* eJOY is one of the prominent edtech startups receiving investment from ThinkZone Ventures. This article is translated from the above share report e27 by Ms. Diep Bui, Co-founder & CEO of eJOY, about the journey and development direction of this startup.
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What do you do when you come across a new phrase while watching your favorite English movie or series on Netflix or Youtube? Skip and continue watching? Or will you pause the video and open the dictionary in a new tab or window to find its meaning?
No matter which option you choose, it will definitely affect your entertainment experience. And for someone whose native English is not, encountering and having to stop to look up the meaning of a word happens every day.
Diep Bui, Co-founder & CEO of eJOY, shared with e27: “Although there are many English learning applications such as Elsa (to practice pronunciation), Memrise (to support vocabulary practice), Duolingo (to learn through games) and Cambly (to learn English with native speakers), none of these applications allow students to actively absorb knowledge while having fun and enjoying their favorite content.
This is why I created eJOY. From the beginning, I set out a clear vision that an English training platform needs to immerse people in an authentic English environment where everyone can learn actively.”
Common problems of English learners
Having limited vocabulary is often the most common challenge faced by all English learners around the world. Most people's way of memorizing words is that people will write them down, create lists of new words, and memorize them without actual context. However, when applied to real-life communication or writing, learners often have difficulty remembering words that fit the context.
Meanwhile, the necessary reference point for the meaning of the word and can help learners remember it for a long time is the context. According to linguistics research, setting appropriate contexts can effectively stimulate brain areas related to learners' experiences in related fields. Therefore, students will remember it easier and longer when new words are used in a specific context.
Therefore, eJOY was born as a web browser extension, helping users learn vocabulary through the context of movies. When users turn on eJOY while watching a movie, a translation panel will appear every time the user clicks on a word or phrase in the video subtitles, or even an entire paragraph. Users can also add their own definitions and save them to the workbook with just a few clicks.
Even more interesting, saved words will be automatically interpreted with the original context in which the user saw them. Users can also use the Word Hunt feature to search for everyday conversations containing that phrase in video form.
This approach also helps change the way teachers convey lessons to students.
Mr. Nguyen Cuong, manager of the English training program at a local high school, has used eJOY for more than a year to redesign his teaching materials for 1,600 students from grades 6 to 11. After using eJOY, he shared:
"My idea is to use eJOY to help students relax and learn languages with new methods, especially during times of social distancing at home. I search for videos with related phrases on eJOY, include them in our teaching videos, and then students will watch those videos every Saturday as a way to entertain themselves without much pressure about scores or rankings."
From product validation to growth
Four years after entering the edtech market, eJOY recently raised a Seed capital round from ThinkZone Ventures to accelerate growth, after focusing on perfecting the product. This startup has been profitable since 2019 with only 10 employees in charge of departments: product, design, sales & marketing, customer care and operations.
➤ Learn more about ThinkZone Ventures' perspective with eJOY via: Portfolio Review - Why we invest in eJOY & our take on education.
Up to now (November 2021), eJOY has reached the threshold 1 million users with only very low paid marketing costs. 30% of eJOY users come from international markets. “We have users from Korea, China, Spain, Türkiye, Germany, etc. All of these users naturally found eJOY through Google, and are all people with the mindset to learn English themselves.”
Ms. Chelsea Nguyen, Investment Director of ThinkZone Ventures said: “eJOY is one of the few startups targeting the global market from the very first days.” This startup targets intermediate English learners, focuses on building good content and applying the freemium model to increase users organically through word-of-mouth.
Currently, eJOY is continuing to develop products to serve more users, especially those starting to learn English. eJOY will use part of the investment capital to test similar learning methods with other languages, and develop a mobile application version to optimize the user's learning experience.
We, ThinkZone Ventures, evaluate this as a transition from the product validation stage, to the company having achieved product - market fit, to the growth phase, requiring the founding team to adapt quickly and grow with the company.
"The English education market is a large market with many different customer segments from children, students to adults, they have different and extremely diverse desires and needs. During the growth period, with the goal of reaching more users, solving more problems, these will be completely new challenges for eJOY's co-founder team" (Ms. Chelsea Nguyen, Investment Director of ThinkZone Ventures)
Apply the "Learn to Earn" model to add new value to learning
eJOY currently has no direct competitors in the market. However, other English learning apps with different approaches as well as traditional English centers may create competitive pressure on eJOY.
"Education can make a huge change in every person's life. Whether eJOY's competitors are big companies or new startups that can do better than eJOY is not a problem that eJOY is too concerned about. The important thing is that we are all creating value for the community through education," Ms. Diep shared.
eJOY is also gradually shifting its focus to the "Learn to Earn" model. Specifically, this startup is developing a new product model that can encourage users to diligently learn on the application in exchange for digital currency or coins, which can be used to purchase eJOY learning packages. This especially brings great benefits to customers in rural areas, where there is a shortage of high-quality teachers, while buying an online foreign language course is quite expensive compared to their income.
From information obtained from current English learners' behavior, eJOY understands that there is no one approach that is suitable for all users when learning a new language. Some users may like games, some like watching videos, or some just need reading or speaking features.
The education industry is gradually participating in the process of personalizing experiences for learners. eJOY will continue to innovate its products to improve users' learning experience, Turn the learning process into an exciting process of discovering knowledge instead of just a dry and stressful learning process..
Therefore, eJOY is also having a strategy to enhance its technological potential through Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Big Data to improve personalized learning recommendations for each eJOY user, as well as build an effective learner progress assessment function.
“We are willing to “pay” more so that learners can “receive” more”. eJOY believes that changing this experience will make the learning experience even more enjoyable in the foreign language learning community.
- Diep Bui, Co-founder & CEO of eJOY.