My time at Online Class - Mel's story

I have a history of looking for new business ideas – they don’t all work out, but some do!

In 2015 the first germ of an idea was planted in my brain. 

My wife is a talented teacher of English with a great ability to communicate. I was aware that teaching remotely using internet platforms was becoming more and more popular in the West.
I spent a few months researching the market and teaching platforms before legalizing the company Online Class on 19h May 2015.
While I was rejecting systems like Skype, Zoom, Viber etc. because they did not satisfy my demands for a fully interactive platform that put teachers and students at the front, Ira was working with some IT guys to produce a landing and menu website.

We decided to work with a university in Canada who had been developing since 2009, a platform that mirrored our ideas. Later that year, the first lessons were being given – Online Class was born!

2016

We started to market our service. The challenge was to promote online education as a better alternative that traditional schools and create a different style of teaching – teaching that put speaking and communicating as a major feature. Also, it was important for me to offer our clients an excellent learning experience specific for their needs. To do this we needed teachers who could do more than follow a book, we needed a different approach. 2016 was the year we started to recruit our type of teachers.

2017

OK, this was no longer a hobby! Customers loved our approach and as we grew we could see that our website needed a big upgrade to deal with the demand.

2018

We employed three IT developers to build a new website to deal with the increasing traffic which took about 5 months to complete to our satisfaction. As the traffic increased so did our recruitment of teachers who understood our way of teaching, had a good personality to engage with our clients and had great communication skills!

2019

This was the year we really began our commercial journey with the introduction of SEO, SMM, Google Ads, Yandex, Instagram and Linkedin to support our product in the market.

2020
A year that is showing big growth as customers find us on the internet, but still most of our clients come from recommendations by satisfied customers.
Corporate customers began to join us because we provided a teaching experience that delivered what the customer needed rather than gave the customer what we thought they needed.