When Irishman Ken Carroll was nearly broke and struggling to turn
his newly-founded English school into a good business, it was
neither his background in philosophy nor his years of experience as
a teacher that got him through.
It was stubbornness.
"I didn't want to go back home and admit I had not succeeded,"
Carroll recalls about being in Shanghai in the mid-1990s.
Luckily the hardships became a thing of the past and he turned a
profit, enough to fund further start-ups. Now, 13 years later, the
Dubliner has become a serial entrepreneur, with big revenues and
worldwide media attention.
Enthusiasm, drive and persistence have made this "liberal
capitalist", as Carroll calls himself, a language and website
entrepreneur.
The reason for Carroll's international attention is ChinesePod,
one of the most significant examples of making new media into good
business. This Shanghai-based online Mandarin venture boasts a
quarter of a million visitors a month and there have been 20
million downloads of the lessons, since they started.
Carroll, who never studied Mandarin, lives in Shanghai with his
wife, from Taiwan Province, and their 8-year-old daughter. He
co-hosts the basic level lessons at ChinesePod, together with
native Mandarin speaker Jenny Zhu.
Sporting a black leather jacket and a goatee, Carroll might not
look the part of a typical computer expert, but the Irishman has
turned fuzzy terms like Web 2.0, viral marketing and language
acquisition into cool cash.
ChinesePod immediately hit the news after its launch with
coverage from international media like the Guardian, the
Financial Times and NBC. It was one of Time
magazine's top 10 podcasts of last year.
A brief tour around the ChinesePod office, located in an old
factory building in Shanghai's Huangpi Road, offers a stroll down
memory lane. Here the basic recording studio is where things were
initially kept very simple.
"We literally started out by recording three podcasts and
posting them on our website," he says.
Despite the simple start three years ago and public curiosity
over whether or not Web 2.0 would be more than a fad, Carroll did
not doubt for a minute that he had a success on his hands.
At home in the new state-of-the-art recording studios, Carroll
says ChinesePod now has 40 employees and has seen 300 percent
year-on-year growth.
"I think the immense international attention ChinesePod received
is partly linked to the emergence of China on the world stage and
partly spurred by the curiosity about Web 2.0. People really wanted
to see if it could work."
The hype around new media also means that Carroll spends some of
his time at Shanghai's foreign chambers of commerce telling them
about how he has turned Web 2.0 theory into practice.
"Web 2.0 only really means something if it is validated. The key
is that it is effective, not that it's squared with Web 2.0
theory."
"The smartest move we made with ChinesePod was probably to rely
on viral marketing. By offering valuable, fun and high quality
podcasts for free, people would recommend them to others and
thereby we would get paying customers to the premium content on the
website."
The viral marketing also meant that community leaders on the
ChinesePod site volunteer to make it into a social network, as they
comment on their own learning process.
Carroll's three businesses, all founded with business partners,
revolve around teaching. The one that started it all in 1996,
Kaien, is now a chain of traditional English teaching schools in
Shanghai.
Praxis Language, the company behind the ChinesePod brand, was
founded in 2005, and the recently started O.D.T. (On Demand
Training) focuses on learning through mobile phones.
(China Daily December 14, 2007)
