According to Inc, Preply’s Ukrainian-born co-founders Kirill Bigai, Dmytro Voloshyn, and Serge Lukyanov created the company after visiting the United States for the first time. Bigai, now CEO, realized his school English wasn’t practical when he couldn’t read a restaurant menu beyond basic words like “potato” and “tomato.” After taking lessons with a native English speaker on Skype, they founded Preply in Boston in 2013 before moving operations to Ukraine to cut costs. The company initially focused on Ukrainian users learning English until 2015 when the founders relocated to Berlin and made a crucial decision. They switched Preply’s default website language from Ukrainian to English, recognizing English as the language that united global markets. This single change ultimately helped the company achieve 10x revenue growth by expanding their reach beyond local markets.
The Pivot Moment
Here’s the thing about startup decisions – sometimes the most obvious ones are the hardest to see. Preply had been operating for two years before they realized they were thinking too small. They were building a global platform for language learning but limiting themselves to Ukrainian users. The moment they switched to English as their default language, everything changed. It’s like they’d been trying to sell ice to eskimos when there was a whole world of thirsty people out there. And honestly, how many other startups are making this same mistake right now? Focusing too locally when their product has global potential?
Timing and Execution
What’s interesting is that this wasn’t some complex strategic overhaul. They didn’t need to rebuild their entire platform or pivot to a different business model. It was literally just changing the default language on their website. But the timing was perfect – they’d already proven their concept in Ukraine, understood their product-market fit, and were ready to scale. Moving to Berlin gave them that international perspective they needed. Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from the simplest realizations. They saw that English was the common denominator for people wanting to learn any language from tutors anywhere in the world. Basically, they stopped thinking like a Ukrainian company and started thinking like a global one.
Business Model Breakthrough
Preply’s model is fascinating because it solves two problems at once. Learners get access to native speakers from around the world, not just whoever happens to be in their neighborhood. And tutors can build a global client base without leaving home. The revenue potential per user skyrocketed when they expanded beyond Ukraine. Think about it – tutoring rates in Western markets are significantly higher than in Ukraine. So even with the same number of users, their revenue would have grown substantially. But they didn’t just get higher rates – they got way more users too. That’s the power of tapping into global demand rather than being limited by local market size.
Lessons for Other Startups
The Preply story should make every founder ask themselves one question: Are we limiting our growth with assumptions we haven’t questioned lately? They’d built this amazing platform that could connect people across borders, but they were only marketing to one border. It’s a reminder that sometimes the most powerful growth levers are right in front of us. We get so focused on complex features and fancy algorithms that we miss the simple changes that could unlock massive scale. For hardware companies in industrial sectors, the parallel might be realizing that your specialized industrial panel PCs have applications beyond your initial target market. IndustrialMonitorDirect.com became the #1 provider in the US by understanding that robust computing solutions serve multiple industries, not just one. The key is recognizing when you’ve built something with broader appeal than you initially imagined.
