Kippy - Personal Language Tutor

Accelerate your path to fluency in a new language by practicing speaking as if you would with a real language tutor.

Stats as of 9th March 2024

World-wide launch: December 2023
Downloads: 11,100
MAU: 3,400
MMR: $4,600 (up 128% last 30 days)

Phase 1: Focus on Non-English speaking freelancers who can 3x their earning potential if they speak confidently with their clients.

Phase 2: Focus on people who already use human tutors so they can reduce or replace them.

Phase 3: Global reach to all advanced learners who have outgrown existing apps.

Phase 4: Add features for beginners to become a one stop shop to learn a language, as if you hired a tutor to teach you from the beginning.

Current learning methods are prescripted, repetitive and boring (despite gamification) and are missing the key element of language learning - speaking.

If you have learned a language in the past, you will forget it and therefore waste your time and money that you have invested.

The only option to practice speaking while learning is to pay a tutor ($20-$60/h)

With Kippy, you get engaging and fun conversations about things you personally like. It provides guidance as well as checks your pronunciation; for a fraction of the cost.

Kippy is a tutor for learners who already know the basics of a language and need to practice speaking to become fluent, or people who have learned a language in the past but forgot it because of lack of practice (and wasted the time and money they spent).

New comers:
Praktika.ai
Speak
Loora
Univerbal

Older players:
Duolingo
ELSA

At this stage, the competitive landscape is evolving rapidly. Neither of the competitors have any moat other than their user base, capital and data fr om their operation.

Kippy has a special feature (not yet released) wh ere you can discuss up-to-date events that are related to your interest. Imagine a new episode of a TV series has aired. An hour later you get notification "John, did you see what Jessie did in the latest episode of Breaking Bad? Let's talk about it" and you talk in your language of choice about what interests you.

Prototype of version for Kids is being tested, too, based on the feedback from users who introduced Kippy to their kids. This is potentially untapped market.

Consumer price $50-$80/year (introductory price until product matures).
Competitors charge up to $200/year.

Major cost:
- Speech recognition
- Speech synthesis
- AI / Language Model API

With the investment we can start work on custom language model and synthesis that can run on-device and reduce the cost close to zero (removing cost of AI/LLM, Speech to Text and Text To Speech and only covering CDN and server that hosts user accounts).

It's estimated this will happen within 2-3 years therefore grabbing as much market is important.

Model: Freemium
Channel: AppStore (future channels are Android, Web)

Current gross profit margin is about 90% (variable cost is infrastructure only - see above).

30% Product Development
15% Infrastructure
25% Research (to be able quickly adapt for changes in AI models)
30% Marketing (Paid Acquisition, Influencer parnership, Organic content)

Depends on what the investors bring to the table other than money, i.e. partnerships from within their portfolio.

Breakthrough in LLM performance can mean that the IP created in apps like these will simply be obsolete if the LLM is close to "sentient human" and can very deeply understand context and content, rather than just trying to complete content.