The story of a startup that wasn’t hacked over a weekend
Growing up in China, I read a lot of tragedies and triumphs of human spirit, their endeavors, their desires, and their mortal weaknesses. I dreamed of being a writer to pour my thoughts and feelings on paper for the world to see. At 16 years old, I set off to Australia to live by myself in quest of that experience.
Even though I was a good student in China, winning English speaking competitions, I had trouble adapting. I felt a significant lack of ability to express my true self. I lost my identity. I desperately wanted to fit-in, to share with my new friends how I felt, where I came from, and the vision that I had in mind but struggled with expressing myself.
One of my first assignments in Australia was to write about my mother. I wrote in prose, depicting myself flying free among the clouds. As I continued my ascend, I started to lose sight of the earth, excited, afraid, yet feeling truly free. But when I finally looked back down, I realized that I still had a string attached to me that didn’t break, and it was in my mother’s hand. Despite my mother’s fear and her attachment to me, she let me fly in order to go far in life. All I had wanted was to fly far away, but in the end, I was still a part of her, and there will always be a string in her hand no matter how far I go. The name of the story was “Kite”.
I got an awful grade. I was shocked. All of my emotions went into the story, and I was very proud of the creative output. However, my teacher told me that although it was a good idea my English was broken and the grammar was awful. It destroyed my confidence in my ability to use language to create. I realized that writing in the West was different from what I was used to. It’s more structured and logical, as it plays up the clarity and plays down metaphors and allegories (at least at high school level). Whereas, I’ve been writing in metaphors all my life in China, which was considered a wonderful thing.
After college, I was selected to HSBC’s global trainee program to work in London, New York and Hong Kong for half a year each. The service apartments, business class flights, and decadent hotels gave me a taste of the “good life” that many are looking to achieve. However, I asked myself everyday: do I belong here? I always felt a bit of a misfit, but I couldn’t articulate the reason. Not until I went to a few parties where I met extremely wealthy people, I realized that managing wealthy people’s money was not the ambition of my life. I wanted to make a bigger impact on the world.
A friend suggested that I ought to be an entrepreneur. At the time, I had no concept of what that meant. He then connected me to another friend who was also interested in startups, and we started brainstorming ideas that we cared about. Everyday after work, I couldn’t wait to hop online to continue discussing the ideas we formed the day before. It was the best creative time I’ve had experienced in years.
Two weeks in, I decided to quit my full-time job. Leaving Hong Kong and flying back to New York was another liberating moment. It reminded me of when I first left China for Australia: unsure of the road ahead, but brimming with possibilities.
We built a prototype for an app called TunTunTuTu, which connects language learners around the world to practice speaking. I knew that I wanted to do something language related, because it had been a personal struggle of mine. We got into Stanford’s incubator program StartX, and I relocated to Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley.
On the second day of StartX, we realized we needed to pivot from TunTunTuTu. A StartX peer shared with us his tremendous insight into the language learning business in China. Each of the successful companies has their own unique angle on the market. New Oriental trains their instructors to be inspirational and edgy, doubling as both motivational speakers and stand-up comedians in a country that lacks either. Wall Street English focuses on the high end executive market, often hosting Friday night cocktails, providing a venue for the upwardly mobile to mingle and date. Disney English offers an over-the-top Disney experience to kids who had not grown up with these characters, conveniently cultivating a gigantic new market for Disney merchandise and the upcoming Disney Shanghai Theme Park. Obviously, these are all high-touch experiences which our online peer-to-peer app would not be able to compete with, let alone charge money for.
We also came to understand the limits of being audio-based and peer-to-peer. Because of the considerable gap between textbook language and the casual language needed for social interactions, the exchanges were both stilted and repetitive. Learners repeated canned phrases and were endlessly apologetic. Their partners were reluctant to correct their every mistake and often had little else to work with. We tried everything from game mechanics, paid tutors, and even pairing up potential romantic partners, but none of the conversations lasted more than two weeks.
After a prolonged period of frustration, the lightbulb lit up one day: what if we did video instead of audio? It’s contextual — you get to see the facial expression, body gesture, and see the settings. And most importantly, the short length was easy to digest and perfect for the twitter generation. We built the prototype, and users loved it. It might seem obvious in retrospect, but when we were scrambling for ideas in the dark, it was quite a revelation.
After we had committed to the video format, we then spent months building and testing a new prototype. We soon realized that we needed a clear content focus. Many of our users asked for a travel and school “survival guide” with video content on how to order food in a restaurant, how to get to the city from the airport, and how to get a cellphone plan.
Most of the team were happy with this concept, but in my gut I felt something was wrong. I felt that it would be hard to crowdsource a survival guide, because it would be too staged, and too uninspiring for creators to be creative. But since there was no clear alternative, and that I couldn’t commit to a survival guide, it paralyzed the team, leading to low team morale.
I tried all different ways to get people to make content and all resulted in failure. Frustrated, I went to the streets to get random people to make videos. Through tons of trial and error, I eventually found out that the best pitch was : “We are making a video version of Urban Dictionary, would you like to explain or define “Pain in the ass?” Lots of people were excited to make these videos on the spot. The consistent success gave me the confidence to drive our content focus to common words and expressions, especially slang.
This direction excited people to create videos, but we had to make sure it resonated with people who wanted to learn. In the beginning, when I surveyed the existing learners on the platform, they told me: “I couldn’t even order food, what’s the point of learning slang?” However, as we populated more content focusing on slang, the same learners who initially dismissed the idea started to love it.
In retrospect, although a survival guide can be useful, it’s not very entertaining. The users who requested to learn the sentences in the survival guide would probably watch the videos right before they land in the US. But how often does that happen? When they are staying at home and just chilling, they would rather spend their time watching videos that are more entertaining and would help them gain a sense of belonging.
Learning without effort is sort of the ultimate vision that I have for SayWhat. It all goes back to the kind of person I am: forever curious, learning all the time, but with a very short attention span. SayWhat is my way to have fun without wasting a moment, because I know I will always have some knowledge to take away.
