I’m now halfway through my stay in Valencia, and overall I’m happy with how things are going. At the start I was a bit stressed: new place, new people. But things settled quickly, and now I genuinely feel good here.
What I’m most pleased with is how work at coLanguage looks. My Host Entrepreneur involved me in real work right away, so I never felt like a guest, more like part of the team. I teach Polish and Spanish, help with course content, and every Wednesday we have a full team meeting where everyone shares what they’re working on and gets feedback. I like that nobody micromanages too much; people simply know what they need to do and make their own decisions. I also appreciate that when I suggest something, like a change to the follow-up message after a trial lesson, it actually gets taken into consideration, not just nodded at.
There were a few minor issues too, nothing dramatic: the server struggled with live lessons during peak hours at one point, so that needed sorting out, and we’ve been working on getting more people to stay on after their free trial lesson. Just the normal day-to-day of running a company, but it was good to be there while it was being figured out in real time, rather than just reading about it.
A good chunk of time also went into working on subscriptions and packages. coLanguage offers packages that simply work out cheaper than paying for lessons one by one, so people are more inclined to choose them, and they give the company more stable revenue than single lessons alone. There’s also a corporate offer: employees can learn a language while their employer covers the cost, as a kind of benefit. It was interesting to see how that works behind the scenes, and it fits well with what I want to do with my own school in Poland, where I’m also thinking about packages, and maybe a corporate offer, instead of just single lessons.
The second thing I’m happy about is Lanzadera. It’s a startup accelerator here in Valencia, founded by Juan Roig (the man behind Mercadona), part of a larger hub called Marina de Empresas. Alongside Lanzadera there’s also Angels, which handles investment, and EDEM, which covers business education. The whole complex is right by the port and is genuinely impressive in person.
Being on this program means I can attend Lanzadera’s lectures and workshops for free, which is probably the best part of this whole trip. I’ve already been to sessions on building company culture, Go-to-Market strategy, usability, using AI in product development, and most recently on financing and financial management. I try to apply a lot of it directly to my own idea for a language school in Poland, since it’s not abstract theory but practical things I can actually use: how to calculate costs, how to think about customers, how to talk to investors.
Overall, I feel this first half gave me a lot: real work experience at a company, plus a solid amount of business knowledge from the training sessions. For the second half, I want to bring more of my own ideas to coLanguage and make even more use of Lanzadera before I head back to Poland.