tuned. Here's a quick shout out to our sponsor and then on with the show.

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In 2008, Ray Blakely was in charge of operations and marketing for a Spanish language school in Mexico when the swine flu struck. A lot of US news outlets presented over the top plague-like coverage of the event. And he was worried that students would stop crossing the border for classes. His worries proved to be well-founded as the upcoming classes almost completely emptied out. This was hugely problematic, not only for Ray's income, but even more so for the teachers.

But hope was restored for all involved when Ray came up with an inventive idea, one that would not only benefit him greatly in the long run, but also a lot of teachers, as well as a lot of students. You see, Ray decided he would start his very own language classes via Skype. Now, when he started this, it was a novel concept. It would give teachers a realistic opportunity to continue earning a living by teaching online. He called it LiveLingua.com.

I suppose it could also be pronounced LiveLingua.com, but we're gonna go with Live. First, here's some brief background on Ray. He was born in the Philippines to an American father and Filipino mother, then spent much of his childhood growing up in Turkey, where his parents ran a publishing house in Istanbul. He later moved to the US, where he attended boarding school. To fast forward a bit, in his early 20s, he noticed an ad for the US Navy that had the slogan, "If someone wrote a book about your life, "would you want to read it?" The question spoke to him.

He responded with, "Yes, I want mine to be worth reading." But it wasn't actually the Navy he joined. Later that day, he was on the Peace Corps website, applying to sign up. Three months later, having sold his car in condo, Ray shipped off to Mexico, which is where he eventually met his wife. Both of them were volunteers there, and ironically, Ray's parents had also met in the Peace Corps. Both Ray and his wife now joke that when their son is in his 20s, they'll send him to the Peace Corps to search for his soulmate.

But let's get back to business. Before joining the Peace Corps, Ray had a background in computer programming, having taken jobs as a programmer for Fortune 500 companies. This knowledge helped him build the website for LiveLingua, which started with just five simple pages. He also says now that the first version looked embarrassingly bad. But that's okay, that's how it works.

And he began implementing SEO into his website, and it soon began to race up the rankings in Google. Ray ran the marketing side of things. His Mexican wife, who was and still is a teacher, oversaw the classes. Probably two months down the line, demand began to skyrocket, so they hired more teachers to ease the workload. All of these classes were conducted remotely through Skype, so I guess you could say the Skype was the limit.

Ray had found a winner with LiveLingua. After six months, he was bringing in four to $5,000 a month, all through SEO marketing, and with only a startup cost of $60, $59.99, for a Bluehost annual subscription. This was more than he was earning from his full-time position as a director at the other language school. And so he didn't quit his full-time position right away, he stayed there for another 12 months, scared that his success was just a fluke. Then another disaster arrived, one that wasn't publicized as much as Swine Flu, but that still had serious consequences for Ray's new business.

Google made a major change to its algorithm, and Ray's website disappeared from the rankings overnight. It took him a year and a half of hard work to get back to where he was before the change. And he says now, "I wish we hadn't depended so much on another company for our business." Lesson learned, as of today, LiveLingua generates annual revenue of $1.5 million. And Ray has staff working for him throughout the world, all remotely. Meanwhile, the language classes cost students as little as $10.99 per hour.

Among several other projects, he's now working on a podcast called "The Anomalous Educator," which launched recently with the goal of helping teachers make money online as a side hustle, or to even replace their nine-to-five full-time income. He thinks teachers worldwide aren't paid enough money, which is what inspired him to launch that podcast. Everything began with that $59 web host subscription and a clever idea in response to the Swine Flu. [Music]

When disaster strikes, how will you respond? Will you treat it like the end of the world?

Or will you perhaps look for a silver lining of sorts, maybe not a silver lining, maybe not the whole thing about, you know, the door closing and one door opening, but perhaps just a redirection, a way of thinking differently that could lead to something you wouldn't otherwise have imagined. Great story here, a huge success. Big congratulations to Ray and his team. Now, as mentioned, he's offering our listeners a free trial language lesson. If you'd like to check it out, we're gonna link that up on the show notes page, along with everything else I talked about in this episode, including his new podcast as well, Anomalous Educator.

Sounds great, I'm gonna check it out myself. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. That notes page is sidehustleschool.com/1012. That is 1012, or 1012. Thanks so much for listening.

Be sure you're subscribed. A lot more is coming up, and I hope you will join me for it. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.