The B2B Podcast Index
Levels Podcast

Ji Woong Jang (Teuida): Growing to 500K MAUs & 3X LTV in 12 months

Levels Podcast · 2026-02-01 · 40 min

Substance score

51 / 100

Five dimensions, 20 points each

Insight Density11 / 20
Originality8 / 20
Guest Caliber11 / 20
Specificity & Evidence12 / 20
Conversational Craft9 / 20

What our scoring noted

Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.

Insight Density

11 / 20

The episode contains a handful of genuinely useful operational data points - subscription model switch driving repurchase from <10% to 52%, 90% of subscribers converting after the first lesson, LTV tripling - but the density is diluted by vague non-answers ('we don't really test that part'), meandering product walkthroughs, and stretches of the host narrating what was just said back to the guest.

our repurchase rate was lower than uh 10%. So uh, even though we have huge uh, uh premium trials or premium users, but they don't really renew their uh premium service
Most of our 90% of our subscribers subscribe our premium after right after they test the first lessons

Originality

8 / 20

Most frameworks here - subscription vs. one-time purchase, streak gamification, organic social as a growth lever, country-level pricing - are well-established playbooks rather than fresh thinking; the one genuinely interesting angle (framing the product as a 'communication confidence' app rather than a language app) gets touched on but not developed with any depth.

Language is not the only way how we can communicate each other. Even though I can speak English well, it's different story to communicate with some kind of English speaking people
if you practice with AI or some AI videos, you feel like when you really speak you have some opportunity to speak with a real person. You still afraid of speaking it

Guest Caliber

11 / 20

Ji Woong Jang is a genuine founder-operator who has built a real product to meaningful scale (5M downloads, 500k MAU) and can speak from direct experience on monetization pivots and organic growth; however, language barriers lead to imprecise answers and the scale, while solid, is not yet at a tier that commands exceptional authority.

we just passed the 5 million uh, download uh three days ago and then our active users more than about 50k. So 500k
since 2024 we have uh 52% of the repurchase rates and then uh this make uh us uh to make the revenue uh the profits

Specificity & Evidence

12 / 20

The episode is above average for specificity - real download numbers, before/after repurchase rates, exact price points, the 90% conversion timing finding, the 75/25 organic-paid split, and a 2-3 percentage-point retention lift from streaks all appear - but several key topics (paid spend levels, cohort data, exact timeline of the monetization pivot) are left vague or unanswered.

even though we raised our price from 8.99 per month to 14.$99 per month, we don't really be changing on our conversion
for the TikTok and Instagram YouTube we have more than 300,000 uh followers

Conversational Craft

9 / 20

The host surfaces a reasonable set of topics and occasionally digs productively (paywall placement, streak architecture, social team incentive structure), but too often summarises the guest's answer and receives agreement rather than pushing on vague claims, and several interesting threads - like why LTV tripled mechanically, or what the paid marketing unit economics actually look like - are never pressed.

have you experimented with when you present the premium plan and try to convert people like where in the flow
Yeah, I mean it's a funnel basically. Right. Because it's you know you show it right at the end of the lesson

Conversation analysis

Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the verbal tics along the way.

Share of words spoken

  • Speaker B65%
  • Speaker A31%
  • Speaker C3%

Filler words

so153uh127like91kind of45right26um17actually16er7you know7honestly7I mean6basically4sort of1obviously1

Episode notes

Summary In this conversation, Ji Woong Jang discusses Teuida, a language learning app that emphasizes interactive speaking practice with native speakers. The app transitioned to a subscription model, significantly improving user retention and revenue. Ji Woong highlights the importance of community engagement, gamification strategies like streaks, and the introduction of missions for real-life practice. He also shares insights on marketing strategies, the balance between organic growth and paid advertising, and the future potential of AI in language learning, while maintaining a focus on cultural understanding as a key component of effective communication. Links Teuida Ji Woong Jang Presented By Trophy Ship gamification features that power growth with Trophy .

Full transcript

40 min

Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.

Speaker A: We've spoken with a lot of founders that are you know launching or have launched B2C apps and a big recurring theme is this community element where you can build almost a personal connection with your users, especially early users. But it sounds like I mean you guys are at some at a reasonably big scale. How many users are on tweeted now?

Speaker B: We just passed the 5 million download uh 3 days ago and then our active users more than 500k. So many users are using our application over the world. As I know our streak has been 1100 about 20 days because there are one users who keep our whole streak since we launched it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Is it your account that has the streak that's 1120 days or is it a different an actual user? Hey Jiwoong, nice to have you here today. Um, do you want to get started by just giving a quick overview of to Twidda and uh the platform generally?

Speaker B: Yeah. So uh, thank you for having me here today. And TWEEDA is ah a mobile application where you can practice speaking in Korean, Japanese and Spanish. So our application is a little bit different with the others because we are really focusing on to providing the experience of speaking with the nativists uh through our interactive simulation. So even this is a virtual situation but you can have a conversation with the nativist based on your pronunciation accuracy. Then you will that you are not only learning the language but also you can empower your confidence to speak in foreign languages.

Speaker A: So the majority of time you spend in the app is actually speaking and listening to Is it like uh, is it a real person on the other end or is it an AI simulation

Speaker B: or ah actually both of not because we don't really providing the one on one real uh time video call at the same time we don't use the AI videos. So what we uh provide right now is we prerecorded the videos. Uh the users feel like they are really speaking with a real person because we make the interactive simulation so based how we can provide the realistic is we filmed all the video in personal objective view so you feel like you are communicating with the person but at the same time we have to provide different reaction based on your pronunciation accuracy or your kind of sentence which you are speaking. So we are uh matching one or two uh good fit of video based on your pronunciation right after you speak so you feel like you are really speaking with the people.

Speaker A: So is it like a fixed pattern of conversation like you have to give a certain response and that way you have your all the prerecorded videos. I see. Cool. Okay, so one of the things I'd like to talk about first is it sounds like sometime in 2024 you guys figured something out when it comes to monetization. Like you had some struggles with it before and then something clicked at that time. So I'd love to dive deep into like what was it exactly that clicked and maybe to start like what was going on before that clicked. Like were you, what was the state of the company? Were you guys struggling to monetize? Did you have a lot of users but then you just couldn't convert them or like what was the state before you figured it out?

Speaker B: Actually we have the many users who paying our uh premium users before but uh, we at the very first time to make the revenue we use the one time purchase system which is the users uh purchase our 1 month or 3 months or 12 months of premiums service. This is our subscription model which is automatically renewed subscription. So the users usually drop the second payments after expired the first one. Our repurchase rate was lower than uh 10%. So uh, even though we have huge uh, uh premium trials or premium users, but they don't really renew their uh premium service. We didn't really make the revenue before but after 2023 we added our subscription model and then ah are trying to encourage the user to keep their subscription. So since 2024 we have uh 52% of the repurchase rates and then uh this make uh us uh to make the revenue uh the profits. So I think the subscription model uh was working really well to make the money.

Speaker C: Got it.

Speaker A: So now you have to be in the subscription model.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Did you guys close your old way of doing things? So now everyone has to go through the subscription model and that way it'll automatically renew if they, if they don't uh, touch it. Right. So have you experimented with pricing, have you experimented with the like in general the conversion flow to try to get people to convert and maybe where in the process that is like if it's right after they sign up or if it's after they've already done some things in the app.

Speaker B: Yeah, honestly we tried many times experience for our price but honestly even though we raised the price the converter rate didn't really change. So we keep raised our uh, pricing and then uh, now we still keep uh, testing our price because uh, even though we raised our price from 8.99 per month to 14.$99 per month, we don't really be changing on our conversion. And also at the same time we, and also we Just launched. We also using the subscription model. So we have to check how the uh renewal rate is changing based on buying increasing the uh pricing but it's still same so we have keep that. One thing which we are trying is we are testing the different pricing for different countries because many countries has different economic systems or economy levels. So we are testing which pricing is really good for each countries but it's really working well. For example the Southeast Asia we reduce the um pricing but it works more conversion rates. So we usually testing these which pricing is bring um, better ah revenue.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, is it all a monthly subscription or do people get to choose between a monthly or an annual or maybe a weekly or how is that structured?

Speaker B: Now we have only two options. One is a monthly subscription and the second one is the yearly subscription. So for the monthly you have to pay about the $15 per month and for the yearly you have to pay $80 per year.

Speaker A: Okay, got it.

Speaker C: And the um, when you mentioned increasing prices, when you do that do you increase the price for old subscriptions at the same time as new or do you kind of move the other older people into old subscriptions?

Speaker B: Actually we don't really raise the old subscribers uh pricing because the price is kind of uh agreement each other between us and the people. So we don't really touch the old subscription pricing. So every time we test uh a pricing for the new subscribers only.

Speaker C: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, have you experimented with when you present the premium plan and try to convert people like where in the flow, the user flow. And I'm curious what the results were of that if you did test it.

Speaker B: Honestly we don't really test on that part because uh January we just started using the amplitude to understanding the user's activity in our application. Before that we usually uh analyze the user's activity in our application with a low data so we don't really understanding about the user's flow that much. So we don't really test about when the users really purchase our service or when they don't. Uh but after we check the amplitude. But we are already aware about this but Most of our 90% of our subscribers subscribe our premium after right after they test the first lessons. So it means that most of our subscribers they decide to subscribe our application very early. So honestly we don't really kind of loom to test when we can make more conversion by driving the users. So yeah, at the moment we don't really test but we are.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I guess there's not much need to Right. Because if they, if you, unless you wanted to show them like even before they do the first lesson but that probably wouldn't work because they haven't gotten the value yet. So it's already. There's not. You can't really move it anywhere now.

Speaker B: And honestly we tested about for the uh, uh, older users because most of the new users when they started the first lesson they subscribe our application. Some people don't really subscribe at the very first time. About our subscribers, 50% of subscribers uh, who is just signed up this month and the rest of the 50 is who signed up the last month or previous months. So we are testing when we can drive all the users to subscribe our subscription.

Speaker A: Uh, when a new user finishes the first lesson do you present them very much in their face with the option to upgrade right away since you know that that's the spot that people tend to upgrade?

Speaker B: Yeah, actually we do. I think that's one of the reason why the people mostly subscribe right after they finish. That's all first lessons.

Speaker A: So what does the premium plan actually get you compared to the free plan? Like what can you do on free versus you have to upgrade for Honestly

Speaker B: we have the vision to provide our application for everyone to empower their speaking skills and they unlock their new uh, opportunity in their life. So we are providing our service for free. But there is one limitation which they can take only one lesson per day and after the lesson they have to watch the advertisements. So if you want to avoid the advertiser ads and also you want to unlock more lessons one day you have to subscribe our premium service. But this is not the only thing which we ah are providing for our premium users. The other one is we are providing high resolution videos for our subscribers. As I mentioned before we are providing the interactive simulation. So high resolution is really important to feel they are really communicating and interacting with the people. So we are providing this high resolution video for our subscribers. And the last one is we are providing new features for every subscribers first. So every time we do relaunch the new features we usually do the A B test for new users. But we allow the use of premium users to test our new features which we don't decide to launch or not. So the premium users uh are enjoying our new features before we really launch it.

Speaker C: M. Do you have um, like a little community there then? I know I downloaded the app before. You have some kind of chat space kind of system where you can. I saw you posted updates in there uh a couple of days ago. So do you kind of use that to release new features to people as well?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we uh, we added our Community tab to make, to communicate our users, uh, and also allow the users to keep communicate each others. But at the very first time we allow the users to post on the uh, community tabs but it's really hard to managing the community posting. So we just block to community tab and then we just allow users to leave the comments on our posting. So through this community we usually communicating with our users and at the same time actually taking charge of the customer service myself. So I usually communicate with our users without any problems or any service feedback and our marketing team just communicating with our users through the social media channels like Instagram or TikTok.

Speaker C: That's great.

Speaker A: Yeah, we've, we've spoken with a lot of founders that are you know, launching or have launched B2C apps. And a big recurring theme is this community element where you can build almost a personal connection with your users, especially early users. But it sounds like, I mean you guys are at some at a reasonably big scale like how many, how many users uh, are untweeted now we just

Speaker B: passed the 5 million uh, download uh three days ago and then our active users more than about 50k. So 500k. So many users are using our application over the world.

Speaker A: Yeah. So it's interesting because the community, we've talked about this community um, thing primarily as a way to start growing when you're very small because it's like your first 10, 50, 100 users can feel much more attached to the product because they can see that the person that's working on it and everything. Everything. But you guys are still, you know, you still have a community tab now at 500,000 monthly active users. So you still feel clearly that it helps the product and it helps people feel like a part of the community.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. Because uh, unlike the other applications we uh, application will help the users to learn the languages. So I think like the people who want to learn the languages, they want to communicate each others. So I think the Community tab is really important features for us to keep communicating with our users and then binding them to in our application. So it's really hard to maintain the community tab because our users are really young, they are teenagers. So it's really hard to manage in our Community tab. But still they share about the, how they learn Korean, Japanese or Spanish each other. So they increase and also they increase themselves because we put their strength on their community id. So they encourage each others to motivate to keep their streaks and is make some kind of positive effect to practice language more and more. So yeah, there are some cons but uh, we believe that there are more pros so we are uh, trying to keep our comment intact.

Speaker A: So let's talk streaks. So how long have you had the streaks feature? Since the beginning or was it something that you added like after you had already scaled the app?

Speaker B: Yes, actually at the very first time we don't really have a stress because we really focusing onto the kind of education things because we really focusing on how we can help the users learn the language. So we are really trying a lot of content tests and then providing more content types to empower their learnings. But after that we feel like uh, mobile language learners who are using the mobile application, they really need something to keep their motivation because it's not school or it's not the secondary school. So they really don't go to the school. So they need some kind of things to keep their motivation. So there are many uh, gamifications to keep users motivation and streak is one of them. So we put the streaks. So yeah, as I know our streak has been 1,100 about 20 days because there are one users who keep the. Our whole streak since we want to.

Speaker C: Wow, uh, that's great.

Speaker A: Yes. Uh, is it your account that has the, the streak that's 1,120 days or is it a different. An actual user?

Speaker B: Uh, because uh, we really close with him because he used to kind of our intern who can help to kind of communicate the users. He is from the province of Latin America as I know. So still he's sending about his streaks. So I understood about. Because he sent me the one screenshot which he surpassed about 11. 11 days.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, that's great. Did you notice after launching the streak feature that there was an increase in kind of daily repeat usage from users? Was that like measurable in the analytics?

Speaker B: Yeah, I uh, don't really quite remember exact numbers, but as I know our daily retention, uh, rates has been increasing since we launched our streets. At least uh, 2 or 3% points, uh, being compared with before those streaks.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah, makes sense.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: How in depth is the streak feature? Is it just you have to be in there every day or is there some customizability? Is there like a streak freezes option where you can freeze a streak for the weekend or something? Like how is it architected?

Speaker B: Yeah, basically our streak is based on daily studying. So even the daily loading, they don't get the streets, they have to Complete at least one contents per day. So this is our basic policy of our streets but still we don't really discourage our users to lose the streets and then for give to learning. So we are providing the portion which is the street portion. They can revive their streets per month but we are providing one more streak for our premium users and also there are some kind of new features we are going to add within these months. We are going to profiling the news to another streak portion based on the finishing one kind of mission.

Speaker A: Okay, let's talk about that more. So what's the idea of missions? Can you explain that in some more detail?

Speaker B: Yeah, so as I mentioned Tada is really focusing on to the speaking practice and also we don't really want the people to speak 100% uh native levels. If you understanding my English I don't really speak correctly but I take communicated with m you. So we are really encouraging the users to keep speaking. So our mission to get the News 3 portion we drive the users to real life situation where they have just using three or five sentences to complete the one mission by speaking 40 languages. For example, I'm asking you to go to the cafe and order Isa Americano. Then you have to speak three or five sentences to get this Isa Americano. But uh, during this process we encourage the users to speak those things. So we provide the hint, we help the people to how to speak it so they can really easily to get the mission. So through this mission one proposal is we allow the users to keep their streets. But second thing is we want to providing more experience of speaking the languages in real life situation.

Speaker A: So how is the mission different from like your normal lesson or content unit? Because isn't it the same sort of thing where you have to do some, you know, they have to say some things back and forth to complete it?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a little bit different because in our lessons they don't they usually communicating with the teacher. Uh, so it's more like the one on one video call lessons M so they are communicating or interact with the teachers and after the lessons we provide short skits where they can speak the one or two sentences which they just learned from the lessons. Our mission is a little different because they have to recall the sentence which they used to uh, learn three days ago or one week ago. And also in this mission we allow the users to choose two or three options because in the lessons or in the skit they have to speak the sentence which is they just learn so they don't have any options. But in the missions we allow the users to choose what they want to speak.

Speaker A: Got it. And the missions, how do they get presented to the users? And like while they're in the process of doing lessons you show them the mission or is there a dedicated like tab in the app that's like this is your missions area where you can just complete missions.

Speaker B: Right now we are uh kind uh of making our product design at the moment. So the very first idea is we are going to providing this mission or when the user lost their stream. So it's going to be a tiny pop up. So we are asking them do you want to get, do you want to do some mission to get new stream portion. But uh, at the same time we already doing test this type of content in our curriculum because we want the users to provide more speaking opportunity when it tested how it's working well. So we are going to do another a B test which is which one is better to drive the users to keep their motivation or to keep their streaks.

Speaker C: Yeah. How do you plan to kind of measure that? Um are ah you kind of going to look at how many people lose their streak, how many times you show that pop up, how many times how far along people get in that mission and then how many people actually use the potion afterwards? How do you kind of measure all of those different steps?

Speaker B: Actually as I mentioned we just in the process of the product design at the moment so we didn't really want it yet. So probably we are going to analyze our older data from um, our Empreus because we are uh linked our application with Apple 2 so we understand how the users are using our mission was the three purchase.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it's a funnel basically. Right. Because it's you know you show it right at the end of the lesson and it's just like any other funnel at what, at ah, what step in the funnel how many people are dropping off? Right. So it's like how many people reject the mission entirely, how many people like start the mission but then drop off during it, how many people finish it and so on.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Makes sense. Are there any other gamification related features that you either have already in the app or that you're planning on like for example leaderboards or a kind of points system or like XP system, something like that or an energy system like Duolingo?

Speaker B: M Definitely. I think our team was really weak to providing the gamification because we don't really have any other gamification except uh streets because we believe that our content is the one of the gamification because we drive them to speak with the people in real life situations. And so we believe that these key users motivation. But we understand we still need a gamification to increase our retention rate. So probably next year we are going to adding more features like uh, as you mentioned leaderboard or XP system or even kind of customizing their own streak, uh icons. So we are going to test these kind of gamification.

Speaker A: So the other thing I wanted to talk about is marketing and user acquisition. It's interesting because in the beginning of 2024 whenever that was all of a sudden what at least maybe doubled or close to doubled the um, like lifetime revenue that you get from each new user because you figured out how to actually get them to keep their subscription right for a longer period. So that unlocks potentially a much higher budget, potentially almost double the budget to spend on paid user acquisition. So have you been scaling up since then the paid user acquisition? And like what does that look like for you guys?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's true. So uh, our LTV has been increasing more than three times higher than before. So we can make the better really huge profit by acquiring one paid users. So our team is keep increasing our paid marketing budgets. So but we don't really spend a lot because we always worried about the. We lose the money by increasing our paid marketing. But honestly we still make the revenue through our paid marketing. So we uh, keep increasing our marketing budget at the moment. But at the same time we have huge subscribing uh social media channels like Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. So we are uh, put more budgets on creating more content on our social media channels to acquire more new users.

Speaker A: So do you think more users come to the app from the organic content side or from the paid advertising?

Speaker B: At the moment about uh, 75% of our users are uh, from the organic users and only 25% of the users from the paid user.

Speaker A: Okay, let's talk about the organic. I think now that I think about it, your app in particular probably works really well with content marketing because you have to make a library of all this content for the app, right? Like for people to learn the language. So I imagine some of that you can kind of repurpose and use as social media content in a way. Is that true? Do you guys think about it that way or not? Is it totally separate?

Speaker B: Totally separate. Because we tested to using our content providing in our application for our social media but it's not working really well because I believe that our um, content in our publication, it's really attractive when they can using as a simulation. So it's quite different. But I think I'm very lucky because I have really good talented people in our team who can communicate with our users through the contents because most of our team members can produce a video and they understand about our targeting. So actually they just posting very fun videos about languages or cultures and it working really well. So uh, since we started our Instagram we just surpassed about more than 100,000 followers and for the TikTok and Instagram YouTube we have more than 300,000 uh followers. So yeah we are uh creating totally different contents for social media channels.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm looking at the Instagram now. This is really worth talking about I think because I think anyone who starts a B2C app they think like man, it would be like if we could get a social account to be this big with like this level of content, like it's game over. Because like that's what you need in, in 2025 right to acquire users. The question is like how did you get to this point? Did it take a long time where you were posting a lot, spending a lot of money to have someone be posting a lot and it was just not growing too fast or did it grow really fast? Like how was the trajectory like for. For that.

Speaker B: If we are uh coming we are. We are talking about uh how we can get these followers quickly based on when we just starting open our Instagram account. I think it's pretty quite uh m. We took quite long times because I think we spend about three or four years since we uh are uh starting our social channels. But uh, if we uh are talking about the starting point when our team is really focusing on social media channels I think we reached these numbers within the one years. So I think there was a really important thing is to whether we really understanding our followers. What does it mean is our target users who are. Who's interesting about Korea and also Korean cultures. But the tone or the kind of humor code is a little different with the Korean and our target who's living in the United States or English speaking countries. So in our team uh about 40% of our team members uh from the English uh speaking country so they used to study in the University of the uh California or they used to living in Brazil or they used to live in the United States so they know what they like, what the Taiwan should like. So I just opened uh and just ask our team members to whatever you feel you can attract the users, just do this and then it works really well. Because they have really creative and they know what kind of content they like. Because I'm not really using the Instagram myself so I don't know what kind of content is really popular in the Instagram, uh, world. They really using their own Instagram and they know what kind of content that people really want to watch it. And then when I allow them to produce any contents it works really well.

Speaker A: So basically find people who really understand the exact target user that you're looking for and then give them the free rein to just like do all sorts of like funny stuff and like kind of related stuff. Not necessarily even about language learning or like your app in particular, just about in general the interest that's kind of adjacent. So in your case, I guess the Instagram might have a lot about Korean culture generally not necessarily learning the language, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think Jason, you summarized it really well. But yeah, because if you go to the research game or YouTube channels, the popular content is not really covered about the Korean language. So usually the popular content is covered about the kind of trending things which is the Korean followers or K pop followers, uh, enjoying nowadays. So yeah, that was a really important thing to understanding the followers or understanding the target users.

Speaker A: Interesting that the uh, time frame was about a year. I mean it does like, I think with this content stuff there's no way around it that there's no like, there's no way to do it fast. Fast, like fast is a year. That's fast. And I think there's like, there's no shortcuts. You just need to have someone or more than one person who's ready to invest all their time into it and just go at it for you know, 6, 9, 12, 18 months until it gets to the point where it's like of really big size.

Speaker B: I just want to give a poll applause for our team members because none of our team members don't want to appeal on our social media channels. They really willing to participate in the social media channel product, uh, project. So I think I'm not doing any, I didn't do anything. Our whole team members are really focusing on that and then they are uh, really enjoying to creating the content and producing and communicating our users. So I think that's the reason how we can reach these numbers.

Speaker A: Was the team that does the social media, did you hire specifically to go and do that or were they people that were already on the team that you just said, okay, you used to be doing this. Now I want you to focus on the Instagram or the YouTube or whatever.

Speaker B: Um, Actually um, as, I mean as you already are in our team there are many uh, content creators in our team because we have to make some videos for our content. They already have some skill to create the uh, video content. So one day they feel like the whole team feel like, oh, we need some kind of marketing to acquire new users. But we don't really have the marketing team. Then I have the skill to make the video and some people, I have a skill to communicate with the users in English and I understand what kind of content they like. So they just do kind of as a part time, so they do their job during the work hour and after work hour they just making some kind of contents for our social media channels. So with this kind of passion and interest to comment on revisions, I think it motivates our team members to keep producing more users. And now uh, we know how we can manage our social media. So we hire some social media interns who is the college chance who is really close with our targeting users and they are uh, making the contents.

Speaker A: All right, interesting. Those people that you hire to make the content exclusively, is that, do you pay them on a like, do they, do they make more money based on how well their content does or is it just kind of an hourly rate or how is that structured?

Speaker B: Actually we are paying for the social media interns based on how many contents they make per month and we usually set up the KPI based on the how about the impression and then if they surpass their KPI we raise their uh, rate.

Speaker A: Makes sense. Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably the right way to do it. Right. Because it makes sure all the incentives are in place to produce both quantity and quality.

Speaker C: That's right, yeah. So you said you're about uh, 300,000 followers on your TikTok and about 500,000 monthly active users on the app. Is the plan to get to a million the same as what you're doing now or is there a different strategy

Speaker B: for social media channels? We're trying to using the same strategies for the applications. I think we need to uh, another strategy to acquire more users and at the same time we have to using another strategy to keep our current users. So that's why as I mentioned before, we don't really using any gamification to lock in our users. So we are uh, going to make more gamification to lock in our current users and also we are uh, providing some kind of personalized application or curation for the curriculums to boost up their language learnings and also we only using the social media channel and the paying uh, marketing to acquire new users. So we probably focus on the brand marketing or we are going to spend more budgets on the paid marketing to acquire more users.

Speaker A: When you said that the audience on social media is not only interested in learning the Korean language but uh, but more generally about Korean culture. And then also you had mentioned that in the app you have this kind of community aspect where people can feel like they're part of a community of people that are all interested in the same thing. Is there do you think that part of like your future plans for growth might be to expand a bit on that idea of community and have the app not just be like here's how to speak the language but also like I don't know, here's how to browse some Korean recipes for cooking or here's how to do other things in that cultural world. Or do you think we should stay 100% focused on the language? The app is for the language learning only.

Speaker B: I don't know how our business is going to be changing in the future but at the moment I can tell 100% sure I'm focusing on the language. Then probably there are uh, following question why then we uh, are focusing on communication or community or make some communication to communicate with our users through our social media. Our vision is to help the people to not just learn the language. We want to make them to communicate with the others to communicate with uh, each other. Language is not the only way how we can communicate each other. Even though I can speak English well, it's different story to communicate with some kind of English speaking people because I have the understanding about their interests or their culture or kind of their currently news. So with this community or our activities in social media we want the people to understand others culture and understanding others trend. So based on these understanding we, we believe the language learning can boost up and also we can help the people to communicate each other so much better than just then when they only learning the languages.

Speaker A: So the app, the long term vision for the app is to teach people how to communicate effectively or to specifically focus on the language part.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, actually probably we help the users first uh time we are uh really focusing on the language part but later on we help them to understanding the other culture because in our lesson we already teach some kind of culture aspects. For example in Korea we have some um, sentence which is we say I'm going to eat well like a bon appetit. But in English we don't really have that kind of expression right. So we really teaching why Korean people speak this sentence before eating, starting to eat. So we really help the people to understand the other culture. So now it looks like we are really only focusing on the language. But we uh, for some uh, fundamentally we help the people to understanding to communicate each other's.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting. We've talked to a couple of founders of language learning apps because there's obviously a lot of them out there, but I think that's the first I've heard of that framework of like it's not just an app to learn the language, that's primarily what it is. But actually this is an app to learn how to communicate. And to communicate you need more than language, you need also these other things. It's like cultural awareness and knowledge and stuff. So that's a really interesting angle I think and could maybe shape some design decisions for the app in the future because it's like, it's a way to differentiate I guess where you can say this is where not only you learn the mechanics of like speaking Korean, you can learn that anywhere. But here's you can learn how to feel more at home there. Feel like you can really like connect with people there in a different way.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: So on the language learning side then, if that's the focus, how does AI video generation play into this at all? Is that something that you're considering? Like do you think that in five years from now that'll be good enough that people will be like basically you can have your same app, but instead of talking to a prerecorded video, you can be talking to an AI that can go in any direction you want. You don't have to talk about a specific thing. You can talk about anything. Or is that not really the vision that you have?

Speaker B: Yeah, as I mentioned before, I can uh, sure. How the theta is going to be after five years because we don't know how the world is going to change. But at this moment we think like we don't really use the AI videos because our differentiator between the other languages and our value is to providing the experience of speaking with people. So even though AI is really developing a lot, but still when you see the AI video you feel like it's not real person. But in our application when you watch our video you feel like you are really speaking with a real person. So I think this makes very huge differentiation between our application and the other language learning application because we really hope the people to empower their speaking skills. Let's say in Korea there are many People used to learn um, Korean, uh, English for 12 years since they're kindergarten to the college because we have to learn the English. But most of Korean people can't speak the English because they are really afraid of speaking it. So if you practice with AI or some AI videos, you feel like when you really speak you have some opportunity to speak with a real person. You still afraid of speaking it because you're afraid of failing to speak correctly. But um, in our application you test a lot or you practice a lot with a real person without failing to speak correctly. But our real person encouraging you to speak and speak and speak and okay, even you're wrong. So we believe that our application empower your confidence not only language understanding, understanding in language. So at that moment we keep uh, focusing on to how we can providing more interactive or immersive videos to users. Uh, to empower the users confidence. We are really concerned about using AI dubbing system which is because all our content is producing in English. Because our main target is uh, English speaking countries. There are many people who want to learn the language from Japanese speaking countries or some Chinese speaking countries. So we are thinking about to translate all the videos by using AI dubbing system. So this is only the product we are using AI. And the second thing is you ask about the AI video, uh, is going to allow the people to kind of free talking, right? But our main target users are very beginners, beginning learners. They don't really want to free talking because they don't know what kind of they think, right. So we help them to provide some situation where they can successfully to communicate with the natives because we have to empower their confidence. So at the very first time we uh, are focusing on that. But because we have done our business the last five years, so there are some people who reached about the advanced weather already. So they asking about to provide some kind of free token. So probably we should make a kind of AI video to help the people to practice the free token with AI.

Speaker A: Cool. All right, I think that's a wrap then.

Speaker C: Okay, thanks Jeep.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Yeah, that was great.

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