Sell to working professionals with good English, and skip beginners entirely

Anada Lakra… playbooks and some elements of a playbook from one app, combine it with a playbook of a different app and create this mishmash strategy. Duolingo's strategy has always been huge freemium base that they monetize a portion of, and because they have all the languages, all the levels. They're teaching the basics of everything, they now have all these new skills, give this product away for free, even if you monetize a percentage of it, you're fine.

Anada LakraOur philosophy from the beginning is we're not going after this huge base of learners, who are at basic level. We are actually intentionally ignoring them. We're not teaching the basics of English. We're not teaching words. We're focusing on a very different audience that is actually somewhat ignored or deprioritized by a lot of these apps. Which is people who already have a pretty good command of language and want to take it to the next level. So people who are at intermediate to advanced level and for whom English is important enough that they want to put more effort behind it. And those people are generally career professionals. They care more about English, they're willing to pay.

Anada LakraThe alternative to what we offer is a way more expensive one-on-one speech coaching experience with an English teacher or an accent coach. So it's a totally different audience, where the intent is much higher and the ROI is also way higher than as a hobby learning the basics of Spanish or Japanese or something like that. So totally different ICP, different value proposition, different willingness to pay.

Anada Lakra… 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.

David BarnardHas there been any kind of more direct B2B play with companies with ... Because I did see on Hacker News, the founder of Expo talked about having an employee expense this as a solution to help them improve their job performance.