The Ledger
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Hsu: Dropping a free tier sidesteps user motivation problems
“We also pretty critically, I think, abandoned the free version and just went straight premium. And we kind of sidestepped the motivation question that way, because we knew that there were a ton of users that really wanted to learn English and were already real…”
Voice onboarding lowers app signups but boosts trial start rates
“The interesting thing is that in general, because it's speaking based, which is a much higher barrier than just like tapping a multiple choice button, what we see is that install to signup rate is a decent amount lower. But trial start rate is higher.”
Hsu: Conversational Onboarding Should Transition from State Machines to Natural LLMs
“I think that things should move in a direction where it's much more of a natural conversation.”
Hsu: Spontaneous communication ability is almost fully orthogonal to pronunciation
“Communication and your ability to speak spontaneously and get us on a concept across, an idea across, is almost fully orthogonal to pronunciation. You can be really bad at pronunciation, but still communicate effectively.”
Hsu: Whisper outperformed human listeners on accented Korean English clips
“There were four of us in the room, we all closed our eyes, and none of us had any idea, and the model got it right. So, I mean, superhuman.”
Speak has surpassed $50 million in annual recurring revenue
“In terms of revenue scale, well over fifty million ARR.”
Hsu: Speak is the largest English learning app in South Korea
“So we're now the biggest English app in South Korea.”
Hsu: If building Speak again, he probably wouldn't build remote hub in Slovenia
“So it worked out, but if I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn't do it.”
Hsu: 80% to 90% of Tech for Superhuman AI Tutors Exists
“It was that as speech models and language models become superhuman, that would let us create an AI language tutor that would help you become fluent faster than any human could. And I think we're like 80 to 90% of the tech is here now.”
Hsu: Early Speak GPT-4 role-play users submitted questionable custom scenarios
“In 2023, when we first launched our AI role plays using GPT-IV, back then people were way more concerned about safety, right? And obviously the models now are much better at like refusals and line sharper between what's appropriate and not. But we did see a lo…”
Hsu: Speak reached several million ARR in Korea pre-Whisper
“Still a great product, by the way, you know, still grew to like several million ARR in South Korea.”
Hsu: Speak mandates AI coding tools as default engineering workflow
“We try to set a culture in the engineering team where usage of these tools as much as possible and as a default path is the expectation. And in hiring We are now explicitly asking about this a lot, thinking about what are the types of people that are going to …”
Hsu: Top Curriculum-Writing AI Agents Will Likely Rely on Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
“And I also think like in the future, a really good curriculum or lesson writer agent will probably be like reinforcement fine-tuned on a lot of our internal data as well.”
Hsu: Language learners face high psychological barrier practicing in front of humans
“It turns out there's like a really key psychological barrier there where people are just not willing to do this in front of a human, even if it's a human that is a teacher that you're paying, right?”
Hsu: Learning app users suffer decision fatigue and need guided tracks
“We realized people don't want to choose. They're already using some of their motivation on a daily basis just to open the app. They don't want to make another choice after that, right? Just tell me what to do, right? Like, you know, give me a big button and th…”
Hsu: Asian language learners seek direct human connection, not AI translators
“If you talk to All of our users in Asia. They don't want a translator. The reason that they are trying to learn English is to make themselves a better person, to connect with other people. Like, they want to be able to look you in the eye and speak English, sp…”
Hsu: Speak has 90% of product team in SF and only hires there
“Now we have 90% of our core product development team in San Francisco here. Office in Fideye, we're really only hiring here.”
Hsu: AI Gives Content and Engineering 100x Leverage While Still Requiring Review
“The way that we see it, really not just for our content team members, but also I think it's perfectly applicable to engineering is that it's leverage. It just allows you to do a hundred X in the same amount of time. We still need human review of the syllabus, …”
Hsu: Winning South Korea's crowded tutor market proves transferable PMF
“And our logic was basically, if we can really make headway and win this market that is chock full of these human competitor products and all these people that fundamentally care about fluency, then we probably have something pretty real and strong PMF that we …”
Hsu: The Frontier of Language Fluency Is Highly Jagged Across Contexts
“You might be really good at that, but be completely unable to, like, talk about your family, right? So the frontier of fluency is very jagged, but”
Hsu: Speak focuses on casual conversational language over textbook English
“That's one of our fundamental tenets, which is that we don't teach textbook English or textbook language. Like we try very hard to teach Gen Z slang. We don't go quite that far, but slaking. We try to teach Very casual conversational language that is actually …”
Hsu: Speak runs agentic LLM pipeline to generate curricula and lessons
“We have a tutor agent, we have a curriculum writing agent, we have a giant LM based pipeline that creates curriculum, scaffolds it in the right way, writes the lessons themselves.”
Speak Building 'Speak Score' Aggregating Fluency Across Knowledge Graphs
“There are aspects of it that are live and it's a very sort of multidimensional system where we think of it as there are many aspects of fluency, right? There's many sub scores and we have a few of them that are currently live and we're actively developing othe…”
Hsu: Speak's demographic sweet spot in Korea is 25-45 white-collar professionals
“We have a sweet spot in Korea. It's like, 25 to 45, more professional, more white collar, but it's very, it's like a very long tail on either side.”
Speak's pronunciation coach fine-tunes Meta's wav2vec on proprietary phonetic transcripts
“We have for English only right now, a pronunciation coach that is basically like a fine-tuned version of WaveDeVec, which is a meta model, but we basically fine-tune it on a bunch of our own phonetic transcripts, like fine-tuned data.”
Hsu: Speak Summarizes User Onboarding Audio into Structured Goals via Secondary LLMs
“The way it works is the tutor will ask you some sort of question, like, what are your goals around learning English or the language? And then we will basically use a separate LM prompt to summarize. So it's not the, like, full transcript for what you said that…”
Speak has no OpenAI Realtime API features in production due to cost
“We are, In the process of building a variety of experiences on top of the real-time API, I want to clarify that actually nothing is in production yet, mostly for price reasons, frankly.”
Hsu: Speak Built All Curriculum In-House via Proprietary 'Speak Method'
“Another thing we did that I forgot to mention was we decided we needed to fully own all the content. So the way that we teach all in-house, all sort of thought from first principles, We built this thing called the speak method, which is basically like a pedago…”
Hsu: Speak Is Building a Real-Time Voice Platform for Advanced Lessons
“We're actively building out a real-time voice platform that we can build a lot of more verticalized specific lesson experiences on top of that I'm super, super excited about. I don't think they're going to replace our current lessons. They're going to be more …”
Hsu: Speak runs custom ASR for core loops alongside Whisper for tutoring
“There's many other sort of product surfaces within the app today that are more LM powered, where it's more open-ended, real tutoring, where we actually give you feedback on what you said in the semantics and so on. So that stuff is more like whisper powered, m…”
Hsu: Early Korean users were shocked Speak was an American company
“We had a lot of reports from users pretty early on that they were shocked that it was an American company.”
Hsu: Speak achieved product-market fit in South Korea around 2019-2020
“Before 20, 22, when Whisper came out, when ChatGPT came out in the years, Before that, you know, like roughly two to three years is when we feel like we found PMF in South Korea and then started growing still only in that market, still only teaching English.”