What They Never Teach You in Language School – Peter Galante Japanese Pod 101

Twenty years ago, we all thought that starting a startup required a special and rare kind of talent. It was something you either had or you didn't. Today, founding and running a startup is considered more of a learnable skill. It has its own best practices, industry standards, and common knowledge.

And, in both startups and enterprises, I find it refreshing to talk to people who have succeeded by going against those industry standards.

Peter Galante started what would become the wildly successful Japanese Pod 101 with no clear idea how to monetize and no clear business plan. He did, however, have a firm conviction that what he wanted to build had value and the people would flock to it.

And he was right.

Peter and I talk about how his unconventional business plan and his rejection of VC advice and standard best practices, actually resulted in a rapidly growing startup in a market protected from even his best-funded competitors.

It's an interesting conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.

Show Notes

Who is really studying Japanese online Why most Japanese language learners fail What you need to know about turning a hobby into a business What happens when your startup start changing for free content Why podcasting is dying [Noooo!!!!] and video is rising How content creators can get paid when so much content is free How to defend your business against better-funded startups

Links from the Founder

Everything you ever wanted to know about Innovative Language Learning

JapanesePod 101 JapanesePod101 on YouTube

Connect with Peter on LinkedIn Friend him on Facebook

[shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs.

I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me.

Today, we're going to sit down and talk with startup founder and fellow podcaster Peter Galante, founder of Japanese Pod 101, and if you study Japanese, then you've probably already listened to more than a few of those episodes.

When I went over to their studio for the conversation, Peter mentioned that he was actually a little bit nervous about coming on the show. That came as quite a surprise to me. I mean, I'm a friendly guy and I genuinely love learning about business models and taking them apart, you know, breaking them down into their individual movies parts, holding them up to the light to see how they work. I think that subject is endlessly fascinating and I learn something new every time I do it but that's my approach and not everyone thinks this way.

Not everyone approaches startups as an exercise in business model design where you have a system of interacting components that need to be optimized in underserved markets that need to be served. Some people, in fact, probably more founders that are willing to admit it start out with a vision of what they want to be doing and then figure out how to backfit some kind of sustainable business model onto it.

This is exactly what Peter has done and as we'll see during the interview, this is exactly what has not only led to the success of Japanese Pod 101 but it is also what is preventing even well-funded competition from entering this space. We also - and as a podcaster, this breaks my heart - we also talked about the ongoing and transformative shift from audio to video content.

Oh, yeah, and Peter wanted to make sure I let you know that about the same time this podcast is released, Japanese Pod 101 will exceed 1 billion downloads. That's pretty impressive for something that started out as a hobby but you know, Peter tells that story a lot better than I can. So let's get right to the interview.

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[interview]

Tim: I'm sitting here with Peter Galante of Innovative Language Learning who is redefining online language education but is more famous and I think well known by a lot of listeners for creating Japanese Pod 101. So thanks for sitting down with me.

Peter: Thanks for having me. I'm actually a very big fan of your show.

Tim: Well, thank you, many of our listeners already know and are probably already subscribers to Japanese Pod 101 but can you just briefly explain what it is and what your company does?

Peter: What we do is we provide about 10 to 15-minute lessons teaching Japanese, usually centered around a conversation. We introduce the conversation, then you hear the conversation, and it's usually two voice actors of speaking Japanese. After that, we break down the conversation and explain the nuances of the words, the vocabulary and usually, some central point that ties this conversation together such as a grammar point or a set phrase.

Tim: Okay, and the podcast acts as sort of sample lessons, and then people come onto the site and they subscribe for the whole package?

Peter: Exactly. We have a free music model, so the lesson is actually free for two weeks. So you can actually - if you can subscribe from day one, you can have all our multimedia content for free.

Tim: I wish I was that dedicated in studying my Japanese. I come in and out of it. No, you support 34 languages now, right?

Peter: That's correct.

Tim: That's pretty amazing. Well, listen, before we dive really deep into the business model, tell me a bit about your customers. So who is subscribing to the Innovative Language Learning system?

Peter: Sorry, Tim, I thought you were here to give me a business model because I…

Tim: We can work on that afterwards.

Peter: Yeah, let's work on that, actually.

Tim: But who are they? Are they younger, older, do they skew male, female?

Peter: So we have listeners as young as eight years old all the way up to people in the 80s. So the free content is consumed by a wide variety of people. The paying customers tend to be about 30 to 40 years old, professional people who are interested in self-growth.

Tim: That's not what I would have guessed. I would have guessed it would have skewed much younger. What's the percentage of Japanese learners versus the other 33 languages?

Peter: When we first started 12 years ago, Japanese was, of course, the whole thing and we worked very, very hard in Japanese to build up the other languages while maintaining the high quality of Japanese content. So over the years, the other languages have grown quite a lot and Japanese is about at 20%.

Tim: Well, listen, I think you've done something that Japanese Pod and in Innovative Language Learning that a whole lot of westerners who come to Japan dream of doing. You started with something that was just kind of an idea and you grew it into something that's a growing, thriving business. So let's take a few steps back and talk a bit about you and how all this stuff got started. So why did you first come to Japan? What brought you here?

Peter: Is spite a good answer?

Tim: Spite? It's an interesting answer. Why did you move to Japan for spite?

Peter: So kind of a half joke. I have to back up a bit. Spite wasn't the key catalyst but it played it important role. So when I was in high school, we had - this is early 90s - we had a Japanese exchange teacher come stay at our house. I'm from New York and this is at the time when Japan was taking over, they were going to be the new number one economy, and I think at that time, the internet wasn't as disseminated, so we kind of paid attention to the narrative that the media wanted to portray and that was that we're losing.

Tim: Right, this was the Japan as Number One era.

Peter: Correct, and meeting someone from Japan and spending time with them up close and learning about the culture and language, and just more important, making a real life long friend was the main reason I became interested in Japanese and Japan. So when I went to University, I chose Japanese as the language to study and my Japanese teacher wasn't very good at it but you have to understand, year one or first sem - Japanese 1 has about 100 students. Japanese 2 has 10 students, Japanese 3...

Tim: It's a tough language, yeah.

Peter: So I managed to make it to 3 and my Japanese teacher just said to me, “You should go to Japan,” so then, like yeah, I want to go to Japan, and then I interviewed for something called the JET Programme.

Tim: Ah, okay.

Peter: And I didn't get it.

Tim: Oh, okay.

Peter: That's where the spite came in. So then I kind of made it a goal to come to Japan. I wound up coming as an English teacher and slowly working my way back into the school system here.

Tim: You just sent out a resumes, you just contacted language schools independently and found someone to hire you?

Peter: Yeah, feverishly.

Tim: You mentioned you're working your way back into the education system but you’re also studying at heat Hitotsubashi, right? You're studying for your PhD there.

Peter: That's correct.

Tim: Was that something you left education to do or is that something you were doing kind of part time while you were paying the bills by teaching English?

Peter: I think the way my professor looks at it is they kicked me out to pursue a career as an entrepreneur. So after coming to Japan as an English teacher, I had quite a rigorous schedule. So in the morning, I would go to Japanese school from about 9 to 1 and I go to teach English from 1:30 to 9, I kind of do this constantly and I worked my way back into academia. I got a job as – oh, I got a position as a research student at a university in Ibaraki. From there, I took an entrance exam into a masters program and that's when I got to have Hitotsubashi. Again, this is in Japanese. So I got my masters degree in Japanese, well, I was studying in Japanese.

Tim: So all the coursework is in Japanese?

Peter: That's what I was trying to say. Then,