Fireside chat - the Inzpira Case Study

Summary

In this insightful interview, Rohit, the co-founder and CEO of Inspira, shares his journey of creating a competitive edge in the language learning industry. He explains how Inspira differentiates itself by blending technology with traditional education, offering a flexible, on-demand, live learning experience. Rohit also discusses how the company’s vision is to build confidence in learners, rather than just teaching languages. He highlights the importance of innovation, future-oriented features, and prioritizing user needs while navigating a crowded, unorganized market. The discussion emphasizes Inspira’s plans for growth and its mission to redefine language learning.

Takeaways

• 😀 The CEO of Inspira, Rohit, shares his experience on how the company has built a competitive edge by defining its own category in the English learning space.
• 🔍 Inspira operates in a cluttered, unorganized market but differentiates itself by creating a tech-enabled language development platform.
• 🚀 Inspira combines the benefits of video-based self-paced learning with live one-on-one interactions to offer flexibility while retaining personal engagement.
• 🏆 The company's vision is to position itself uniquely, not just by competing, but by redefining how English language education is delivered.
• 💡 Inspira prioritizes features through two approaches: customer feedback and future technological trends, aiming to deliver results effectively while staying ahead of the competition.
• 👨‍💻 The feature prioritization at Inspira is chaotic but productive, with a focus on user feedback and technological advancements to enhance learning outcomes.
• 🤔 While learners want results like improved English or IELTS scores, Inspira emphasizes making the learning process efficient and easy, without overwhelming users.
• 🤖 Inspira embraces innovation but balances it with user readiness, planning future technology integrations like AI while ensuring acceptance from learners.
• 🔮 By 2025, Inspira envisions a comprehensive learning ecosystem combining human interaction, AI technology for practice, and real-world outcomes like job placements or further education.
• 💼 Inspira defines itself as being in the 'confidence business,' helping users not just learn a language but also gain confidence to achieve their goals.

Q & A

What is the main focus of the case study on Inspira?

The case study on Inspira focuses on how the company is establishing a competitive edge in the language learning industry and how it is innovating through technology to differentiate itself from competitors.

How does Inspira identify its competitors in the crowded language learning space?

Inspira identifies its competitors by analyzing the unorganized nature of the language learning sector, which includes various tuition teachers and institutes. However, Inspira differentiates itself by being a tech-enabled platform that combines face-to-face interaction with the flexibility of self-paced, video-based learning.

What makes Inspira's approach to language learning different from traditional methods?

Inspira combines the benefits of self-paced video courses with live, face-to-face interaction with tutors. This approach provides flexibility to learners while maintaining the personal interaction aspect of learning, something traditional methods or video-based courses alone do not offer.

How does Inspira prioritize features in its product development process?

Inspira prioritizes features based on two main factors: user demands and the evolution of technology. They aim to deliver the best results to learners while staying ahead of competitors by combining the latest technological advancements with user-friendly approaches.

Does Inspira's feature development process get influenced by competitors?

Yes, while user needs are a primary driver, Inspira also actively monitors competitors to ensure their features are unique and provide an edge in the market. They aim to stand out with their innovative approach while delivering strong results to learners.

What role does user feedback play in Inspira’s feature planning?

User feedback, especially from both learners and tutors, plays a critical role in Inspira’s feature planning. This helps ensure that new features meet the needs of learners, improve their experience, and align with the company’s goals.

What is Inspira's vision for the future, particularly in 2025 and beyond?

By 2025, Inspira envisions itself as an ecosystem combining human interaction with advanced AI technology for practice and simulation, focusing on delivering tangible results such as job placements or university admissions. Inspira aims to move beyond just language learning to helping people gain confidence and practical outcomes.

What is Inspira’s ultimate goal beyond teaching language skills?

Inspira's ultimate goal is to build confidence in learners, not just teaching language but helping them achieve practical, tangible outcomes like job placements or improved test scores. They focus on delivering measurable success rather than just language learning.

How does Inspira balance innovation with user acceptance in feature development?

Inspira balances innovation with user acceptance by considering how far ahead certain features are in terms of technological advancement. For instance, while AI tutors may be an exciting concept, it may not be immediately accepted by users, so such features are phased in gradually.

What sets Inspira apart from other players in the language learning industry?

Inspira sets itself apart by creating a new category in the language learning market—tech-enabled, flexible, on-demand, live one-on-one coaching. This blend of self-paced and live learning is unique, allowing them to cater to modern learners who need flexibility without sacrificing interaction.

Outlines

00:00

🎤 Introduction and Welcome to Rohit, CEO of Inspira

The host, Umkar, introduces Rohit, the co-founder and CEO of Inspira, to discuss the company's journey and success in the competitive language learning space. Umkar expresses excitement about Rohit's insights and how they can inspire young entrepreneurs. Rohit thanks the host and emphasizes the importance of sharing their story to help others.

05:02

🏆 Defining Competitors and Inspira's Competitive Edge

The host asks Rohit how Inspira identifies competitors in the crowded English upskilling market. Rohit explains that although the field seems cluttered, many players in the sector are unorganized. Inspira aimed to differentiate itself by creating a tech-enabled platform combining flexibility with real-time, live coaching. This approach distinguishes Inspira from traditional methods still used by many competitors.

10:02

💡 Combining Technology and Personalized Learning for a Unique Experience

Rohit continues to explain how Inspira leverages technology to make language learning flexible, blending the benefits of video-based courses with face-to-face interaction. He emphasizes Inspira's unique proposition in offering an on-demand, live one-on-one training experience, which merges the advantages of both traditional and digital learning environments.

🛠 Chaos and Innovation in Inspira's Feature Planning

The discussion shifts to how Inspira plans and prioritizes new features. Rohit describes the brainstorming sessions as chaotic but ultimately focused on meeting user demands and staying ahead of technological advancements. He explains that while user input is critical, Inspira also considers future trends and the evolving needs of younger learners, balancing innovation with user acceptance.

📊 Prioritizing Features Based on Competition and User Needs

Rohit elaborates on how Inspira decides which features to develop. While they don’t follow a strict formula, features are prioritized based on their ability to create a competitive edge and meet user expectations. The team constantly gathers feedback from both users and trainers to ensure features enhance learning and remain easy to use, while also keeping an eye on future technology.

🌍 Inspira’s Vision for the Future: Confidence, Not Just Language Learning

Rohit outlines Inspira’s larger vision, emphasizing that the company is not just in the business of language learning, but of building confidence. By 2025, Inspira aims to develop a comprehensive ecosystem combining technology, human interaction, and tangible results, expanding beyond English to other languages and skills. The focus is on helping users gain confidence and achieve measurable outcomes, such as landing jobs or improving life skills.

🚀 Inspira’s Growth into a Tech-Driven Ecosystem by 2025

Rohit shares his vision of Inspira’s growth, driven by technology and partnerships, to offer users more than just language learning. He imagines a future where learners can practice skills using AI, receive personalized feedback, and connect with companies or universities for tangible results. Inspira’s focus is on creating an environment where learning leads to practical outcomes and confidence, positioning itself as a leader in personal development.

👏 Wrapping Up: Inspira's Story and Impact

The conversation concludes with the host praising Inspira’s approach to building confidence through education. Rohit expresses gratitude for the opportunity to share Inspira’s journey and hopes it will inspire others. The session ends with a mutual appreciation for the insights shared, leaving the audience with a clear understanding of Inspira's mission and future direction.

Keywords

💡Competitive Edge

A competitive edge refers to the unique advantage a company has over its competitors, enabling it to outperform others in the market. In the context of the video, the speaker emphasizes how Inspira has identified and built a competitive edge by offering a tech-enabled, flexible, and on-demand live training service that stands apart from traditional education models.

💡Unorganized Sector

The unorganized sector refers to industries or businesses that lack formal structure, regulation, or standardization. In the video, the speaker mentions that the language learning industry is largely unorganized, with individual tutors and small institutes, which Inspira seeks to differentiate itself from by providing a more structured and tech-driven solution.

💡Tech-Enabled Learning

Tech-enabled learning is the use of technology to enhance educational experiences. Inspira's approach combines the flexibility of online video courses with live, one-on-one tutoring. This fusion of technology with traditional teaching methods is a key part of how Inspira creates a new category in language learning.

💡Flexibility

Flexibility in education refers to giving learners control over when, how, and where they learn. Inspira emphasizes flexibility by allowing users to study at their own pace with on-demand, live tutoring, which stands in contrast to the rigid schedules of traditional educational models.

💡User-Centered Design

User-centered design is a process that focuses on the needs, wants, and limitations of the end users at every stage of product development. In the video, Inspira prioritizes user needs by actively seeking feedback and ensuring that their features meet the learners’ goals, such as improving language proficiency or exam scores, while also delivering a personalized learning experience.

💡Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a group activity used to generate ideas and solutions. The speaker describes Inspira's brainstorming sessions as chaotic but productive, where the team discusses, debates, and prioritizes new features based on user needs and technological advancements to remain competitive in the market.

💡Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence refers to technology that enables machines to mimic human intelligence. The speaker mentions that AI is considered as a future phase in Inspira’s development, though it has been delayed to ensure users are comfortable with the concept of real human tutors rather than AI-powered teaching solutions.

💡User Feedback

User feedback is information provided by users about their experience with a product or service. In Inspira's development process, user feedback plays a critical role in shaping features and improving the learning platform to ensure that it aligns with learner expectations and needs.

💡Confidence Building

Confidence building refers to helping individuals develop the self-assurance needed to achieve their goals. Inspira positions itself not just as a language learning platform but as a company that helps users build confidence through mastery of language, which is essential for personal and professional success.

💡Future Vision

Future vision refers to the long-term goals and aspirations a company has for its growth and development. Inspira’s future vision includes expanding its platform beyond language learning to become a broader confidence-building ecosystem, supported by technology and strategic partnerships, and evolving into areas like job placement and other skills training by 2025.

Highlights

Inspira aims to position itself as a tech-enabled language development platform, creating a category of its own.

The majority of the language learning sector is unorganized, ranging from individual tutors to franchises.

Inspira blends the flexibility of self-paced video courses with the benefits of live one-on-one interaction.

Inspira's competitive edge lies in its unique approach to combining old methodologies with modern flexibility and automation.

User feedback and competitor tracking play a crucial role in Inspira’s feature development and evolution.

The company’s product evolution is driven by two main factors: user demand and technological advancements for future growth.

Inspira prioritizes features by balancing user needs, competitive edge, and technological trends.

The goal of Inspira is not just language learning, but building user confidence, especially in competitive exams like IELTS.

The leadership team at Inspira creates features based on internal brainstorming that often involves heated debates.

Inspira’s vision for 2025 includes creating an ecosystem combining human interaction, AI simulations, and tangible outcomes for learners.

In the future, Inspira plans to partner with companies, recruitment agencies, and universities to help learners gain employment and achieve tangible results.

By 2025, Inspira envisions evolving into a platform not limited to language learning but offering other skills and use cases to enhance confidence.

The company differentiates itself from others by emphasizing personalized, flexible learning experiences instead of mass education methods.

Inspira carefully introduces technological features, considering user acceptance and market readiness to avoid overwhelming learners.

Inspira positions itself as being in the ‘confidence-building business’ rather than just language education, focusing on practical, real-world outcomes for its learners.

Transcripts

[Music]

hello everybody my name is umkar and i'm

sure that all of you have been fairly

inspired by reading the case of inspira

and the way it is killing its

competition i am extremely delighted to

have rohit the co-founder and ceo of

inspira to come here and share his

experiences his opinion as we navigate

through the beautiful case study the

beautiful story so thank you rohit so

much for joining in and sharing your

experience and also inspiring a lot of

young students across the world to

pursue entrepreneurship

welcome thank you for giving us this

opportunity as well to explain our story

and detail it out so that somebody might

find it useful someday that's that's the

wrong idea that is that is delightful

you know i want to start off because the

entire team is about how do you build a

competitive edge so you know i want to

start off that how do you actually

identify your competitors because

understanding you know offering english

and upskilling folks within english

might be perceived as a competitive

space but is it just a mirage of a

competitive space when you enter and

when you realize that it's great or it's

easy to uh to win the competition or how

do you actually identify competition and

then build barriers around around

yourself within your competitive edge

so uh to answer this question i'll give

you a brief overview of the sector or

the the industry that we are in so as

you said uh from from a bird's eye view

it looks so much cluttered

i mean wherever you look you might find

at least one of the other institutes

that does almost a similar stuff right

uh however if you go deeper into it you

will understand that a majority of this

particular field of the sector that we

are in is unorganized

so it's it's basically an unorganized

sector that you will find a tuition

teacher teaching english language all

the way up to institutes running even

with franchises

so uh inspira's vision or the wave that

we wanted to position ourselves was a

tech enabled language development or a

platform that is going to create a

category of its own

so uh if you look at uh i'm not calling

them as a competitor but this particular

industry if you look at them they're

still following centuries old

educational methodologies that is you

have one trainer or teaching a group or

an individual at a specific time whereas

other industries not related to

education but all other industries are

growing so fast with automations

happening you know you have food

delivery happening in matter of minutes

banking services coming to your home

right so so much flexibility is given to

all the industries except education so

we wanted to create a category where

education can also become more flexible

and especially in today's world where it

is fast moving and people are so busy

with their work life uh it is imperative

that we give them flexibility to study

on their own pace so the only

alternative that most people would think

of is to go for a video recorded or

video based courses uh however that

lacks the uh physical interaction of the

real face-to-face interaction with the

change so inspira took all the positives

of a video based self-paced course uh

program and mixed it with again all the

benefits of the real one face-to-face

interaction as well and that's how the

the category of uh flexible uh on-demand

live one-on-one training of the coaching

happen basically so we do

i'm sorry okay please please complete

yourself

sure so to answer your question is we do

uh

very aggressively track our competitors

also and a few of them even though

they're in the same space they don't

qualify as competitor because language

learning i mean that is

the globally language is

certain rules and

grammatically it's the same so the

approach has to be the different

difference there so we took a different

approach uh coming up with our own

methodologies to convey that and that

makes us different yeah

i i really like the whole the whole

proposition of that hey you know what

you enter a competitive space but you

start defining a category for yourself

and and i really really admire that

vision you know further to that about uh

about defining your own category your

own space i think according to me it's a

combination of the vision what you have

to enter while you're entering the

market alongside the features what

you're developing so i want to

understand that how does the the

brainstorming room of inspire look like

where where you're all chalking out

features on your kanban chat or or

prioritizing which features to launch

does your feature planning and feature

release in the inspire journey towards

productizing

english learning as a concept does it

get influenced by competitors and what

competitors are offering or does it have

any other route

uh we have two approaches to answer your

question the brainstorming room of

inspira is uh it's chaos basically you

know as you can expect you'll see things

flying around and fights happening

shouting screams but end of the day we

are all on the same page so the features

or the decision to come up with the

feature is driven by two approaches

definitely uh

the user demand or the user requirement

that is one important factor however in

this specific industry the requirement

of the user is just to get the end

result the approach is not very much

clear to them because they are

surrounded or bombarded by various

approaches around so it's our duty to

understand the optimal approach that is

going to give them the absolute result

in a very easy and still making sure

that the flexibility of the promise that

inspires a brand is giving them is doing

justice to them

like i mentioned earlier the second

feature or the second approach that we

take is uh looking at the future as well

where uh you know the evolution of

technology how we can combine that with

the latest generation as well because

older generation their thought process

is different and that's easily changing

so we are a younger organization

catering to the new generation as well

so we need to uh be up to the mark for

up to speed in what their requirements

are the technology is evolving and our

features also revolve around that angle

as well so combining it together we

create or chart out various features uh

and priority is basically what can be

done now uh the user acceptance and

whether is it too much into the future

for example if we suddenly come out with

an ai kind of like a thing you know an

ai teacher training people won't accept

it because i need a real tutor so that

acceptance is also fact so we push it to

maybe a second phase of third phase so

that's how we prioritize prioritize it

but at the end of the day the priority

is

strictly aligned with how to deliver the

best results to the users and how can we

enhance their uh learning capability and

give them the best performance you know

meet their expectations or even beyond

that so that's how we prioritize it all

right so it's as i understand uh you

know it's very much user driven so

just an extension to my previous

question is there a formula what um what

you at the leadership team at inspire

have when it comes to ranking certain

features and you know

dropping them in the market or releasing

them in the market do you follow any

kind of a

formula where you uh possibly

attach a weight value to uh

to customers requests internal

capabilities the need of the market or

whether it can it can kill competition

with these so is there any formula and

if yes then how does it play out

sure so we don't have a clear cut

formula but based on you know whatever

the most of the elements that you

mentioned is i don't know by default

part of that decision making for example

killing the competition and creating an

edge over other players is definitely

our priority as well so the features

that we come up with should uh do

justice to that factor that is being

unique as well as uh giving the results

to the users when it comes to our

customers basically the learners like i

mentioned earlier they do not have any

particular requirement other than learn

english or get better ielts score that

is their requirement the the way we give

them that's the experience factor and if

we are able to give them a feature that

is going to help them uh reduce the gap

between achieving that objective then

that's good for them and if it is like

too much tricky or too much confusing

then that's a bad decision not a bad

feature so we take constant feedback

from our users and also the coaches or

the trainers because they're the face of

the organization they interact with the

learners every day and those feedback

are also taken into consideration along

with the business angle that is staying

on top of our competition so all these

comes together to prioritize on our

features

got it i think that's that's a fantastic

wrap you know uh as as a part of my next

question over here

i want to understand the larger vision

of of inspira uh it has been quite a bit

of a journey uh since he started inspire

and i believe that there was i wouldn't

say a pivot but but a kind of a natural

succession of what should have gone

towards the technology side i'm very

curious about uh about what does inspire

look in 2025 what does inspire look in

2013 and and your vision towards it

which is dependent and independent of

the competition in the market

sure so

inspira is into confidence business yeah

that is we cannot we cannot uh tell that

we are a language learning platform or a

software environment we give confidence

to our users right and we are creating a

category over them so inspire being a

tech enabled organization technology is

basically the heart of it so uh if you

if you look inspire or maybe if you if

you visit transparency 2025 you will

find us having an ecosystem

where uh human interaction for the

learning and air technology for

practicing and simulation and then a

separate stage where people are getting

some tangible outcome out of it that is

everybody wants some result or objective

at the end of the day so casual language

learning is gone were those days you

know joining an institute i learn

language that's it what is going to

happen next it's totally it's a question

mark but we don't want that to happen so

we want to take the user from point a to

point b and then further push them to

point c which would either land them a

job or help them achieve something

tangible that they can experience in the

at the end of the day so that revolves

around again the third stage revolves

around again technology as well as a lot

of partnerships it could be companies it

could be recruitment agencies it could

be even countries universities whatever

it is so the technology identifies uh a

lot of gap that is the skills

level of their skills uh the scope of

improvement etc a practice platform

where they can keep practicing

regardless of uh the availability of a

human trainer at any point of time and

then the learning happening within the

platform with a real person and it's not

just

uh you know we are restricting ourselves

to english language but it could be used

in any any areas where we can give

confidence it could be other languages

it could be other skills it could be uh

the use case scenarios it's so huge so

that's how we are building the entire uh

you know organization

so we are into flexibility as well not

just

you know i i'm sure in the case study uh

there's going to be a mention that

inspira is not in the business of

helping people learn language but it is

in the business of helping them develop

confidence i think i i really love that

line i really love that positioning uh

thank you so much rohit for for

extending your time extending your

wisdom to to all the students across the

world and i'm really grateful for for

taking out the time and sharing your

story thank you very much thrilled to

help others and thank you for giving

this opportunity

[Music]