Keep lessons free and sell learners' translations to news sites

David BarnardWow.

Cem KansuAnd it actually generated some revenue, even though very small. So we would have customers that are, at the time, the big news outlets as well, like CNN, BuzzFeed, they would feed an article they wanted to translate from English to Spanish.

Cem KansuAnd then our users in bits and pieces would translate that article and we would crowdsource a translated article and then provide a translated article back to CNN. It was actually a genius model. If you want to do something crowdsourced, it's actually, you're serving both sides a positive value.

Cem KansuThe challenge with that model was though is twofold. One of them is translation. Also, this is pre LLMs. Translation now has changed a lot post LLMs, but this is, you have to remember this is 2013 as well. Even then, translation was a race to the bottom business model.

Cem KansuSo if we were providing a service for, I don't know, however three cents, 10 cents, $3, whatever it is, there was always somebody else trying to do it for a little cheaper by having someone in the Philippines translate it for cheaper. So there's always a race to the bottom. It is hard to scale for that reason.