ReadLang bought by Duolingo

[rdearman]

I would like to wade in here about marketing. It is true that nobody will buy your stuff if they've never heard of you, or even download it for free. So this mythical "language for intermediate" company with their amazing product can't just sweep the market globally. Or even just in Europe. A 30-second slot on UK daytime TV can cost between £1,000 to £2,000 (€1,126 - €2,252). Of course you need to do this repeatedly to catch people, so 3 slots per day for 30 days would cost you between £100,000 - £200,000 for the month. This doesn't include the cost to produce the commercial, just show it. Now repeat in the other 27 EU countries and you've just burned your way through between £2.7 million and £5.4 million.

But you don't have to use TV! (I hear you shout) Just use the newspaper. Well let's checkout the latest rate card for the Daily Telegraph.

• Full page colour ad £59,000
• Half page £43,500
• Quarter Page £22,000

So we want do to a quarter page 5 days a week because newspapers charge more for weekends. That would be $440,000 for the month (4 weeks) again do this for the other 27 countries. £12.3 million.

So a combined newspaper and TV campaign would run you into £20+ million. You know what they say: A million here, a million there, and soon you're talking about real money.

The most realistic, and cost-effective advertisements for our mythical company is probably direct mail. It costs around about £15 per thousand address mailed in the UK, so if you mailed all 25 million homes in the UK it would cost you about £25,000 and you'd bound to find someone looking for intermediate language products. £1-3 million to directly mail everyone in the EU is a rough estimate.

This is why marketing people like to segment the market so that rather than doing massive amounts of costly advertisements. They only target the people who actually want the product, and only advertise in the places those people hang out. (BTW, this forum would be a god-send for our mythical marketing person)

Now, to Cavesa's point about having a load of learners who want my intermediate level product, how do I reach them? I can't afford to do mass marketing across TV and newspaper broadsheets. Even the cost of Google or Facebook ads might be prohibitive although much more reasonable budgets of less than £150,000 would be available. The problem is how do I get my message about my product to them?

How do you reach the market segments you mentioned in Czech Republic?

For a teenager with responsible parents. For a secretary improving her qualification. For a student of economy.

And is the market segmentation different in Poland or Germany? Probably, so now I need to have country and segment specific advertisements for 28 countries. Now you need a marketing team, probably at least 10 people. Because it isn't just about placing advertisements, you have to track sales to the advertisements to make sure you're reaching the right people, and change your strategy if you're not.

So you've shown there is a market, but the problem is connecting with them. For example do the 40-50 year old responsible parents read the same magazines and newspapers as the student of economy? Unlikely. You'd need some way for these people to "self-select" like signing up and participating in an online language learning forum, or you have to find out something or place they all have in common where you can advertise to them.

Advertisement on a metro station is a good idea, since all of these people presumably travel, but the responsible parents (who you really want to target because they have more disposable income) probably drive.

OK, I'm rambling now, but I hope you see that just throwing money at marketing without knowing your target will cost a boatload of money, and segmented markets come with their own challenges and costs.

[DaveBee]

I would like to wade in here about marketing. It is true that nobody will buy your stuff if they've never heard of you, or even download it for free. So this mythical "language for intermediate" company with their amazing product can't just sweep the market globally. Or even just in Europe. A 30-second slot on UK daytime TV can cost between £1,000 to £2,000 (€1,126 - €2,252). Of course you need to do this repeatedly to catch people, so 3 slots per day for 30 days would cost you between £100,000 - £200,000 for the month. This doesn't include the cost to produce the commercial, just show it. Now repeat in the other 27 EU countries and you've just burned your way through between £2.7 million and £5.4 million.

But you don't have to use TV! (I hear you shout) Just use the newspaper. Well let's checkout the latest rate card for the Daily Telegraph.

• Full page colour ad £59,000
• Half page £43,500
• Quarter Page £22,000

So we want do to a quarter page 5 days a week because newspapers charge more for weekends. That would be $440,000 for the month (4 weeks) again do this for the other 27 countries. £12.3 million.

So a combined newspaper and TV campaign would run you into £20+ million. You know what they say: A million here, a million there, and soon you're talking about real money.

One of the odd things I've noticed in my watch-lots-of-french-stuff course is Assimil embedded in French films, presumably before companies started paying producers to do that.

From memory Assimil books appear in the 'La Vache et le Prisonnier', and their english book's lesson one "my tailor is rich" has cropped up in two films that I've seen: 'Gendarme in New York' and I think 'Le battaillon du ciel'.

[emk]

OK, one more "startup economics" post before I go back to Anki!

The most realistic, and cost-effective advertisements for our mythical company is probably direct mail. It costs around about £15 per thousand address mailed in the UK, so if you mailed all 25 million homes in the UK it would cost you about £25,000 and you'd bound to find someone looking for intermediate language products. £1-3 million to directly mail everyone in the EU is a rough estimate.

Actually, the most cost effective form of advertising would word-of-mouth from existing, enthusiastic users. But there are two problems with this:

1. Word of mouth is really hurt by language barriers, so you need to keep re-launching one country at a time. Everybody in France knows that Assimil is awesome at least seriously worth considering for self-study. I only tried it because my wife is French.
2. Word of mouth works great for dabblers, because there are a lot of them. But successful intermediate students are rare, and any advice they give is drowned out by the dabblers. This is the classic problem faced by the fitness industry—they know how to reliably turn couch potatoes into lean, strong athletes who can run a 7-minute mile and squat 1.5 times their bodyweight. But the real money is in people that want to mess around for two weeks every January before giving up again.

So you can't really rely on word-of-mouth unless you target specialist communities online.

One of the biggest issues - as discussed in this thread and others - the large slice of the market is beginners. They are the low hanging fruit, easier to develop for and the segment where most potential profit lies. I’m just hoping someone comes up with a concept for intermediate and advanced learners that a business can see a future in. Not every business has to be Google or even Assimil. I’m just saying that the market for non-beginners IS also huge - if not as huge - and Cavesa has detailed where much of the market lies.

I don’t think Assimil have “failed” emk. Did you say they employ fifty people? I imagine the owners living comfortable lives in comfortable French homes, eating fine food and drinking fine wine. This is all my imagination of course but they have been around for three generations so I don’t think “failed” is an appropriate word. They’ve been doing well enough to keep going. I think you make good points for untapped potential, though, Cavesa.

This is a good point, and it's worth digging into it a bit. From an investment perspective, you can divide software companies into two major groups:

1. Startups backed with venture capital, which need to "swing for the fences" and "hit a home run." These companies ultimately hope to earn hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars per year.
2. "Lifestyle" businesses, which accept very little investment, and which grow out of their own revenue.

As one entrepreneur puts it:

What’s a lifestyle business? Some consider it a patronizing term that the VCs and startup ecosystem use to put down businesses that don’t consume your life.

There’s a debate between entrepreneurs who say chasing swing-for-the-fences startups wastes your life and VCs who call businesses that stay small on purpose “dipshit companies.”

To make this concrete, Readlang and Assimil are both "lifestyle" businesses. Duolingo is a venture-capital based startup. A company like Assimil is successful if it stays in business, meets payroll, and earns a few million dollars a year. But if you decide to accept venture capital like Duolingo has, then you need to earn a lot more money. This blog post describes how the numbers work:

The headline is that they received 60%+ of their returns from just 10% of their capital which was invested in companies that achieved home run exits of 5x or more. The average exit multiple in this homerun set was 16x.

This makes it very clear that unless a business can achieve a 5x+ exit, and maybe up to 16x+ then it isn’t likely to contribute meaningfully to the returns of a fund. Hence VCs target these sorts of exits on every deal.

Exceptional returns on the winners are, of course, necessary because of the large percentage of losers. In their sample 50%+ of capital was invested in companies that returned less than the original investment, and the vast majority of that 50% was invested in deals where all or nearly all the money was lost.

So Duolingo has accepted $108 million in startup capital and burns $40,000/day. In order to get a 16x return, they would need to sell for for US$1.7 billion. Actually they want more, because the most recent $25 million was invested at a valuation of $700 million, buying only 3.5% of the company. So the investors really hope to sell Duolingo someday for $3.5 to 12 billion dollars. As you can see, the economics of venture capital mean that every venture capitalist is always chasing the next Google. Most startups fail, losing all the money invested, and so VCs need the winners to win really big.

This, in turn, raises another question: Why couldn't you just get a VC to invest, say, US$1 million? Well, the problem is that the good VCs tend to have a lot of money to invest, and even a really successful tiny company just won't make enough money to interest them:

For a $25 million return in a $500 million fund (even on a $1 million investment), half of one's partners might remember to mention it to you on their way to the coffee machine (it not being worth a special trip down the hall to your office), the second half wouldn't think it noteworthy enough to mention at all, and the third half would say to themselves: "why did he spend so much time on such a crappy little deal?").

So basically, unless you have a story about how you can become as big as Rosetta Stone ($250 million/year in sales), you're not going to get the VCs excited. But remember, it's not sales that count, it's profit—and Rosetta Stone is currently losing money. What the VCs really want is a story about how you're going to steal some of that juicy $35 billion/year "total addressable market" away from the language schools.

But if the best you can do is €5 million/year (like Assimil), then typical venture capitalists won't be interested. I mean, they might talk to you for an hour because they like to talk to people (and they might learn something), but they won't open their wallet. You could try to tell them, "Hey, if you invest in us, you can come to annual board meetings in Bordeaux" (and I've heard the French government actually push this idea), but that's not really enough.

But if you can't access venture capital, this imposes some very strict limitations:

1. You're going to have to work hard for years for small amounts of money. Rideout absolutely went through this with readlang. As I mentioned upthread, I remember an interview where he said he was earning something like $10,000/year after several years of very hard work.

2. You may not have enough money to build a first-rate app. I know of one software company in Boston that will happily build you a professional app or website. They're very good at what they do, and they won't just set a giant pile of your money on fire. It's perfect for a non-technical business founder with a good idea. But their minimum project size is $80,000. If you complain, they'll patiently explain, "Well, it costs about $80,000 to open a coin-op laundromat. You've got to spend money to start a business." Readlang managed to get around this because Steve Rideout built everything himself—but he spent more than $80,000 of his own personal time to do so.

3. You won't be able to afford serious marketing. Several people in this thread have complained about Readlang's marketing. Honestly, I think Steve Rideout did a pretty respectable job:

readlang-website-small.jpg

You can see at glance what the product does. It offers you a sweet deal: "Learn languages by reading stuff!" If you just want to use the browser version (not the ebook reader), you can be up and running in 2 minutes for free. If you scroll down the page, there are more detailed explanations, testimonials from users, and it's all nicely done. This is what marketing looks like when you're only earning a few thousand dollars a year. Yes, it would probably sell better if he added, "Learn naturally, like a child" somewhere. :-/ Or if he turned himself into a public personality like Khatzumoto or Benny Lewis or Steve Kaufmann have done—Khatzumoto and Benny are very good at Internet marketing.

So what does this mean for people who want to make language-learning tools?

Well, first you need to decide whether you want to focus on beginners, or on more advanced students. If you want to focus on beginners, then taking VC money might make sense. But if you go down that route, you'll be pressured into a laser-like focus on attracting first-time students and keeping them happy. Any time that you spend worrying about intermediate students is a distraction, because it's a much smaller market. So ultimately this means either (1) you chase the "dabblers", or (2) you figure out how to break into the ESL "false beginner" market one country at a time.

Alternatively, you decide that your true love lies in helping students make it from A2 to C1. If you do this, you're looking at staring a "lifestyle" business and big investors won't touch you. And honestly, Readlang tried this, and Steve Rideout did everything about as well as he could, given his time and budget. Others have done somewhat better, including LingQ. I agree that there's probably a viable market here, but I don't think anybody has really figured it out yet.

A third option would be to start an open source project, and possibly set up a Patreon for pizza money (or a Kickstarter, if you're really ambitious). You'd still lose money, but you wouldn't have any illusions going in. The drawback with this approach is that just like with LWT, subs2srs and my own substudy, you'll probably build something just good enough to do the job, and save time by building a very basic UI.

I've been leaning towards the "open source" route for years. I've been approached twice by entrepreneurs who wanted to start a real company (and I still talk to one of them regularly). I think somebody is going to figure this out. But I'm waiting until the numbers start adding up. And this means either (1) somebody figures out how to sell to serious intermediates, or (2) somebody figures out how to make the dabblers care about the quality of the product they're buying.

[aokoye]

3.Anki or Readlang does not look easy to use. as AdrianSlont said well. I really dislike design being polished at the expense of the form, but there must be a central bliss point between nice+easy and efficient. Actually, both would profit tremendously from copyright that would make more sense. Right now, learners not living in the target country have no legal way to get ebooks for Readlang. And they have to make their own Anki lists out of their coursebooks, as sharing "Assimil wordlist" decks seems to be problematic as well, from what I've heard. (I'd be interested to know how has Scritter got the coursebook wordlists for their service. If they found a business model working for the publisher too, it would be awesome if it would spread).

I really loved your entire post Cavesa and I think you voiced some really important points the vast majority of which I agree with and some of which I think I've brought up in other threads (and some of which I know I've brought up outside of this forum). I agree that the idea of what or who qualifies as a "serious learner" in the context of Emk's post just doesn't make sense or is, at the very least, very truncated. To add to your and Adrianslont's points, I would also add that there are countless immigrants who are very serious language learners because their livelihood quite literally depend on it. Yes this is perhaps more apparent right now with the current refugee crisis but it has always been the case. We hear stories on this forum about expats who never take the time to learn the language spoken in the area that they've moved to, but I am almost positive that they are the exception, not the rule. Yes, in the US (I realize I'm being US-centric at the moment but it's because I have the statistics in my head and could cite them when it's after 7am) there are some overarching demographics of of people who tend to not gain high levels of English proficiency but in those cases there are a number of factors that lead to that. Age, income, education, why they came to the US to begin with, and resources (this includes, among other things, both local resources and things like legal documentation).

To add to the list of demographics who are "serious" language learners: children who are immigrants (and whose families have the resources to put them in a stable educational environment), people who work in politics (including some who live in the US and inner circle Anglophone countries), pilots who aren't L1 English speakers, doctors who aren't L1 English speakers and need to read things in English/other languages, people who work in tourism (especially outside of the English speaking regions), likely the vast majority of international students at universities globally, immigrants in general, a good chunk of translators and interpreters, professional athletes who play on teams in areas that don't speak their L1, sections of people who work for international intelligence agencies, and so on.

To get back to what I quoted above about the lists. I'm not positive that word lists in which it is "word-translation" are actually copyrightable in the US. It appears to be, at best, a grey area. There's was a relevent article published in Slate in 2014 but I'll add this quote about wordlists:

The definition-free OWL and a words-only version of the OSPD might be said to resemble the phone book. The facts in them—the individual words themselves—wouldn’t be considered “original” and likely couldn’t be copyrighted. But the lists might represent “an original selection or arrangement of facts,” as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in Feist. “These choices as to selection and arrangement, so long as they are made independently by the compiler and entail a minimal degree of creativity,” she wrote, “are sufficiently original that Congress may protect such compilations through the copyright laws.”

Note the modal "may" in the last sentence, not "must" or "will". Note that ingredient lists in are not copyrightable in the US. I've always found the "we're shutting down/deleting users' lists" because they fall under a breach of copyright more than a little bit dubious. I suspect the real issue is that companies are worried that someone is going to sue them because they don't have the financial resources to deal with that. For what it's worth, Renshuu also has a number of vocab lists from Japanese textbooks and I'm pretty sure they've been around for longer than Skritter has.
There are a few websites that I can think of that do work directly with textbook companies - Quia and Phase-6. Quia is more workbook related at this point though 10+ years ago there was more of a vocabulary focus. Phase-6 is an SRS webapp aimed primarily at children (or parents of children) taking languages at schools in Germany.

[aokoye]

In terms of Anki, software in general, and the idea that people don't want to pay for things, I'm going to leave this Twitter post (or really thread) here. For people who don't want to click on it:

Technology really fails our elderly. If you don’t have good fine motor control, smartphones & tablets are a nightmare. If your memory is not what it was, complex UIs are terrible - you can’t remember where stuff is. Confusing UIs, like Skype’s new one, are impossible to navigate.

I would argue that this could and should be expanded to it fails also fails people with a wide range of physical and neurological "issues". Also documentation. Yes at least Anki has documentation, but even with it getting the most out of Anki is confusing to me and I am "tech-savy". That said, I can think of plenty of tools that are easier to use than Anki whose documentation is a mess or in some cases just non-existent.

Cavesa kind of addressed this in an earlier post and I've addressed this elsewhere on this website, but even if people want to pay for something that doesn't mean that they can. Yes, I am all about paying people a fair price for the work that they do. I have had countless conversations about this in the context of fiber arts and arts and crafts more broadly, but not everyone has the money to buy a $24 app. People have a wide variety of priorities in their lives including things like paying bills and feeding themselves and their family. Never mind too that this app is best used in conjunction with a rather powerful piece of desktop software that, like I said above, is far from self explanatory if you want to get anywhere near the most out of it.

[emk]

Yes, I am all about paying people a fair price for the work that they do. I have had countless conversations about this in the context of fiber arts and arts and crafts more broadly, but not everyone has the money to buy a $24 app. People have a wide variety of priorities in their lives including things like paying bills and feeding themselves and their family.

If we assume that we're talking about people in the US, the minimum wage is $7.25. And let's say it takes 300 hours of study to reach a solid level. That means that the minimum investment to learn a language would be $2,175 of time. If Anki can save you 4 hours that you'd otherwise spend getting paid to work, you come out ahead. Yeah, there are lots of people for whom US$25 is a huge deal, even in the US. If I could offer every US immigrant a cheap phone with a free English course, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I still think that $25 is perfectly reasonable for a specialist tool for intermediate learners.

I really loved your entire post Cavesa and I think you voiced some really important points the vast majority of which I agree with and some of which I think I've brought up in other threads (and some of which I know I've brought up outside of this forum). I agree that the idea of what or who qualifies as a "serious learner" in the context of Emk's post just doesn't make sense or is, at the very least, very truncated.

Yeah, I really ought to be more precise. When I say, "serious language learner", I'm almost looking at it from a researching their options perspective. Specifically, I'm talking about somebody who will go online, research different language-learning methods, and pay particular attention to which methods actually work reliably and efficiently. These people will pay more attention to polyglots like Barry M. Farber, Benny Lewis and Gabriel Wyner. They might ask for recommendations on forums or on reddit. On the high end, they might drop $9,000 for a summer at Middlebury Language Schools. The common factor is that they care enough to do their research beforehand, and that they don't just fall for some garbage course with good marketing.

So I'm not actually measuring how badly they need to learn a language, or how hard they'll work. They might be deadly serious ESL students. But if they're just going to buy Rosetta Stone because they saw an ad in a magazine, then a company like Readlang will never be able to reach them successfully. When your marketing budget is less than $10,000, you need to target early adopters who are actively searching for something better. I wish I knew how to reach these folks, and convince them of a better way. But I'm not confident enough to invest my personal savings and to work 80 hours/week for the next five years, only to lose everything. (I did once burn about half my savings and worked brutal hours to co-found a startup that failed. I learned a lot, happily, so it all worked out in the end.)

Anyway, I've been working for the last few evenings to update substudy to the latest libraries, and I'm thinking about how to add a basic cross-platform GUI using Electron. But if anybody can figure out a better way to build easier tools and sell them to a bigger market, I'm rooting for you. Please just do your homework first, and don't invest more than you can afford to lose.

[iguanamon]

...successful intermediate students are rare, and any advice they give is drowned out by the dabblers. This is the classic problem faced by the fitness industry—they know how to reliably turn couch potatoes into lean, strong athletes who can run a 7-minute mile and squat 1.5 times their bodyweight. But the real money is in people that want to mess around for two weeks every January before giving up again. ...

We see this every January here on the forum. It was much more noticeable when TAC existed. Enthusiasm would peak just before New Year's and by February TAC was dead. Most of the new members would be gone by March.

The thing is that while practically anyone can learn a second language most are unwilling to put in the time and effort needed to do it. It's a winnowing process that we see play out on the forum over time. Many of our members who go on to learn multiple languages to high levels start out just like everyone else does but something within them drives them to "go the extra mile". After learning one language to a high level, the rest come much easier. The members who have taken learning less seriously or maybe have lesser motivation to learn, predictably do not progress. Just as there are New Year's Resolution runners who never make it past February.

Successful learners (success being defined as having learned a language to B2 or above) have shared their methods and process here. There is enough variation in learning that there is something for everyone to glean tips and advice. Despite this, despite seeing success every day here, there are still people who don't progress beyond A2.

So, is it the tools? Or, is it the motivation of learners? I think it is most likely a combination of the two. The best tools in the world won't help if the learner won't use them and use them consistently. We all know how to get in shape and curb obesity- calories in vs calories out. Still, most western societies are seeing dramatic increases in obesity. Motivated people get in shape and more importantly stay in shape. These folks are the minority. So are motivated language-learners who live in societies where a second language isn't absolutely necessary to live a good life. They are the minority. The situation will probably always be that way. That doesn't mean that a "lifestyle company" couldn't be developed to be a better mousetrap for serious learners. I believe it can, and emk is on to something here. He's obviously thought about this a bit. But as emk points out... it won't and can't be the next Google. In capitalism, that's what it's all about. Investors want a huge, obscene profit return, not a "nice little profit". Can something like what emk is talking about be developed, marketed and sold with low cost and a "nice" profit? I definitely believe it can.

The seeds are out there already in the decades old productions of FIA and Destinos. Imagine an updated program similar to these two with built in srs, interactive exercises, live tutoring, student language exchanges and a built-in program that helps learners to learn from reading. It would probably do well amongst the general public who would like to learn a language but don't want to have to "cobble together" all the tools needed to do so on their own. That's where we lose them. When people like me tell folks about making their own parallel texts, downloading subtitles and using them to work with a TV series, subs2srs, srs word frequency, reading level appropriate material, etc... it's just too much work for folks who aren't as motivated as we are.

[aokoye]

Yes, I am all about paying people a fair price for the work that they do. I have had countless conversations about this in the context of fiber arts and arts and crafts more broadly, but not everyone has the money to buy a $24 app. People have a wide variety of priorities in their lives including things like paying bills and feeding themselves and their family.

If we assume that we're talking about people in the US, the minimum wage is $7.25. And let's say it takes 300 hours of study to reach a solid level. That means that the minimum investment to learn a language would be $2,175 of time. If Anki can save you 4 hours that you'd otherwise spend getting paid to work, you come out ahead. Yeah, there are lots of people for whom US$25 is a huge deal, even in the US. If I could offer every US immigrant a cheap phone with a free English course, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I still think that $25 is perfectly reasonable for a specialist tool for intermediate learners.

I was definitely not just thinking about people in the US when I wrote that. And again, if you are someone who, quite logically given the UI, thinks all Anki is a simple (not powerful) SRS system because you can't figure out how to take advantage of even a small selection of the powerful options it affords its users then why would you pay $25 for it?

Yeah, I really ought to be more precise. When I say, "serious language learner", I'm almost looking at it from a researching their options perspective. Specifically, I'm talking about somebody who will go online, research different language-learning methods, and pay particular attention to which methods actually work reliably and efficiently. These people will pay more attention to polyglots like Barry M. Farber, Benny Lewis and Gabriel Wyner. They might ask for recommendations on forums or on reddit. On the high end, they might drop $9,000 for a summer at Middlebury Language Schools. The common factor is that they care enough to do their research beforehand, and that they don't just fall for some garbage course with good marketing.

So I'm not actually measuring how badly they need to learn a language, or how hard they'll work. They might be deadly serious ESL students. But if they're just going to buy Rosetta Stone because they saw an ad in a magazine, then a company like Readlang will never be able to reach them successfully. When your marketing budget is less than $10,000, you need to target early adopters who are actively searching for something better. I wish I knew how to reach these folks, and convince them of a better way.

So it sounds like one chunk of people you're talking about are expert/native English speakers and another chunk that you might be talking about are educated economic migrants who probably spend a lot of time on the internet. Where "educated" means what we think of as western education.

I also wonder just how many of the people that you're talking about actually pay attention to people like Farber, Lewis, and Wyner. While that's a bit of an aside, I think what it shows is that you're likely talking about a very narrow band of people compared to the multitudes of "serious language learners" that are out there. I'll use this example because I know you know of the website I'm talking about. On March 20th, 2017 Ravelry reached 7 millionth, nearly 1 million of those users being active between February 20th and March 20th. That's a lot of people for a website run by 4 people. I'm also going to assume that it's significantly more than on all of the language learning sites combined. This is a site whose interface was only in English up until maybe 12 months ago (now it's in German as well), whose official documentation is primarily, or perhaps only, in English, and whose market is likely a heck of a lot more niche than "language learners" or "serious language learners" (where serious is what Cavesa, AdrianSlont, and I gave examples of). So yeah - a huge website. That said, there are significantly more knitters, crocheters, spinners, and weavers (Ravelry's supported crafts) in the world than there are those who are registered on Ravelry. There are certainly people on Rav who like to claim that isn't true, but it most definitely is.

There are plenty of people who, in your words, "care enough to do their research beforehand, and that [they] don't just fall for some garbage course with good marketing" but those people don't appear to be in your real or imagined market for one reason or another. That doesn't make them less serious, less successful, or mean they work less efficiently. I think the other problem for you (and for Ravelry) is that there are people who don't need "a better way" they know what works for them and they stick with it. They don't need to buy or use your product. Their way might actually be better than yours.

[Cavesa]

Thanks for a lot of food for thought!

Now, to Cavesa's point about having a load of learners who want my intermediate level product, how do I reach them? I can't afford to do mass marketing across TV and newspaper broadsheets. Even the cost of Google or Facebook ads might be prohibitive although much more reasonable budgets of less than £150,000 would be available. The problem is how do I get my message about my product to them?

Thanks for a lot of info about the real prices of advertisements. It is sometimes hard to imagine this with enough precision, without being in the field. (Please let me know, whenever I am too naive) The thing is the new services for intermediate and advanced learners cannot and as well don't have to replace the giants. They need to find the niche. That is a good thing: you don't need to convince people that believe only the tv commercials, not others. I actually thing that even if Readlang or Anki had the money, spending it on tv commercials would be a waste. The bad thing: The giants don't leave much space even for products not attacking their position.

There are various ways to get noticed, cheaper but harder, and I like the example with the Pirate party (which was not meant as a political promotion, I hope that is understood as I don't want to break the rules but the example is just so obvious. It is as an example of the possibility to succeed without tons of money even in the national elections, which are about PR and marketing more than anything else unfortunately), and the example of the success and lack of success of products like the Language Transfer.

The Pirates started from the bottom, with good ideas, offering people a high quality service and convincing them it was that good. People didn't believe them at first, as they were used to the shinier products presented on TV, why should they know about or take serious someone not on TV. They stood against political equivalents of the Rosetta Stone and similar (heh, this is sooo YKYALLN, comparing the individual political parties to language learning products ). Unlike some other parties that hit the market hard with lots and lots of money and PR to skip majority of the path, the Pirates went from people easy to convinced and eager to spread the word, to convincing communities for local elections, then to convincing people on a bigger scale for the regional ones, and now they succeeded in the biggest elections we have. The key: they weren't disappointing their voters, they always do maximum to keep to their promises. Yes, they are not for everyone of course, they are one party among many options on the market. But they do not disappoint people they have already convinced.

This is why they grow at each step, unlike many earlier small parties, who gained popularity and lost it due to not focusing on the already convinced people. For example our Greens have fallen very low from rising to and being a parliament party, because they were so focused on targeting new public they simply stoped caring about their existing voters. They had more means to address people than the Pirates (including tv time), but they kept changing their product and disappointing the old customers. This is a bit like the Memrise decision to get tons of new customers by removing stuff the old ones had been returning for for years. The difference is simple: Memrise can count and may be right there are tons of people who will like the New Memrise, as the competition in the field of SRS is not that fierce (most people don't know about SRS at all, so the first who finds them is likely to get them), while the Greens were leaving their old customers for customers already faithful to other brands and their tv spots.

This is the important point: Such companies (and political subjects like Pirates or non profit organisations looking for regular supporters) care about their voters/customers and want to keep them. They are not like a big company (in any field), who couldn't care less about individual learners and unless you are a huge customer (a state owned or private organisation paying for hundreds of the product copies or licences), you are free to put your complaints where the sun doesn't shine. This "let's keep each learner" attitude is something sorely missing on the language teaching market and indispensable, if you want to address other people than the mass of beginners, who don't know their preferences yet. It takes a lot more time and investments, but you can get faithful customers.

With a faithful customer, you get a new way to target their contacts through Fb and similar sources too. And you don't lose already gained positions. And as so many language teaching products take a monthly fee instead of a one time payment, faithful satisfied customers should be their priority.

As I said, the quality of the product and keeping one's promises is an important, perhaps old fashioned, way to spread the word with cheaper advertisements. I would like to use the Language Transfer as an example here, as the creator is trying to spread the word without paying for advertisements. LT is a great thought, the products are good and in some ways unique, and they are free. He is doing all he can to present the product online (fb, patreon) and in real life (workshops), and with the help of others (the packages). But he is not exactly succeeding. He is offering a good product for free, what could have gone wrong?

Mikhail from LT is spreading himself extremely thin. He is admirable in many ways, but right now, he is making people wait ages for four courses, instead of visibly progressing with two. I get he wants to give something to the huge public of French and Italian learners. But the huge public of German learners see they are not the priority. And German has a lot of potential, we are not talking about Klingon. Mikhail has completed a few great products, but has been constantly not delivering the expected stuff to many customers. As he divides the Introduction and Complete courses, the Arabic learners have been set aside several times for people who don't need LT so much as they already have everything. The German learners are another example. The Cypriot Greek has been a part of the whole original idea and wasn't delivered.

I was about to start paying, but due to technical problems with PayPal couldn't at that point. Now I could but I don't know whether I want, because I cannot see much of a reason to support someone trying to compete with the giants and giving even more to the priviledged learners. I would love to support someone filling the niche. And another problem: due to difficulty of production, Mikhail (I am not sure whether I remember the name correctly, sorry) has now announced lower quality of the audio from now on.

Products like LT, Anki, or Readlang can succeed, if they slowly gather customers and keep them. Without keeping them, they cannot survive. RS can. There are still tons of inexperienced people, who will trust the tv commercial and not a bad review on the internet.

How do you reach the market segments you mentioned in Czech Republic?

For a teenager with responsible parents. For a secretary improving her qualification. For a student of economy.

And is the market segmentation different in Poland or Germany? Probably, so now I need to have country and segment specific advertisements for 28 countries. Now you need a marketing team, probably at least 10 people. Because it isn't just about placing advertisements, you have to track sales to the advertisements to make sure you're reaching the right people, and change your strategy if you're not.

So you've shown there is a market, but the problem is connecting with them. For example do the 40-50 year old responsible parents read the same magazines and newspapers as the student of economy? Unlikely. You'd need some way for these people to "self-select" like signing up and participating in an online language learning forum, or you have to find out something or place they all have in common where you can advertise to them.

No, no, no, you misunderstand! I may have written it weirdly but the point was exactly the opposite: these people are not individual and divided segments of the market! This heterogenous chaos is one mix. One huge mix of extremely different people and all of them go to the language classes and to take the FCE exam.

Perhaps in the anglophone countries, you need to convince individual groups, whey they should learn a language and why they should do it for you. Here you don't. A huge part of the convincing has been done for you. You just need to convince them that your alternative or supplement product is a serious thing. And this is just as true about the parent, about the secretary, the student, the laywer, anyone.

And the advertisements for the 28 countries don't need to be that specific. With language learning products, you sometimes don't even need to have that much stuff translated (there are for example advertisements that are purely in the target English). The huge mixed mass learning languages in the Czech Republic has the same motivation as their counterparts in other non anglophone countries, especially the smaller ones. You may need to offer different ideas to people with important native languages (German, French, perhaps Spanish), but the rest is eager to learn an important language and earn more money. It is that simple.

The only problem will be dealing with a polish tv station, a german tv station, a czech tv station (tv is just an example). But a large part stays the same.

Advertisement on a metro station is a good idea, since all of these people presumably travel, but the responsible parents (who you really want to target because they have more disposable income) probably drive.

OK, I'm rambling now, but I hope you see that just throwing money at marketing without knowing your target will cost a boatload of money, and segmented markets come with their own challenges and costs.

No, advertisement on a metro station is not so good idea, many people with middle and lower incomes use a car too, because the public transport is simply too much of an inconvenience. The responsible parents, the managers of smaller businesses, the artisans, or just anyone living further from the centre and therefore gladly economising elsewhere to avoid the inconvenience of switching three trams or buses twice a day.

I never thought it was easy. But just like the target of serious learners is much larger than emk's post suggested, it is much more unified than you belief. All those different people are mostly learning for the same reason (money) and with the same means. If they required segmented advertisements, they would hardly attend the same classes and sat the same exams.

[Elenia]

Much earlier in the thread people expressed the idea that Duolingo bought out a competitor. Now, I don't see that, because I can not in any way see ReadLang and Duolingo as competing products. I'm wondering if this could be a move that is good for both companies - Readlang gets more attention in time and funding and reaches a wider audience (ready and waiting) and Duolingo can expand their offer so that they can retain those learners who've done their tree and reverse tree and don't understand why they're still not as fluent. As a bonus, Duolingo get's to compete against another market heavyweight*, namely LingQ.

*For a given value of heavyweight.