(Ep 36) TOUCAN -> Learning new languages reimagined 📖

Taylor Nieman | Co-Founder & CEO

Dec 22, 2020

Hey friends,

Back again with another edition of The Founder recap - this is Episode 36. If you’re new here, my goal is to give you a quick synopsis of what got me thinking from this week’s episode of The Founder Podcast in 5 minutes or less.

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And who am I?

I’m Kallaway - a future founder trying to get some answers before I jump in the ball pit myself.

Let’s get it.

This Week’s Episode (Ep 36) 📖

Guest -> Taylor Nieman, Co-Founder & CEO of Toucan

Mission -> Toucan’s mission is to enable users to learn new languages while they’re browsing the internet.

Episode available on -> Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website

In this episode we talk with Taylor about…

🏆 Why Toucan is the best way to learn a new language

🤝 Building brand partnerships with companies like Nike, Spotify, Uber & Delta

⌨️ How to decide if you should learn how to code

🎪 Why Chrome extensions are a massive untapped opportunity

💰 Toucan’s business model

Summary 🔍

What is Toucan and how did Taylor get started?

Taylor was born in Los Angeles and spent a lot of her time growing up playing competitive volleyball on a track for the Olympics.

She eventually wound up at Cornell for school and after trying her hand in a couple of different fields, identified tech as an area she wanted to spend more time.

She went to night school at YouTube University and taught herself how to code so she could bring her own ideas to life.

After graduating from Cornell and returning to Los Angeles, she joined Headspace and a number of other tech companies including Pop and Fair, running business development and partnerships at each.

Along the way she launched several of her own projects, including Simba, an app to connect dog owners with each other and Lancer, a Glassdoor for freelancers.

While those projects didn’t pan out, her latest and most promising is on a roll. That project turned into a rapidly growing company called Toucan.

Today at Toucan, Taylor and her team have created a free browser extension to revolutionize the way you learn new languages.

Once installed and enabled, you simply pick the language you want to learn (either Spanish, French, German, Italian or Portuguese) and then the magic starts to happens.

As you browse Google, scroll through Twitter or interact with other websites, Toucan will change some of the words from English to your desired language.

As you continue using Toucan, the words will get harder and harder as you level up your fluency. They’ve also just started rolling out mini games that you can play while in Wikipedia, which provide a more direct way to practice your skills.

The coolest part is that language is just the beginning – Toucan was built as a disruptive learning platform that could be applied to lots of other disciplines.

Here’s why I’m a fan and excited about the future for Toucan:

Learning languages is just the beginning. While Toucan focused on language learning because it’s a massive opportunity and market, it’s easy to see how they could spin up a Toucan-like product for other categories. Imagine scrolling through ESPN and then instead of clicking on a linked word to take you to another article (not an ideal experience), you could hover over that word and a video or game could pop-up right on that page, giving you access to additional complementary content to satisfy your curiosity. I don’t believe Toucan is a language company. I think they’re a learning company that is in the first inning of what is possible.

Taylor’s Startup Manifesto 📜

What’s a Startup Manifesto?

At the end of every episode, I ask all of my founder guests the same question:

If you had to write a Startup Manifesto with 5 of the most important key lessons or pitfalls to avoid when starting out, what would they be?

Here’s what Taylor had to say:

Picking your Co-Founders is critical. It’s so important to build the right team at the beginning. There’s just so much to do in a startup and almost too much to do by yourself. Being able to bounce things off and get feedback from your Co-Founders is critical.
Decide early on if you want to bootstrap or fundraise. They are very different but both can be extremely successful.
Team makes or breaks you. If you’re doing something right, there’s going to be copycats in the market. Your company can out-execute anyone if you have the right team in place. If you have one asshole on the team it may sour everything so be super conscious when hiring.
Leverage your mentors. A lot of strategic angel investors are also our mentors. They’ve been through this already and have so many learnings to share about the challenges we’re facing. Make sure to leverage them.
Distribution is everything. You could perfect your product all day, but if you don’t figure out how to get it in the hands of people, it’s not going to work.

What Got Me Thinking From the Episode 🤔

After reflecting on my conversation with Taylor, here’s something that really got my wheels spinning:

The importance of distribution 👍🏽

Toucan is a revolutionary language learning product that has the chance to become a major factor in how users learn anything across the internet.

I think the genius in their solution isn’t the product itself (although that is quite good), it’s the distribution.

When a maker/founder/creator launches a new website/app, they’re often making two critical, sometimes fatal, assumptions:

The consumer will be willing to take the time to learn how to use my product
The consumer is consistently going to choose to spend their time using my product over any “competitor”

The best products are ones that are (1) super easy to learn and (2) either solve an unavoidable need (like Uber) or are significantly better and more personalized than any other solution for the problem (like Spotify). The latter leads to consistent usage overtime.

If you think about the legacy options for learning a new language (pre-Toucan):

You could enroll in a class at a local school or community college (this costs money and takes lots of time)
You could buy a one-way ticket to a country that speaks that language natively and try to immerse yourself (likely the most effective option but unrealistic for most people)
You could use an app like Duolingo, Rosetta Stone or Babbel

Let’s analyze the third option.

For my two critical user assumptions above, number 1 (ease of use) is fairly true here. Overtime, Duolingo and others have built a pretty seamless user experience that makes it easy for users to learn new languages if they put in the time.

But on the second point, those solutions require you to open their app and actively use it in order to learn. That means you have to choose Duolingo over Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, friends, family, etc.

And that has traditionally been the problem with most of the language learning apps on the market. People really want to learn new languages, but they churn out at an insane rate because learning languages isn’t high enough on their totem pole of priorities.

Enter Toucan.

What they did, is try to build an experience on top of something you already do - use the internet.

You’re already Googling 50+ times a day. You’re already using Facebook and Twitter for hours each day. You’re already reading blogs and exploring your favorite sites consistently as well.

Why not give you a little language practice embedded in that experience? That means when you’re online you’re learning, and when you stop, you don’t have to open a separate app that you don’t want to open.

By taking this approach, Toucan’s distribution went from only the people that downloaded and consistently opened their app, to anyone that has downloaded (once) their Chrome extension and then uses the internet.

Toucan’s growth is exploding and it makes sense why - they are retaining users much more effectively because they didn’t force consumers to choose them over something else they love.

The broader point, as Taylor put it in our conversation, is that figuring out distribution is everything.

I’ve heard this from several founders so I’m not sure who to attribute the original quote to, but it’s effectively, “First time founders focus on the product. Second time founders focus on the distribution.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Outside of Toucan, what’s another example of a favorite company that perfected their distribution?

Wrapping it Up 📕

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