How I Grew My German Speaking Classes To $5K/Month
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hello there! I’m Rónán and I’m the founder of Deutsch Gym. We host the best German conversation classes on the internet. Our customers are adult German learners who want to improve their spoken German. Most of them live in Germany, Austria, Switzerland.
I call them German classes, but what we really sell to learners is confidence.
We are a bit different in that we focus on German conversation/speaking classes - we don’t do traditional grammar classes.
They are group classes where the full group, say 12 people meet at the start of the class, and then they are broken up into 4 groups of 3 for the rest of the class. We make unique themes/topics for them to talk about. The teacher then switches between the groups and gives the students feedback.
We don't tell anyone this but what we really sell isn’t German classes, it is confidence! Today we make about $5k per month.
How did you come up with your business idea?
What is ironic about the whole thing is that I actually swore off startups when I came up with it.
I was fired from my last job and moved to Berlin. I half-heartedly applied to some tech jobs in Berlin, but I knew I didn’t want to work in another job.
I didn’t really like working for others, and had started 15 side-projects and 2 companies in the past. None of them worked out.
However, the goal was always to work for myself. That desire never went away.
I used this opportunity as a reset. I made the decision to:
- never get another office job again
- finally learn German
For the rest of my life, I would get some mix of manual jobs or freelance jobs - anything apart from an office job - until I started a business that would sustain me. But never the office jobs like I had before. It was a big decision! But I feared if I didn’t use that chance to make that change then, I might have been trapped in office jobs for a long time.
At the last minute I enrolled in an intensive German course (in-person), where you have 3 hours of lessons per day, and I would do 2-3 hours of homework in the evening. I treated learning German like a job.
At the same time I got a job with an e-scooter company. I would drive around Berlin, swapping the batteries of e-scooters, and collecting the damaged ones, and bringing them back to base. It was a perfect job for what I wanted - to give me some headspace whilst still earning a bit of money.
However, halfway through this period I got frustrated with my German progress - I was learning a lot and becoming more confident. But when I tried to practice it on the street/in a cafe/bar, I would always get a response in English! Berlin is an international city, and unless your German accent is 10/10, people will switch to English. They don’t want to speak broken German with you.
To get around this and practice the German I was putting so much effort into learning, I thought I would start an online group for German learners. I had used Discord a bit for a crypto group I was in (forgive me) so I know that would be perfect.
I posted into the “Expats in Berlin” Facebook group with a link to the Discord channel and waited.
One person showed up! I was very nervous but excited. But I did the same thing the next week and no one came. I continued posting about it on various facebook groups and on week 3 4 people showed up, and it grew from there.
A few weeks into it the pandemic hit and it started to grow a lot more.
The Discord group was still totally free, and I was in charge of leading and organising the meetups. After a few months of continual growth I began to think that there might be something there that I could charge for.
Give us a step-by-step process for how you built the first version of your product.
To start off I created a free Discord group, and then simply posted that link with a quick message to various expat Berlin/other German city Facebook groups. The basic format of the business was set up in a day.
That was totally free and got me the first 50 users. I did not charge at this stage. I was leading all the meetups myself with my intermediate German!
After a couple of months of growth I decided to charge for access. I made a quick Gumroad page initially and charged $10 per year. When they bought, they would get a Discord invite link. That was it - nothing fancy.
The first sale I made on Gumroad felt like the best high in the world. It was like a shot of adrenaline/dopamine/serotonin all at the same time. IYKYK. I got 2 sales at that price and then changed it to $10 per month. Someone bought at that price within 1 day so I knew that was a decent rate to leave it at for a while.
The business model is the same now - a monthly membership - but the price has gone up to $40 per month for unlimited classes.
You will probably have to try a lot of things before something works, so just start.
Understand the concept of iteration. Also that not all business models are created equal.
Around this time I wanted to reach more people, so I set up a page on Meetup. I think it was around $18 per month. It was in the language learning category in Berlin. Around this time I noticed that most of the other Berlin language Meetup groups were closing down due to pandemic restrictions.
I thought this was total insanity - they were not even offering online meetups! People were locked indoors and craving connection with others. I wasn’t complaining though - their timidness would only help me.
Being one of the few groups offering virtual meetups in Berlin was a big driver of users for me. I set up a simple Carrd website to replace the Gumroad page. Carrd cost about $49 per year. I linked this from the Meetup group page, and people got all the information via email.
For my website I made the log in about 10 minutes. It is just Deutsch Gym in permanent marker. I still have the same log today.
There was a lot of growth in the first 6 months of the business. People were lonely and craved an hour of hanging out online in the evenings. There was a great atmosphere - it was very relaxed and easygoing, the members were from all over the world and were living in Germany, learning German, so everyone was going through the same experience. There were loads of regulars and people made friends through the groups.
At the start I led all the meetups every day, so I have led hundreds of meetups myself. But the issue was my German is intermediate - so half the people had German worse than mine and have better. This was fine when it was free, but it became an issue when I started charging money. I would make mistakes and teach them dodgy German. I look back and cringe! I soon decided that I needed native German speaker to lead all the classes. Now all the teachers are excellent.
How did you “launch” the business?
The main growth channel at the start was Meetup.com. I relied on that a lot for the first year. It worked. My roles in startups before were in growth/marketing (and some development) so I knew that if you find a growth lever, you pull as hard as possible on it. It will inevitably stop working so just keep it going as long as possible. And shut up about it.
I would create Meetup groups in different cities and point them to my website. I don’t mind talking about it now as I think that channel is dead now. It’s very crowded and the platform is a bit of a mess.
While relying on Meetup, I started trying other ways of growing like SEO, a referral program, and some ads. I knew it was too dangerous to get my traffic from one source, so I wanted to diversify it. It took a lot longer to do that than I thought. Word of mouth also really helped me - my members were happy to share it with their friends.
I launched it on twitter as well, and at the start I embraced “build in public”, tweeting revenue and user growth etc. But my followers aren’t really German learners so it didn’t get me customers. There was no major response as such. What that did get me was copycats! They annoyed me at the start but I don’t really worry about them anymore.
But I have since pulled back from sharing too much on revenue or strategy, as I felt it wasn’t really benefiting me, only hurting me. I still share a good bit, but usually after the fact.
Stop talking, just do it! A lot of entrepreneurship is just doing it, getting punched in the face, and trying again with a different approach.
How did you land your first customers?
It took 2 months for the group to earn any money. When I started it, I didn’t plan on it becoming a business at all. It was just to solve my own problem. Only after it grew did I decide to charge for it. It was the first time I really felt the “pull” of the market, and I did not have to push it - people wanted it!
My first customers came from expat Facebook groups and Meetup groups. I had zero organic traffic at the start. Once I had about 100 free users, I started charging for access to the group. Not all of them were happy about it, but many came on board. The new users, who never had the free version, were all happy to pay. There is a lesson about setting expectations there.
Then after I decided to start charging, it grew to $2,200 MRR in 3 months.
My pricing at the start was $10/year, $10/month, then $12/ month for a while. Now it is $40/month. That is probably quite high compared to other B2C businesses I see on twitter.
How have you grown your business?
Meetup brought me a lot of customers in the beginning, and that source of traffic gave me time to get my SEO in order, before it petered out.
SEO is now a big driver for me, but it took a while for it to start working. What I would have done differently at the start would be to concentrate on SEO from day one. Really put a lot of structured effort into it. People say it takes 3-6 months for it to kick in. In my experience it is closer to 1-2 years.
Obviously it hasn’t been my strong point! Once you get the organic traffic it is extremely gratifying. It takes time though, and if I didn’t use the other channels in the meantime the business might have died whilst I was waiting for SEO traffic to kick in.
18 months into the business and SEO was a disaster. I have learned my lesson!
In language learning the CPC for ads is quite high - all the big companies run a lot of ads so it is competitive. I have dipped my toes into ads on the various platforms, but they have not been that effective. They are expensive for a bootstrapped business.
I made the decision about 18 months ago to send a weekly newsletter. There are now over 3,000 subscribers on it, all German learners, and it has been a great way to keep people updated about Deutsch Gym. It probably does not drive a lot of immediate revenue. But there are a lot of potential customers there that eventually join. Also past members that re-join. I also use it to get beta users for new features, and to get feedback from members. It is a great way to stay in touch with everyone in general. So in that sense it has been pretty invaluable.
Word of mouth has been great for me. I provide something a bit different to most of the competitors on the market, so when people “get” Deutsch Gym, they really get it and tell their friends and spouses.
If I were to start again, I would have listed a bunch of directories at the very start to get some easy backlinks. You search for lists of directories to post on, or buy a list of them (not the backlinks, just the list of directories).
I would have invested in SEO immediately, and then in the meantime while that was working its magic, post about the company where all the users hang out - like on sub reddits (but you have to be careful, as a lot of them will ban any self-promotion).
Give us a breakdown of your revenue & financials.
Average monthly revenue is around $5k. There are usually around 200-250 customers at any one time, it varies a bit. The business is profitable.
The best change to my business I made was increasing the price. This price increase was from $30 per month to $40 per month.
Guess when I increased the price:
What does the future look like?
I am very confident in the business going forward. I’m developing a new platform that will improve the learner experience. The students will get more time with the teacher, and the content will be more interesting and useful to them. I have a blank canvas to build a real learning platform, so I am trying to make it great.
I’ve been testing it over a few months and am working the kinks out. This will be its own platform, not Discord. I will have more control and the students will have a better time learning there. I see this as the future of the business.
I’m aggressively focusing on making the student experience better, whilst also pushing organic traffic more. I also built a tool (freegermantest.com) where you can test your German online for free, so I plan to make more of those.
I think if in 5 years’ time most German learners would have heard of Deutsch Gym as the place to learn German, and would try it out, I would consider that a success.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
I have made a bunch of mistakes - how long do you have!
One bad decision I made was buying a domain for $3,000 and not being able to use it!
My original plan was to have the website offer lessons for 10 different languages, so when I made a little bit of profit I bought the domain and added new languages to the site. I then realized this was not the way I wanted to go and decided to focus only on German. Now the only other people who would use this domain would be competitors, so I can’t sell it!
I regret not making the marketing website myself - I used Webflow. I customised it heavily so it took a while to finish, and I could have just coded one myself in the meantime. This would have opened up some opportunities for me to have fun with it I think. I can’t totally complain, Webflow is great, but you are locked into something more rigid, which I think closes some doors.
Not having backup teachers has bitten me hard before. If a teacher gets sick or has an emergency at the last minute, I have been scrambling to find a replacement. Sometimes I couldn’t get one and the students have a bad experience and a bad first impression if they are new.
I made some bad hires (contractors) that I instinctively knew weren’t a fit and took too long to find a fix for it.
A poor decision of mine was not grandfathering in everyone who first joined (about the first 80 people) as free customers for life. They took part when it was totally free, and while I gave them a huge discount when asking them to pay, it was not worth the small amount of money I made from them. I should have just brought them for free and charged all the new people.
I’m sure there are some missed opportunities. I could have probably raised some money in 2020 considering the frothy times and my early growth rate, but I don’t really want investment and it could have caused more problems than have helped.
Got blindsided by - SEPA debits (bank transfers) - if you are based in the EU be careful of accepting SEPA debits as payments. Those customers will automatically win disputes/chargebacks within 6 weeks of payment, and they know it. They are lower quality customers. They ask for more refunds and dispute/chargeback more. This can cause your payment processor to freeze your account.
I had to learn SEO - it is an ongoing process! I know a lot more now than I used to anyway.
I made the decision one day to cold email a bunch of people in the language learning space to ask if they would be affiliates. It paid off. Referrals were a great growth driver for a while - there was a year-long period where they accounted for 30% of revenue, so they were absolutely worth it. When they work they really work - it’s free money. Referrals count for a lot less of the business’ revenue but I still have the program running and will continue to.
COVID was something that was totally out of my control that ended up helping me. The world was locked indoors, people were anxious and lonely, all in-person German meetups and lessons in every city were canceled, and people wanted to speak and connect with each other whilst being cooked up in their living rooms.
I actually started Deutsch Gym a few weeks before the pandemic hit, so it was a pure coincidence that I came along with something that German learners would really desire whilst being stuck at home. I think the groups and the concept would have worked anyway, but it did accelerate the growth a lot.
Although the core of the business didn’t necessarily require coding - it did help me a lot along the way. I could do automations and custom bots for managing Discord which saved me a lot of time, as well as some API stuff like pulling customer data on Stripe, changing prices etc. I built a few side-projects along the way as well to keep my skills sharp, and am building the new platform myself.
I think I’m also good at dealing with people. I worked in our family business growing up so I learned how to talk to customers. At the start of the business I onboarded every single customer with a phone call (probably the first 80), and led hundreds of meetups myself, so I ended up chatting to a lot of customers. Customers like talking to the founder!
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Stop talking, just do it! A lot of entrepreneurship is just doing it, getting punched in the face, and trying again with a different approach.
If you are not on Twitter/X you are making a mistake. It’s where every founder is. Use it for motivation, DM people, and find a telegram group of peers. It helps with opening your eyes to what is possible.
Something that was not obvious: I only came up with a good idea when I stopped hunting for one. I just experienced the real world and then got hit with a problem that I could solve.
Also - I did side-projects in the evening and weekends whilst having a day job that is also coding/marketing. I think it is very difficult. You are staring at a screen 16+ hours a day. Your brain is pretty fried. I don’t know the solution. Try to go on a 4-day work week?
You will probably have to try a lot of things before something works, so just start.
Understand the concept of iteration. Also that not all business models are created equal.
Be prepared to work like hell. But know you won’t always have to.
I’ve always had the burning desire to work for myself - it never went away no matter what life situation I have been in. If that is you, you owe it to yourself to try!
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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