Fluent Forever Case Study

The Situation:

When Gabe Wyner enrolled at the University of Southern California, he pursued a degree with great career prospects—Mechanical Engineering, but he didn't give up on his love of music. He was a dual major, adding Vocal Arts Performance. Even in college, he performed in operas. Sometimes he had to learn a new language quickly. ‍

Gabe developed his own personal method for learning languages. It worked so well that he decided to share it in an article at Lifehacker. The article went viral, which led to a 2013 Kickstarter campaign to go along with a book he titled Fluent Forever. The book became a bestseller and was later translated into 11 languages.

Readers wanted more—specifically, an app—so in 2017, Gabe launched what became the most successful Kickstarter campaign for any app at any time, raising $1.7 million across multiple crowdfunding platforms.  

The app was a hit, but now Gabe needed to build a company around the app—customer service, technology, infrastructure, marketing... By 2020, he had raised a $4.9 million pre-seed round and began building a team. It was then that he realized that being a CEO required new skills he needed to learn. He hired me to be his coach.

How I helped:

Gabe and I began meeting weekly via Zoom. We talked through his current opportunities and challenges, but our most impactful work was collaborating to design monthly virtual strategy workshops, which Gabe would lead with his growing globally distributed team. We designed these sessions to be fun, for the team members to learn new skills, and most importantly to answer critical strategy questions for the company.

Together the team aligned around five foundational areas: