Hoosier language startup avoids failure with last-minute pivot

A northeast Indiana language education startup is seeing early success, but its CEO says that’s only because of advice he received at an immersive ideation workshop shortly before the company’s product launch. Language Matters has developed an online platform that provides translation services to help clients reach Hispanic communities, as well as tutoring in Spanish, French and English.

But co-founder Lucas Fonseca attended Discovery Week, a three-day workshop hosted by the Kosciusko Economic Development Corp. and Indianapolis-based NEXT Studios, and was told his company’s model of going direct to consumers wouldn’t work.

In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, Fonseca said the advice he received from NEXT Studios Managing Entrepreneur John McDonald to take a B2B approach saved his business.

“It’s been really weird because you have this idea in mind, and then you hear some feedback, and you take it, and then you end up with that being the main thing you’re doing,” Fonseca said. “It was a complete shift, I would say, from being pretty certain and confident with what our company was going to do with this specific product. And then that shifted completely to what we learned in that workshop, and now we’re just doing that 100%.”

Fonseca said he found two main challenges with the B2C model. He said the consumer market doesn’t tend to spend a lot of money in education across the board, but Hispanic communities don’t like to spend money on education if there are many other options available.

“I just think the way we were presenting it wasn’t the correct way,” he said. “And so going through this workshop, we realized that there was a very big opportunity to work with companies because they had, and they do have this challenge to recruit workers [and] retain them. But also, there are a lot of organizations that want to provide the services for free, and to do it at scale.”

Fonseca said he was hesitant to take McDonald’s advice because he was used to hearing positive reinforcement from other entrepreneurs.

“The fact is that we need to hear all the things that don’t work and how to do them better,” he said. “I think that we hear too often things that do work, and so it’s really easy to become complacent because of it. That’s when entrepreneurs stop developing things and innovating and changing.”

Since pivoting to a B2B model, Language Matters has landed clients such as the city of Warsaw and Grace College, as well as 10 nonprofits, including the YMCA of Greater Fort Wayne.

Fonseca said organizations across the country are seeing how the demographics in their communities are changing and how cities are being reshaped by the population growth of different groups, including the Hispanic community.

“We have 10 to 15 years to prepare and build infrastructure so that when that happens to us in Indiana, we’re ready to go, and we don’t have to struggle to get, especially, Hispanic community members joining the workforce and becoming community assets,” he said. “That’s what I tell companies [and] they’re agreeing with the fact that the Hispanic community’s growing fast, and there there will be services that we want to offer if we really want to transform them really into community assets.”

Language Matters currently has 14 employees, all of whom are working remotely. Most of the employees are based in Indiana, but Fonseca said one employee works in Michigan and he also has a small team in Chile.

Looking forward, Fonseca said he wants to continue to expand the company’s reach to other parts of the state and bring on more municipalities as clients to help them prepare to serve growing Hispanic populations.