“And you may find yourself…” selling an Ed-tech product in Taiwan

Warren Friesner
Jul 28, 2017 · 6 min read

Part III — “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”

Judged by results alone, Demo Day was a disappointment; yet, it was also the impetus that pushed us in a new direction and created our best opportunities thus far. The universe doesn’t just shift for you with a big arrow pointing to the right. It signals the potential for change; it’s up to you to read it correctly and start bending the curve yourself.

We thought Demo Day went great, at the time, in terms of presentation and audience response. Then, a deafening silence, followed by… “Thanks, but we’ve decided to pass because…reasons”. So, what really went wrong? We were able to piece together several coincident factors through interactions with investors.

1. No one bought our argument that we had a “clear lane” in the Language Learning market space. We should have embraced this crowded, messy, $5B market and explained how our unique tech could thrive in it.

2. Rapidly getting our signal through all the noise (see # 3, below) with $500k in seed investment is tough. It just doesn’t go far in a crowded, hyper-competitive market with huge players.

3. Larger companies could quickly reverse engineer our tech and crush us, if we couldn’t grab market share quickly enough and create strong entry barriers.

4. Learning to speak a foreign language is hard and requires a long, steady commitment. How do you retain users for 9 or 12 months?

Perhaps a picture-perfect Y-Combinator-worthy pitch would have failed too. The US Angel investment community simply hasn’t warmed to Language learning, perhaps for all these reasons. And they have a point — what’s the chance that their half a million dollars will produce the 10X or higher potential return they need to see to make it all worthwhile?

With visions of the half million dollars we never had slipping just beyond our grasp, we knew we had to move in a different direction. We’d been bootstrapping and bleeding cash from our “day job” (digital agency, from which we’d been mostly AWOL). This felt like a heavy blow.

It proved to be a wake-up call. Once our post-Demo Day depression cleared, we realized our path to success led through institutional customers, which required only a willingness to get out and do sales, some good collateral materials and demos, and an affordable (or better yet, money saving) product that efficiently filled a real need.

We already had a relationship with one Taiwanese University. We had the only smart video chat product in the institutional or any other language learning market, and the first use of AI to improve language exchange chat outcomes. Our MVP (prototype) rocked. So what were we waiting for?

We felt that we just needed to convince prospective clients that our method worked, and that it was a solid, cost-effective investment for them. A meeting at Hunter College (flagship school of the City University of New York) taught us that we were lacking something else — something we hadn’t expected.

Hunter’s Mandarin Language Department faces a unique challenge in that most of its 400 or so students are of Chinese decent, and many are proficient Cantonese speakers looking to learn Mandarin. Their curriculum caters to these specific needs.

The Department Chair asked whether Smart Chat let them upload their own curriculum. We hadn’t considered it, but it seemed like a great idea, not only from a pedagogical standpoint — it was a great selling point as well, because it empowered Universities and Schools to get students practicing their classroom lessons with each other, potentially saving money on tutors as well.

This approach helped solve an even more foundational problem related to bringing Ed-tech into the classroom — the natural fear and consequential reluctance it produces in teachers and professors who feel left out of the process. In general, an Ed Tech product’s proprietary interface, content, graphics and animations don’t allow input or authorship from teachers or administrators — they’re self contained. This leaves teachers frequently feeling like third wheels. What if teachers controlled the contents of the Ed-tech products they used in the classroom?

We quickly saw the importance of driving home the point that Smart Chat was not only “nonthreatening” to professors — empowering the authoring and configuring of content allowed them to re-purpose their classroom instruction through video chat. It gave them control.

We already had planned a trip in to Taiwan in Feb, 2017 months before. We now went into a full court press preparing for it, reaching out to all of our contacts, to language schools, major Universities, and even High Schools. The response to our cold emails was encouraging. We were able to get 7 prospective purchasers, including Universities, language schools.

And we made another valuable connection as well, through a pitch competition in Taipei. With Melody presenting, we made the finals. One of the judges, who runs a website that sells downloadable Mandarin learning software, expressed an interest in our tech and in meeting with us and recommended us to one of Taipei’s top tech incubators and another company that specializes in Mandarin voice to text products.

We were welcomed with as much enthusiasm in Taiwan as the near-apathy we generated back home. Taiwanese are more invested in language learning than Americans, especially English, in a country where few speak it well, but the need to learn it is greater each year. They also have a fair number of Mandarin language schools, both in the private and public sector.

Professors who attended our meetings were engaged and enthusiastic, rather than skeptical and wary. 1 Hour meetings became 2 hour ones. We received commitments for pilot projects (starting this Sep) from all 4 Universities we visited, plus a commitment to test our product out by one language school, and possibly a second, which owns 12 branches in China. And finally, the website with the downloadable software has expressed interest in a possible partnership.

We also moved in a different but related direction. I had taken a deep dive into Second Language Acquisition theory but I had nothing to point to in my resume that spoke of domain depth. I decided to see what I could do to change that. I got kind of lucky in that regard, after an exchange with an Angel List connection mentioned a Conference in Hong Kong and how our approach might be something they’d find interesting. Checking out the Conference website I saw that they were calling for paper topics so I submitted one along with an abstract, assuming that it would be rejected. Instead the Conference asked us to present a 1 hour workshop on the paper topic (the implications of AI in Second Language Acquisition).

Our Hong Kong presentation led to another opportunity to present at the International Conference on Internet Chinese Education in Taipei. These presentations have led to several possible collaborations with teachers and professors in the fields of AR, Big Data, and Voice Recognition Software, which we’re pursuing. They’ve also given us a bit more “gravitas”, hopefully in the Language Learning domain.

Bringing you up to date, we’ve been virtually adopted by a Tech Incubator, which wants us to be part of its ecosystem, and are in discussions with a group of Taiwanese business people about starting an Asian spinoff of Language Hero. Additionally, the people at Startup Taipei have been incredibly helpful in providing resources and advice for getting started. We’re psyched about growing a business in Taiwan and plan to participate in their International Startup Week Pitch Competition this November.

Meanwhile our pivot to upload-able curricula caused, and continues to cause untold headaches on the development side (a whole different story to tell), but it’s getting built, finally and, has been a clear winner from a marketing perspective. We expect to launch our in September

To be continued pending whatever the future holds…

Read Part I or Part II

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