The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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DECEMBER/JANUARY The Linguist 7 @Linguist_CIOL FEATURES Thebig idea Q What is Language Amigo in a nutshell? A A social enterprise which aims to provide opportunities for Latin American youth in low and middle income families by using language and technology. We partner with universities and become the practice component for their Spanish language classes. Through us, their students have one-on-one videocalls with young people ('Amigos') in Latin America. Q How did the idea come about? A [Co-founder] Macarena Hernández and I met doing our MBA at Oxford University and we both had a passion to create opportunities for people in Latin America. There is currently a lot of demand for learning Spanish and we realised this was a good approach. Q How did you develop the business model? A Through the Entrepreneurship Project (part of our MBA) we narrowed down our market and who our service providers would be. At first we thought this would be an open platform but we realised that the higher education market would be our best fit, and more stable from a revenue perspective. We decided to focus on universities with intermediate to advanced Spanish language students who can have a conversation, rather than being a teaching service. We launched in 2017. The initial challenges were fundraising, prioritising work, networking, recruitment and training of Amigos, and the long lead times for testing the model and gaining customers. Q What is the Amigos recruitment process? A Our end-users are college students and we wanted our service providers to be in a similar life state. We looked for students at public universities in Colombia and Mexico (where we are from) because they are often financially disadvantaged. I had a grant from Oxford to work with students in Colombia and some became Amigos. Our online application process is quite lengthy because we want talented amigos to provide a quality service. Many are studying languages, so they understand the process of language learning. Our Amigos are mainly in Colombia and Mexico, Macarena is in Mexico and I am in the US, so training is through videocalls, both as a group and individually. We have also developed a lot of materials to support them. Q How is Language Amigo funded? A Through end-users' fees, but initially with a grant, crowdfunding and personal funds. We may look for further investment to expand. Q Tell us about working with universities… A We experimented with different models and found that we get the best results when Language Amigo sessions are a mandatory Ana María Ñungo on providing opportunities for Latin American youth through Language Amigo part of student grades. We've trained our Amigos to provide an assessment of each student. We also match sessions to the curriculum of the university and provide guidelines so Amigos can prepare the relevant topic for each conversation. Q What new skills did you need to develop to set up Language Amigo? A It was our first time running our own company, so we had to learn skills on the operations side: accounting, how to approach potential clients, and everything around sales and account management. We speak Spanish and English but we didn't have knowledge of the language industry, so we received training from language professors and people in the industry. We are now training some Amigos to help us with our day-to-day operations. Q What are your plans for the future? A In the short term attracting more customers in the US; in the mid term expanding our customer base outside the US; and in the long term, diversifying our product. languageamigo.com TEAM WORK Ana (left) and Macarena (right) with members of the Language Amigo team