Show HN: Hotpot, a TikTok for learning English like a native speaker | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hotpot, a TikTok for learning English like a native speaker

hotpotenglish.com

7 pointstianshuo7 comments

We're a small team making the next-gen of language learning app. Instead of "learning a language through memorizing words and grammar rules", we help children acquire fluency by watching short videos of people speaking the language in real-life situations - as if they were living in a native speaking country. We need to build and curate a huge library of short videos, in a variety of situations, topics, and difficulty levels, so we need your help making videos of everyday speech that is understandable for English learners (think simple Wikipedia). Our target audience is kids and teenagers, and we aim to build a personalized learning experience for learners with different proficiency levels and interests. So we are giving out prizes everyday to encourage engaging and educational videos, and when we have enough content for language learners, we will launch our learning app globally.

> when we have enough content for language learners, we will launch our learning app globally.

You have a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there.

Before you launch, few people will hear about you and even fewer will contribute content. But without content, your app isn't attractive enough. And the people it's most likely to attract are English learners, not English speakers.

I think you could somewhat get yourself out of this by becoming a multi-sided marketplace. E.g. Chinese users who want to learn English upload videos in Chinese, which unlocks English content for them. Those videos then get used on a site for people who want to learn Chinese. (hotpotchinese.com is already taken, but the maximally generic hotpotlanguages.com apparently isn't.) That way, network effects are in your favor.

It won't get you across the initial hurdle of not having enough content to launch at all, but you can try to get the flywheel going by providing content in your native language. I think that'll be faster than waiting for people to participate in this contest. (But maybe I'm wrong about that. How many videos did you get so far?)

I don't think a chicken/egg farm avoids the chicken/egg problem. The problem is achieving market liquidity. The primary rationale for uploading Chinese content is the expectation that there will be English content. There is almost certainly asymmetry between those wishing to learn English versus Chinese.

To me, the way to get content is to pay for it. If there is not money for that, the business is under-capitalized (most are). If it doesn't make economic sense to pay for content, then the business itself probably isn't economically viable...it simply cannot achieve the imagined state where there is a market on which to charge rents.

We are paying for good quality content, but we have a problem in promoting our contest. Do you have any good ideas on ways of finding young people who could be interested?

Find them one at a time.

Tried that before, doesn't work. The problem is that people who learn foreign languages and people who are good at making videos are two total different groups. We've done this before, got ten thousands of videos, but the content was too random, too difficult for most learners and video quality was not good enough, and we're trying it again as a contest, where what creators can say are semi-restricted as video tasks.

Too bad it didn't work out, but props to you for not giving up. Good luck with the contest approach!

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