Chatterbox

Refugees and other displaced people (DP) currently exist in a parallel job market. The opportunities they can access, if any, are usually limited to low-skilled, low-paid work that harms their future employability. In this world, even a trained doctor can be unemployed.

Chatterbox transforms what would normally be considered an employment barrier for DPs - their foreign language skills and international work experience - into a strength. We train and employ DPs to teach their native language to professionals in their former industries.

By channeling DPs latent talent through innovative applications of existing technology, like video classrooms, and the development of new technology, we have built the best language learning experience for professionals on the market that can easily scale to benefit millions of learners and DPs around the world. 

And our mission is lockstep with our revenue; while their students learn, DPs simultaneously earn a good living and improve their employability.

Underemployment remains an unaddressed challenge for the 70million DPs worldwide. Even in advanced economies like the UK (where DPs have higher levels of education than the native-born population), they are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed than any other minority group. 

This issue of economic exclusion is surprisingly underserved by NGOs and governments, perhaps because of the complex labour market barriers involved. DPs often lose their professional identities after becoming displaced and face chronic barriers to reclaiming them in their adopted homes:

(a) Their overseas qualifications/experience is disbelieved 

(b) They lack relevant professional networks

(c) They are impacted by chronically lowered confidence and aspirations

The immense waste of human potential and resultant economic inequality facing DPs is unnecessary. Put to proper use, their untapped economic potential could produce billions of dollars of value. The good news is that given the right opportunity, this community can help themselves. The twin impacts of globalisation and connectivity present just this opportunity - elevating the international expertise of DPs to an undeniable asset. Chatterbox harnesses this opportunity and provides DPs a new, highly-accessible stepping stone into the professional world.

We serve people like our founder Mursal's mother, an Afghani civil engineer who became unemployed for over a decade after becoming displaced due to civil war. Her 10-years of industry experience and multilingualism would have been highly in demand somewhere in the world. Today, internet connectivity has made connections like this possible.

We are serving a surprisingly overlooked population encompassing 12-20% of the global population of DPs with higher levels of education, including degrees. These displaced doctors, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and teachers are typically unemployed before working with Chatterbox. This segment is expected to grow as the impacts of climate change are felt in an increasing number of countries, such as Egypt, China, and the US. 

Our platform has been designed around the specific needs of women and rural DPs, who are underserved by existing employment solutions.

Our online work platform connects highly-skilled yet underemployed refugees with demand for their language skills and professional expertise among organisations worldwide - from refugee camps to cities around the world, all through a mobile phone web-app. The services we are building by harnessing this untapped talent - starting with corporate online language learning - produces better outcomes for both our clients and DPs.

OUR SOLUTION

Chatterbox trains and employs highly skilled DPs to teach their native languages to professionals who work in their former industries. So engineers can learn Arabic from Syrian engineer, and aid workers can learn Spanish from Venezuelan medical doctors. Based on the philosophy that 'those who can, teach', the Chatterbox online platform creates a space for DPs to demonstrate and validate their expertise through teaching to rebuild lost professional identities. Whether on our platform or beyond, this experience is designed to help DPs access even better employment opportunities through skills validation, enhanced professional networks, and revitalised confidence. 

THE MARKET 

We believe a platform channelling the untapped economic power of DPs could build several billion-dollar businesses and create greater prosperity for all. We’re starting with online language teaching because:

- The industry represents a huge and fast-growing market opportunity

- It circumvents qualification barriers faced by DPs -  someone can deny their overseas qualifications but they cannot deny their native language skills

- DPs have a unique competitive advantage as language tutors: their rich prior professional histories

THE PROCESS

We combine old and new technology to help DPs deliver outstanding learning experiences easily:

1. We take the radical first step of believing in DPs' professional backgrounds.

2. Our unique matching algorithm pairs them with the ideal students based on their professional and educational backgrounds and personal interests, enhancing the impact of the learning partnership for both DPs and language students.

3. DPs are supported by our online curricula to provide high-quality freelance conversation practice and tuition in their native languages. Work is flexible, available anytime and anywhere with only an internet connection and digital device, and a generous pay of up to $25 per hour. It can augment existing work and help to avoid gaps on CVs.

4. Our platform records the hard and soft skills they demonstrate via teaching through the student feedback loop.

5. Over time, this produces a digital skills profile that can be automatically generated to help DPs unlock further work opportunities on the platform and beyond. 

IMPACT

40% of tutors working on the Chatterbox platform during our pilot were able to access other skilled employment opportunities within 12 months. 90% chose to continue teaching flexibly on the platform. Because we are B2B-focussed, DPs gained access to relevant employment opportunities with the companies and professionals they taught. Two moved back into work in their prior professional domains in the legal and education sectors. 

1. By building a better language learning solution we have developed a more robust business model, ensuring our social impact is ‘lock-step’ with our revenue.:

Our laser-sharp focus on building the best language learning experience for professionals on the market has led to a powerful unique value proposition; our courses are better because our tutors are refugees with a professional history that is relevant to our learners. Ultimately this helps sustain their interest.

In a marketplace where digitisation has led to a significant drop in learner engagement and sub-optimal retention rates, keeping a human element to tech innovation in language learning helps to tackle the biggest challenge faced by users - staying motivated. The impact of this is illustrated in our compelling 70% course completion rates (e.g. compared with 3% in a similar analysis of Rosetta Stone). 

Designing a better product significantly scales our market potential and ability to create economic opportunity for millions of DPs over time. 

2. Chatterbox is a community-driven solution that empowers DPs to drive their own economic and social inclusion. 

Chatterbox was built by the displaced community, for the displaced community. DPs are represented in both our founding and product team, giving us a shortcut to understanding and building solutions to meet the needs of our community. DPs may also participate in the platform's success, earning a proportion of the profits of the company depending on the hours they work every year.

Matching algorithm: we have created the first matching algorithm pairing learners with their ideal language tutor based on shared professional and educational backgrounds and personal interests - like a Tinder for language learning. This produces a better learning experience for students and more relevant professional connections for DPs.

Learner platform: We match and surpass the industry standard for online language learning with features like in-app video/messaging, scheduling, AI-assisted/gamified courses available on the learner platform and additional reporting features for enterprise customers. 

Tutor platform: All of our processes, from tutor recruitment to payment, are fully automated. This means that getting DPs from unemployed to working on the Chatterbox platform can happen within 24 hours. This enables us to more quickly scale and respond to natural and political crises all around the world. Chatterbox currently teaches over a dozen languages and connect DPs and learners worldwide. 

Skills profile: every lesson delivered by a DP adds to a skills profile generated through the collective feedback provided by their language students. This can be used by DPs to generate automated references on the platform and help them access other employment opportunities. DPs have already used Chatterbox references to continue their higher education, apply for family reunification, and successfully access other employment opportunities. This feature also unlocks more complex and better paid work opportunities on the Chatterbox platform for DPs.

We provide attractive and rapidly accessible skilled work that breaks the glass ceiling of opportunity impacting DPs by helping them to:

(a) Gain validation of their professional skills via micro-references from fellow professionals

(b) Rebuild lost professional networks through their language students and corporate clients

(c) Rebuild lost confidence and aspirations by putting them in a position to help, rather than be helped

We know that our solution works because of the opportunities we have provided to our current tutors. Take the example of Amina, who is one of our first tutors at Chatterbox. A human rights lawyer from Sudan, Amina was referred to Chatterbox by an organisation helping destitute refugees in Europe. Three months after working on the Chatterbox platform, she had a job Chatterbox had provided a reference for, an offer to study with one of our clients, and even a legal internship through one of her students.

Career progression is also possible within the Chatterbox platform, from conversation partner to language tutor to curriculum contributors. Other freelance work opportunities leveraging DPs language skills and professional backgrounds, including consultancy and translation, are in development.

At scale, the data we are collecting on the platform on refugee skills is also invaluable. There is currently a knowledge gap in our understanding of the skills profile of DPs worldwide. Governments and NGOs do not know how to design integration programs to meet their needs. By compiling and reporting this data, we hope to influence refugee integration policy and accelerate systemic change.

- We have already trained and employed 120 DPs worldwide, in refugee camps and cities around the world.

- With 4 new B2B clients launching in Q4 2019, we expect this number to grow to 150 by the end of the year. 

- Our 2020 target is to provide consistent full- and part-time employment to 300 DPs worldwide

- In 5 years we expect our teaching community to grow to 10,000 DPs

Goals for the next year: 

Our pilots, connecting >100 DPs with thousands of learners worldwide, successfully demonstrated that Chatterbox has the potential to become a powerful new labour market re-integration mechanism for a highly capable yet marginalised community. Our 100% B2B client retention rate also points to the high value being created for the organisations we deliver language tuition to. 

We want to scale our impact and take Chatterbox to businesses across Europe and the US. In the next 6 months, we want to find 3 more multinationals to join our pilot community of corporates helping to build and test our enterprise-facing platform. This community already includes one of the world's largest banks and a tech unicorn. 

In 12 months, we will raise our seed round to fund expansion of this corporate language learning services in Europe and the US, where we already have strategic partners to facilitate our growth. We aim to both increase the working hours available for DPs on the Chatterbox platform and reach break-even (given present 80% cost recovery). 

Goals for the next 5 years: 

• 'Land and expand' the range of services we provide for our corporate clients, with expertise-centred localisation/translation services already in demand. 

• Become the home of diverse, multi-lingual, professional talent and help to place DPs in full time roles at the companies we provide our services to, a service already in demand with our existing clients. 

In addition to business development and fundraising goals listed above:

• Recruiting DPs with the necessary skills at scale could become a bottleneck if we are successful in generating demand for our language learning and future services. 
• The platform, if successful, might attract individuals who misrepresent their backgrounds and skills.
• A common platform-related issue we may face is disintermediation - with students and tutors transacting outside of the Chatterbox platform

• We have built a talent pipeline of over 10,000 DPs that we can recruit fairly rapidly through partnerships with organisations like UNHCR and the IRC. We are also building an innovative staggered on-boarding process, delivering value to DPs at each step, to further strengthen the speed and volume at which we can recruit talent onto the platform. For example, we could on-board a waiting list of 350 people within 24 hours. 
• If the economic opportunities produced through Chatterbox grow beyond the supply in the community of DPs, we will expand recruitment to other communities of of highly skilled yet underemployed 'displaced talent', including other groups of migrants. 
• We have designed and will soon implement a peer screening mechanism to augment our existing automated recruitment process. These will screen for language skills and refugee status with the help of tutors already working on the platform. 
• The student feedback and DP skills profiling mechanism is designed to monitor the accuracy of claims to professional expertise on the platform. If an issue develops, we are notified and can take further action to investigate. 
• Like Airbnb, our response to the potential for disintermediation is to ensure that the we build platform is easier to transaction on than other options. 
• We have and will continue to build features for a stickier learner experience - such as tutor and student skills certification. Being B2B also helps to ensure against loss of revenue.

Our small and mighty core team includes 4 full-time and 1 part-time team members (this number excludes DPs who are tutors). We also benefit greatly from collaborating with colleagues at our startup-studio partners All Turtles (US) and soon Founders Factory (UK). A volunteer community of over a dozen tech workers helped us build our MVP when we were a team of 2 and continue to contribute to Chatterbox to this day. 

The founding team making this happen has considerable experience in tech entrepreneurship, refugee integration, and social innovation.

Mursal Hedayat - a former refugee from Afghanistan who has first-hand experience of the social issue we are trying to solve. 

Mursal started Chatterbox after graduating from Leeds University Business School and studying social entrepreneurship as a Year Here social change fellow. She is a multi-award winning social entrepreneur recognised by MIT, Forbes, and Ashoka who regularly speaks and writes on issues around refugee integration and social innovation. 

Guillemette Dejean - Y Combinator alum and serial tech entrepreneur. 

Following an honours degree in Political Science and International Development from McGill University, Guillemette worked in the public sector in Australia and later, as a social worker, created and taught language programs for third sector organisations. This led her to found her first company in the translation sector (Fliplingo). Endorsing all non-technical responsibilities, including product management, it served as a springboard for her YC-backed second company, an online community for designers and developers (Uplabs).

Language learning is a well-established industry.

We simply charge organisations for their usage. Our current and target clients are organisations including universities, corporates, NGOs, and governments. They pay for annual/monthly licenses for their members to access the Chatterbox learning platform. Tutors are paid at least 50% of the price of each tutoring session they deliver.

We are highly competitive in the corporate language learning space, with both a better product and world-changing impact aligned with our clients’ CSR strategies. We intend to achieve break-even by capturing a large chunk of the multi-billion dollar corporate language learning segment over the next two years.

Solve can help us advance four key priorities in the next 12 months: 

- Business development and product- testing opportunities with our target clients, including corporates, government, academia, and nonprofits. We would, for example, love to have conversations with Google, General Motors, Medtronic Foundation, Save the Children, and Starbucks about what language solutions they might be using and how we can best design Chatterbox to meet their needs. 

- Media exposure and furthering partnership opportunities. PR has been one of the most powerful channels for us to acquire new corporate customers. The public platform offered through the competition, including the SOLVE finals in New York, will help us to gain visibility at exactly the time that we hope to grow our service. 

- Fundraising. Having attended the SOLVE finals last year we have seen firsthand how powerful the networking opportunities being offered are. We hope to access nourishing capital from your community of donors and investors, aligned with both our impact and market ambitions. 

- Building our board. The most impactful additions to our team in the next 12 months will be in the form of an advisory board. We have significant challenges and opportunities ahead of us and need experts in fields spanning linguistics to SaaS enterprise sales and refugee employment law to ensure we build a robust business. We think our future board members already belong in the SOLVE community.

We are looking for product testing partnerships with large multinationals, NGOs, educational institutions, and government departments.