The Product:
Website: https://www.ideogram.world/
What is It?
Ideogram allows you to upload content in your target language (PDF files) where you can detect word boundaries, click unknown words and view additional information for those words - definitions, example sentences, pronunciation, and more language dependent info like stroke order (ex. Chinese) and conjugations (ex. Spanish).
Word boundary detection is a much bigger deal for language like Chinese and Japanese where boundaries are more ambiguous (aka not space delineated like English).
Ideogram supports a total of 12 languages:
Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Chinese, Japanese
I studied Spanish and Chinese throughout highschool/college and the biggest painpoint I found was how to figure out what a word meant quickly. For Chinese this was particularly painful as it's hard to know where the words are. But overall it's a pretty manual process that takes a couple minutes at least, and many times a single site doesn't give you all the info you may want.
Market?
K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment -> 10.6 Million
College Foreign Language Enrollment -> 1.2 Million
Of course there are a couple of caveats:
The language learning space is an extremely competitive niche, so there are several companies that are tangentially related to what I'm trying to do. Ideogram is NOT designed to teach you a language. It is a tool that is designed to be used in conjunction with some sort of guided learning.
Chrome Extensions:
Stage
Bootstrapped early stage, pretty much have an MVP and want to get more feedback
Customer Acquisition Strategy
Reaching out to former teachers/professors and schools in my local area to get feedback and hear what other use cases users may want.
Why Us
Ideogram aims to provide more in depth supporting information than our competitors with a better experience. Some competitors only give definitions/translations which leaves me needing search the internet for more info. Many competitors also don't have a great UI/UX and we think that can be a great way to differentiate ourselves. I will say that front end development is not my strong suit but it can definitely be a future differentiation if things go well enough to get to that point.
Ideogram also has the flexibility to integrate more easily with additional tools/services compared to a targeted solution like a chrome extension. While Ideogram is pretty much only a textbook assistant at the moment, you can imagine future integrations with google classroom/google drive and more features like vocab lists/flashcards/etc to increase the value of the product.
Website: https://www.ideogram.world/
What is It?
Ideogram allows you to upload content in your target language (PDF files) where you can detect word boundaries, click unknown words and view additional information for those words - definitions, example sentences, pronunciation, and more language dependent info like stroke order (ex. Chinese) and conjugations (ex. Spanish).
Word boundary detection is a much bigger deal for language like Chinese and Japanese where boundaries are more ambiguous (aka not space delineated like English).
Ideogram supports a total of 12 languages:
Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Chinese, Japanese
I studied Spanish and Chinese throughout highschool/college and the biggest painpoint I found was how to figure out what a word meant quickly. For Chinese this was particularly painful as it's hard to know where the words are. But overall it's a pretty manual process that takes a couple minutes at least, and many times a single site doesn't give you all the info you may want.
Market?
K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment -> 10.6 Million
College Foreign Language Enrollment -> 1.2 Million
Of course there are a couple of caveats:
- Ideogram supports a subset of all offered foreign languages
- These stats don't capture people studying foreign languages outside of K-12 or college
- There are foreign language students outside of the US
The language learning space is an extremely competitive niche, so there are several companies that are tangentially related to what I'm trying to do. Ideogram is NOT designed to teach you a language. It is a tool that is designed to be used in conjunction with some sort of guided learning.
Chrome Extensions:
- Google Translate
- ReadLang
- a couple others
Stage
Bootstrapped early stage, pretty much have an MVP and want to get more feedback
Customer Acquisition Strategy
Reaching out to former teachers/professors and schools in my local area to get feedback and hear what other use cases users may want.
Why Us
Ideogram aims to provide more in depth supporting information than our competitors with a better experience. Some competitors only give definitions/translations which leaves me needing search the internet for more info. Many competitors also don't have a great UI/UX and we think that can be a great way to differentiate ourselves. I will say that front end development is not my strong suit but it can definitely be a future differentiation if things go well enough to get to that point.
Ideogram also has the flexibility to integrate more easily with additional tools/services compared to a targeted solution like a chrome extension. While Ideogram is pretty much only a textbook assistant at the moment, you can imagine future integrations with google classroom/google drive and more features like vocab lists/flashcards/etc to increase the value of the product.