October 2020 — End of the Month Update
Hi everyone,
I feel like I say this every month but... Another month down! Can you believe it?
It’s November now.
Anyhow, let’s take a look at October.
Change is in the air. October has been an eventful month for NativShark. Our focus has been: “Simplification.”
What that looks like:
- Consolidate our operations to just Fukuoka and Bellevue.
- Simplify pricing plans.
- Massively speed up the platform’s performance.
- Simplify development process.
- Simplify the student flashcard experience.
- Establish new content creation flows to work in the interim before our new content management platform is ready.
- Kicked off our livestreaming and other media efforts to continue to strengthen our community.
- Focus on building the company in a financially sustainable manner. NativShark’s gotta make it in the long term if we’re going to make the biggest impact we can.
Community / Media:
We have a livestream now! And we’re active on Instagram and YouTube. Come check us out.
Here’s our Twitch where we stream most days of the week:
Our YouTube and our most recent video we put up:
And finally our Instagram where we make daily posts involving factoids about Japan, our word of the day, and yojijukugo. Here’s a peek at the first slide of a recent post:
We’ve also been doing a lot in our community on Discord lately. We have events that are streamed with student participation weekly, there’s been so much good vibes and Japanese practiced by everyone. Really proud of some of our new students, they’re doing so well! You should check out our streams to see ^^ We’ll also get highlights up on YouTube soon.
Additionally, we’ve updated the discord server a lot. The roles are now sorted by streak! You can link your NativShark and Discord account. That way no matter what you’re studying with NativShark, you can show up how boss your streak is. (or if you’re like me uhh, how you’ve accidently missed a day here and there. Streak saver when??).
Anyway, come join, it’s a great place to connect with fellow students: https://discord.gg/nativshark
Content Production:
It’s been about 6 weeks since we last posted Phase Two content.
The main reason for this is that the content production workflows used to build Phase One were not sustainable long-term with how much content we are working towards producing. More on that in a bit.
So, rather than slowly put out content and further delay sustainable content production, we’ve put it on hold and spent October reviewing the processes and figuring out what they should be in the future. Now we’re looking at what we can do in the interim before a new content management platform is built.
We have come up with combinations of various technologies and workflows that we’re going to be testing in November and onward. As such, we hope to resume consistent content releases soon — faster than any single student could hope to keep up.
Company Direction:
NativShark is going multilingual next year.
Actually, we’re going beyond languages entirely and will begin offering the same highly comprehensive educational experience in other non-language fields.
It’s too early to announce which subjects we’ll be working on offering first, but I wanted to let you all know that this is something we’re working towards. There are a ton of moving parts and work to be done for NativShark to go multilingual and beyond, so we are still quite a ways out, but the initial framework is being put in place. Since it’s confirmed that we’re headed in this direction, I thought you all should know.
Though we can’t share which non-language topic we’ll be working on first yet, the first languages we’ll be offering have been decided.
We’ll be bringing:
English
Korean
Spanish
To the NativShark platform.
We’ll be building them as language pairs as well. This means that each language will learnable from each other language. So Japanese, English, Korean, and Spanish language pairs represent 12 language directions.
Here’s a screenshot from our business plan docs:
We’re setting up our new content production methods so that, in addition to helping us publish Japanese content more regularly, we’ll be able to easily transfer to whatever other languages we might want to teach. So that’s how this will be doable. I’m really, really looking forward to it.
The other big effort we’d like to see out of 2021 is getting native mobile app support for our platform.
Once we have app support and teach several languages, NativShark will be truly unstoppable. If you’re just as excited about this future as I am, thank you! I appreciate your energy.
The more we’re able to spread awareness of NativShark and the larger our subscriber base grows, the more we will be able to bring all of these plans into reality. It’s a long game process for sure, but the more everyone shares and talks about NativShark, the more exposure it generates. It really does make a difference. Additionally, if you’re interested in our mission and you’re an investor or have expertise you’d like to share with us, please do reach out! contact@nativshark.com
Significant improvements in the most recent update:
Speed —
We changed the way the site is rendered, and it now performs significantly better than before.
Flashcards & learning new material —
We updated the flashcard answer buttons to simplify the mental load on responses to help students more efficiently and effectively get through flashcard sessions. They’re now simple emoji.
The response to this from students has been really amazing :) Many people are reporting much faster flashcard sessions!
We also updated the new card information view, but it isn’t complete yet. It’s only a partial implementation and more work has yet to be done there. We’re monitoring feedback and student usage data closely to get all of your input as we finish up the version of this new implementation that we’re working on.
That said, what we’re turning it into is the first time you see new material that will show up in flashcards, it isn’t like a flashcard. It’s a special tool for learning new material, which then feeds your flashcard system.
As such, the first time you view new information, one should not be thinking about it as a flashcard going forward. Rather, it’s just “first time exposure,” as if someone had spoken it to you in a real conversation, on a TV show, or something you read in a book, where it just happens that you’re thrown into and immersed in the real word with something you didn’t know before. Then when you see it next — in your flashcards, that’s when you start rating how you feel about your familiarity with it using the new flashcard options.
So the two systems play into each other in order to create a more streamlined process.
Flashcards are not and should not be thought of as a tool to learn new information. If flashcards are being used to learn new information, they’re being used wrong. Likewise, if there is too much information on a flashcard, they’re being used wrong.
As such, our first iteration of flashcards had some of these issues, and we’ve now taken the first strides towards fixing and improving the experience immensely.
At some point I’ll get into a full discussion on the topic of flashcards, either in an article or on our stream. There’s much to talk about here and a lot to get excited for with where NativShark is headed!
Pace slider —
We removed the 1 year pace option. It was always an experiment, and from the data we could tell it wasn’t working well for the platform.
NativShark is supposed to simplify the learning experience and set the learner up for the highest chance of success in their target goals. The one year pace was counterproductive to this effort.
For those who have extra study time after going through their Today’s Studies, we’re working on getting more review tools and Extra Credit stuff together. For example, we should have the ability for you to manually add in / self report your immersion time soon.
Additionally, with the removal of the 1 year pace option, we will be adding in a 3 year pace option. Long term, being able to set a more precise variable time between 2 and 8 years is certainly on the table. For now, it will still need to be set in year-long increments.
Pricing —
We updated our pricing plans. We got rid of the different tiers and simplified things to just have one product that you’re subscribing to. You can now pay monthly, annually, or once with lifetime.
Our initial pricing plans, aside from being really confusing to students, were also not sustainable for the company to maintain.
With this change, we’ve been seeing strong initial responses and good feedback from new students on how it is a nicer and more simple experience.
With more exposure, NativShark should hopefully be on its way to being profitable.
If you’re interested in this business side of NativShark, Niko and I are starting a podcast on our twitch on Wednesday mornings, JST. More info on that soon.
That pretty much covers the highlights from the last month~
Looking forward to the next month. Lots coming up, excited to share. November will be a good month.
Thanks as always. Stay safe!
~ Caleb
