Backstory: my partner and I developed a language learning app that had some good traction around 2016, but we couldn’t raise enough money to build it out and market it further as much as we’d have liked, and since 2020 it’s largely been in hibernation.
We’re talking about diving back in and fundraising again, but are concerned the market has passed us by and, product wise, things may be too stacked against us, even if we raise money.
We have some unique approaches:
- In our main course, we data mine TV transcripts to teach people vocabulary in order of how likely they’ll be to encounter it.
- We built algorithms to track how well a user knows each meaning of a word. This allows us to prioritize teaching sentences that have the most words/grammatical concepts each specific user needs to practice, and it lets us teach through personalized spaced repetition.
- We let users learn from special topics and songs whenever they want. They can help bridge their personal vocabulary with the vocab of the course/song. For example, if you already know 50% of the words in a song that you’re interested in, we’ll teach you the 50% you don’t know so that you can understand all of it.
My real question is: is our actual user experience uniquely positive enough to differentiate us?
We built the app (Language Zen) to go up against Rosetta Stone, early Duolingo, Babbel and Busuu. Since then, Duolingo has advanced a lot, and there are new, interesting apps like Speak, Mondly, Lingvist and Falou.
If we decide to stick with it and successfully raise money, our main focuses will be:
- Building out additional languages (we currently just have Spanish)
- Gamifying the experience
- Building more exercises and material to help users with grammar and other challenges (while showing
off our adaptability algorithms more)
If you have experience with our competitors, I’d be super grateful you give our app a try and let me know your thoughts on if what we have is special/worthwhile.
If you hit a paywall, send me with your email and I’ll give you free premium (micah@languagezen.com).
Any thoughts on the product or company would be sincerely appreciated.
Here are the links:
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/language-zen-spanish/id1393842...
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lzr&hl=en\...
