We Launched Ellii 20 Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago today on December 22, 2002, I launched Ellii (formerly ESL Library) .

I had just returned to Canada after spending five years living and teaching English in Kanagawa, Japan (Chigasaki and Fujisawa, to be more specific).

Over the course of my time in that amazing country, I developed a real love for writing and developing lessons for my classes. During my last year in Japan, I quit my teaching job and began working on the concept of a subscription-based lesson library where teachers could go online and pay a monthly or annual fee to access high-quality, ready-made content for their classes.

At the time, recurring billing and online payments were still a very rare thing, so my first few years of trying to sell subscriptions were tough. There weren’t many people who were eager to pull out their credit cards and make an online purchase (of any sort) back in 2002. Nevertheless, from the very first day that the site was launched, teachers started buying subscriptions. Not a lot of subscriptions, but enough for me to keep the lights on and make it my only job. I was thrilled!

For the next several years, I continued to work alone without any staff. I spent my days writing new lessons, formatting them, uploading them to the site, and answering emails. For me, it was heaven. I got to do what I loved and make a living from it.

Every day, more and more teachers signed up. And every day, I just kept writing more and more lessons. My mom, who was a retired ESL teacher at the time, started writing some new lesson sections for the site too (she worked for free!). And my dad, who was an accountant, started doing the books (also for free). He’s 76 now, retired, and still does the books for us, happily.

My wife, Marta Solodun , joined the company in 2006 and began tightening the operations as we started to grow. Later that year, Tara Benwell (now our Vice President of Publishing) sent us an email asking if we had any writing positions. I hired her immediately, and to her surprise she found out she was employee number 3. She had thought she was applying to a much larger company.

By 2011, we could afford an in-house editor and brought on Tanya Trusler . Tanya has been with us ever since and now leads our video content team. And in 2017, Ann Dickson (who had been our customer since 2005!) also joined Ellii as an editor. I love that we hire former teachers and former customers. That's a great feeling.

Today we are 35 people strong, and I believe we have one of the best publishing teams in ELT. Ellii is used and loved in more than 10,000 schools around the world, and has been adopted by major universities, colleges, school districts, intensive English programs, tutoring companies, and independent teachers across the globe. Most of our growth has come from word of mouth. Teachers telling teachers. It’s a beautiful thing.

Over the past 20 years, Ellii has remained small but mighty. We’ve never taken on venture capital funding and yet we’ve managed to grow into one of the most widely used content platforms for English teachers anywhere in the world. For 20 years, our focus has not been on sales or marketing, or raising money; rather it’s been on simply attempting to make highly engaging content and meaningful courseware to help teachers teach a better class.

I’m proud of the work we do here and the company we’ve built. I want to thank everyone who works at Ellii (past and present) and all of the teachers, administrators, and program coordinators who have supported us over the years.

Happy 20th, Ellii!

Ben Buckwold, Founder/CEO