Hamid Darabi: Demiks Strives to Bridge Cultural Divides Through Language Learning

Based in Tiohtià:ke, commonly known as Montreal, Demiks strives to bridge cultural divides through language learning. We build products for language schools, teachers and students. We also promote language learning and traveling on our blog and social media.

Tell us about yourself?

I was born an entrepreneur. Growing up in a small town in Iran, I tried running a photocopy service at 11 years old. My education is in computer science and what I’m the best at is building software. In 2014 I moved to Montreal, Canada to pursue bigger opportunities in business.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Maybe not spreading myself too wide and focusing on one thing . I might also give myself a couple of stock market hints [smiley face]!

What problem does your business solve?

We help language schools with technology they need to run their school. We offer a cloud software to manage their sales and class management. We also promote language schools using our management software on our marketplace at https://www.demiks.com/courses

What is the inspiration behind your business?

Countries around the world are diverse and rich in culture. Here at Demiks, we think it’s time to get to know one another. We believe travelling to a different country and learning about their language and culture helps us gain perspective. We hope more and more people make the effort to know their neighbors and we see less and less frictions between neighboring countries. Growing up in the middle of an 8 years war, I hope for a day no other child goes through the same things I experienced.

What is your magic sauce?

We pride ourselves on building easy to use software. Our products have much less learning curve compared to our competition. Everything is smooth when a new admin signs up their private school.

Since we’re a mission driven team, we price our products at a range so that no school need to think twice about the fees. It’s the best combination a language school is looking for, high quality software at a reasonable price.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

Our focus during the pandemic was on the management software to help schools run their businesses online. We want to get back to our original business model once the borders open and help students go abroad to learn a new language, have fun and make international friends.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

The pivot at the beginning of the pandemic was not easy. Our model was based on international travel. Suddenly borders shut down and international language schools needed to move their classes online. We needed to move fast to keep up with the change. We had a chaotic year which was a big challenge for us.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

Join the ecosystem on https://admin.demiks.com if you teach a language or you run a language school. We help you get organized with your day to day tasks and we promote you on our marketplace.

Teacherpreneurs can use our teacher toolbox to share class material, assign homework to students, track student attendance, create quizzes and access the bank of high quality class material and ready to use exercises at https://teacher.demiks.com

We invite you to book your next language course online at https://www.demiks.com/courses

Feel free to learn more about us and why we’re supporting language learning at https://www.demiks.com/about