Learning a new language just got interesting
‘The beauty of Learnit is the elegance. It tells you what the curriculum for the day is and then silently just hangs around in the background waiting for that moment that your attention wanders and you’re ready for another dose.’
“LearnItLists is a new way to learn a language. Originally from the UK, Nicola and her husband
built this widget to help teach themselves Czech. The couple actually lives in and is restoring an old farmhouse outside of the city and they spend their mornings coding and their evenings digging up unexploded ordnance in the Czech country-side. They also took part in the Elevator Pitch-off.”
(and later could be found drunkenly berating pre Y2K VCs. Techcrunch.com May 23, 2008)
Our video escapade into Monty Python territory, vying for a Being Digital ticket. TechCrunch UK May 27, 2008.
Our first TechCrunch UK coverage… a photo from the TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup, TechCrunch UK May 23, 2008.
Hmm… really must now put together that press release about the cat in our pitch video.
What an experience. It was great to have the opportunity to present in front of 150+ people - our first outing with the learnit concept. I was gutted because we ran out of time and missed some important facts - like we only had the idea on the 30th January this year.
I also completely fluffed the marketing question. What I should have said… something along the lines of… yes we have a very web 2.0 strategy - which is about to be published as a case study in a marketing textbook, comprising of all the usual web 2.0 suspects. Our offline strategy will be implemented when we have a budget. But that’s not what I said.
I’m very glad that Mike Butcher (aka the butcher) wasn’t one of our questioners. He was tough.
ps we also experienced dinner 2.0 - an interesting concept - micro portions served on cocktail sticks - table free. Still a bit beta - they seem to have a few bugs to iron out.
Learnit helps you learning a language
Do you spend more time on Facebook than watching TV?
Learnit has 11,000 registered users
Learnit seems to be a widget network
Feels good to see a woman presenting a project
Learnit is a multinational project: Czech republic + UK
With 50 million people they will do an IPO
Do they have a marketing plan?
Their widget is not finished yet
This girl is good: secure and seems to love her project
They want to be the best Facebook app for learning a language
They will use viral marketing
I love numerical coincidence. When we switched over from the first version of the widget, to the second, the user tally stood at 11111. We have now pressed the reset button - the table on the home page shows registrations only on the new widget, not the first prototype.
So far, the time investment into the learnit widget has been 2100+ hours. We have had visitors from 167 countries (large and telling gaps from Central Africa and various totalitarian regimes). One in ten visitors register on the widget (a figure with room for improvement). The prototype has been viewed over half a million times, by 112k unique visitors, who spent on average 8 minutes on the site.
We have have not officially launched the new version of the widget. We still need to add the write & share sections, but it has bedded in pretty well. We’ve not had many reported bugs. On average, each visitor has come to the site six times in the last 3 weeks, and stayed for 8 minutes. We like sticky.
I’m made up that we’ve won second place in the MyVox developer challenge - against some heavy competition.
What was so great about this was that they gave us a hard deadline that we had to meet. And we worked nights, days and weekends to get our entry in. It really drove us forward.
We’ve just heard that we’ve been invited to Barcelona to present the learnit widget to a panel of experts at startup 2.0 2008. This is a competition to to promote and reward the European startups that work in the field of 2.0 technologies.
We have immediately accepted the invitation and are now planning our 5 minute presentation - that’s not a lot of time! It’s all very exciting and is definitely a distraction from our maxed out credit cards (we’re so web 2.0 startup!).
The finalists are as follows:
It should be a great meeting in Barcelona - and a fantastic opportunity to network with other startups who are in the same boat. Can’t wait.
We are trying out a new widget platform called Clearspring, this contains a ‘Get & Share’ option at the bottom of the widget which will create code to add the widget to loads of different platforms (iGoogle, Facebook, Netvibes, Blogger and loads more). This will replace the main widget on our site as soon as we work out how to get rid of the annoying white box at startup!
