Context
Student CZ teaches Czech and prepares students for Czech universities. The buyers are families relocating from Russian-speaking countries, so two people decide at once: a parent paying and worrying, and a teenager who has to live with the result.
The tuition worked. What didn’t exist was a route from a parent googling "moving to Prague" at eleven at night to a student enrolled in a twelve-month programme.
Diagnosis
The obvious move is to advertise the course. That fails here, because nobody buys a twelve-month language programme as a first interaction with a company they found yesterday.
The research separated what a parent says from what a parent fears. Three fears, each specific: my child won’t know enough to get in, my child will be alone in a country whose language they don’t speak, and I’ll pay for this and lose it.
Every promise was then written against one fear rather than at all three. A 100% refund if the student isn’t admitted, which answers the third. Native-speaker teachers who help with cultural adaptation, which answers the second. And 94% of course graduates taking state-funded places at a Czech university, which answers the first.
One promise runs under all three: admission to a Czech university with no ЕГЭ, ЕНТ, ЗНО or ЦТ. That removes the largest single procedural obstacle for the whole audience, and it appears in both segments.
The teenager’s version of the same purchase is the mirror image. The parent’s angle is fear. The teenager’s is appetite: friends from all over the world, languages to practise, walking through historic Prague between lessons, a European degree to be proud of. They carry exactly one fear the parent doesn’t, which is that the programme will be too hard for them. Same decision, two people, two sets of words.
What the parent wants first, though, isn’t a course. It’s an answer to a question they can’t ask anyone: is my child suited to this, and which university should they aim at? So the career-orientation consultation, which identifies a student’s strengths and matches a university to them, goes first, and it goes free. It’s the most valuable thing the business has, given away.
Decisions
- Built five stages with named offers at each: lead magnet, tripwire, frontend, backend, and a split into upsell and downsell
- Put the career-orientation consultation in the lead magnet rather than selling it
- Priced the tripwire at about $24 for a ten to fifteen video Czech Basics course, low enough to be a decision nobody needs to think about
- Made the first real lesson a diagnostic rather than a demonstration: a methodologist assesses level, clarifies goals, and assigns teacher and programme
- Costed the roadmap twice at every stage, realistic and idealistic, so the client picked the pace instead of being handed one plan
- Wrote a second funnel for people already in Prague, on community rather than admission
Results
The engagement delivered two funnels and a four-stage roadmap taking monthly marketing from about $690 to $6,300 as channels and headcount were added. Each stage was costed twice: one in-house generalist covering targeting and content, or three specialists from the start at roughly double. Same channels, different staffing, an explicit choice rather than an assumption.
The second funnel was the surprise. Russian speakers already in Prague, eighteen to thirty-five, with a different problem entirely: no friends, no reliable answers about visas or banks, no circle. It monetises arrival rather than admission. A Telegram community where specialists answer questions leads to paid events, then the language school, then what is genuinely hard in a foreign city: bank paperwork, legal questions, and a conversational Czech course for the slang nobody teaches.
Same company, same city, a different business, and often the same person a year and a half later.