Market to international college students first

David BarnardHow did you figure out that was your market?

Anada LakraWell, in the early days we created this product. I went back to the basics and I said, "Well, I was an international student when I first experienced this problem." And it's such almost a cliche playbook. Let's just put this in colleges because college students are great adopters. Again, this is what happens going back to my point about, you take a playbook from a totally different product, like dating app or something where they all start in college campuses or Facebook famously or whatever. And you apply it to product, where the ICP and the value prop is super different and of course, it's not going to work.

Anada Lakra… .... It's not like international students were a terrible audience for us. I mean, we still do get a lot of students in the app, but we clearly realize that A, they are a bit younger and they have more ... They still have some plasticity and they're still surrounded by native speakers in very social environments. So their rate of improvement naturally will be higher without needing this additional resource if they just focus on it themselves.

Anada LakraThe second thing is the willingness to pay and the ability to pay for college students is of course, lower. And also just the fact that they maybe have not seen the price of their communication as much because they're not yet in a meeting where people will overlook them and listen to the native speaker over them. Or they haven't yet been in a job interview, where they realize that the reason that that didn't work out was their communication and all of those things.

Anada LakraSo both the willingness to pay and the realization of how much it impacts your income and your career advancement has not happened yet. So we found that actually the audience that resonates the best with this were people who were in the workplace already and who were already seeing the cost and therefore the ROI of investing in their career. And of course, they were having actually income that they could put towards this.