Full transcript: Bernhard Niesner on London Real
0:00 London Real promo: In London, technology is the silicone roundabout. Introducing a new talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. Silicon Real. Each week, interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, financial technologies, accelerators and incubators in an exciting three-person format. Learn about the people behind the innovation. Locally filmed, locally sourced.
0:34 Silicon Real. It’s about the people.
0:37 Brian Rose: This is Silicon Real, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I’m Brian Rose. I also host London Real. It’s a similar setup, same studio. We get three people in the room try to figure out what the hell is going on. This week we had Neil Bill deGrasse Tyson, the rock and roll astronomer.
1:00 We’ve had Tim Ferriss from the 4-Hour Everything. We’ve had people like Max Kaiser in here from Russia today. So check that out if you want. But today we’re here to talk about tech. My co-host is entrepreneur Colin Pyle, who’s run in coffee companies, language learning schools, very appropriate for today.
1:18 You just came back from a European tour. What’s going on?
1:21 Colin Pyle: Yeah. Flying around trying to sort of lock down that supply chain for the coffee. So, you know, spending some time in northern Italy and Naples and in Germany, so it’s hard, but it’s coming along.
1:33 It’s not a, you know, taking three beans from completely different places in the world, bringing them all together, and then roasting them, grinding them, encapsulating them and having them arrive at your door is much more difficult than I am.
1:45 Brian Rose: And it’s tougher than you thought it was going to be.
1:47 Colin Pyle: Way tougher. Okay. But we’re getting it though, yeah.
1:50 Brian Rose: That’s what makes a good entrepreneur is they don’t know what they’re going to get into. Or they never would have done it, right?
1:56 Colin Pyle: Yeah, sometimes going in blind is the only way to go in.
1:58 Brian Rose: Yeah, definitely. Before we get to our guests, I just wanted to give a shout out to TaskRabbit, who are sponsoring this episode.
2:04 They’re an online marketplace, allows people to outsource small jobs to people in their neighborhood. They just got to London a few months ago. We had Lauren Sherman on, their head of community. She was awesome, great show if you wanna pick that up. But they’re doing, not only, you can get people to clean your house and all this other stuff, but they also run a lot of our backend operations at Silicon Real.
2:22 Colin Pyle: Yeah, they’re helping us so much right now. They’re really good. Yeah, since coffee’s sort of gone nuts, I’ve just been so busy. So yeah, it’s not just tasks, like just easy tasks, she’s really cranking it out.
2:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, they’ve got people, Bonnie’s really hooking us up.
2:35 So if you want to give them a try, you can use the code REAL25 and get 25 pounds. That’s like three hours of work and they’ll literally do anything. Robin from Datch had them clean after one of their company parties. They’ll go get your coffee. They might even give you a foot massage.
2:48 I don’t even know. That’s none of my business, but if you want to check it out, it’s code REAL25 and it’s all good. Thanks to them. Let’s get on with the show. Our guest today is Mr. Bernhard Niesner, who is the founder and CEO of Busu, which is the world’s largest social network for language learning.
3:05 I think you have more than 35 million users.
3:07 Bernhard Niesner: It’s probably more now. 40 million now.
3:09 Brian Rose: 40 million. Are you at like 50,000 a day or 40,000 a day?
3:12 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah, around between 40,000, 50,000 new signups a day.
3:15 Brian Rose: Some big numbers. Very big numbers. You guys are looking to revolutionize the way people learn languages via the use of tech yeah I believe you raised three and a half million in series a around 2012 yes you’re right near us and in the in the roundabout you also mentor at telephonic weira we love weira we’ve had a bunch of weira companies in here we had simon devinshare in here that man is tall he is very tall so we love those people bernard welcome to silicon real
3:44 Bernhard Niesner: thanks a lot it’s a pleasure to be here
3:46 Brian Rose: thank you so much for being here you know Busu is a language that’s spoken in Cameroon, right exactly by eight people. Is that about right?
3:54 Bernhard Niesner: That’s about right
3:56 Brian Rose: What why that name what are you trying to say?
3:58 Bernhard Niesner: Well, actually so when we started the company We were always looking for a name and we had this idea why we don’t call the company By a language, which is on the verge of extinction, you know, there are 6,000 languages out there and half of them are about to extinct So we went through the list of the UNESCO which publishes the languages which are you know a close to extinction and we like to sue and the dot-com was still available so we went for that there you go is there a camera on like Doc Cameron as well I mean is there like a URL that I suppose but what we did in in in 2011 we actually felt that okay it’s good that we a code like nearly extinct language but we should be doing
4:40 Something for this language as well so we send our crazy Spanish creative agency, La Despenza, to Cameroon to actually find those eight people, and they went off for I think a month. It was quite logistically complicated because they only speak Spanish, so we either translated from Spanish to English, from English to a local language, and then from another local language to Buzu, and they went like two weeks into the forest. The Buzu people live close to the Nigerian border, and we did a very cool viral video which which you can find on YouTube.
5:13 So if you go to buzu.com slash safe buzu, you actually see those eight people dancing to a very cool buzu song.
5:20 Brian Rose: Wow, so can you actually learn buzu on buzu?
5:23 Bernhard Niesner: Yes, so the thing is that now we worked there together with a linguist and we recorded some of the buzu language and it’s probably the only record of this language at all available. And we used the same technology, methodology of how we teach English or Spanish or French to teach buzu. So you can learn what’s your name, you can order a beer in Busu, so we have a few phrases on our website which you can learn in Busu.
5:49 Brian Rose: Wow. I was wondering if you could take us through the evolution of this company. I mean, you know, you’re no spring chicken for Busu, you’ve been there over six years, right?
5:58 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah, exactly. Time flies.
5:59 Brian Rose: It’s nice to see, because a lot of people think a startup is all about the quick flip after two years, and I think I saw a video where you were saying, if you go in for the quick flip, then you’ll never get it, because those aren’t the kind of people that build big companies. Exactly. Because you have to want to do it. But walk us through, what has Busu done and what are you looking to do in the future? Yeah.
6:17 Bernhard Niesner: So basically, we started the company in 2008 after doing an MBA at IE Business School. So I was before in management consulting, wanted to have a break of that, went to do an MBA at this business school and met there my co-founder Adrian, who has a technological background. So at the random network event, we met up there. he had this idea of language learning online, I was looking for a team to join and in the business school there was quite a strong focus on entrepreneurship. So basically throughout the MBA you were supposed to write business plans and develop the idea and we met throughout the year and liked really this idea of how we can revolutionize the way people learn languages because if you face it over the last 10 years the only real innovation in language learning had been maybe a CD-ROM. The rest were always learning a language exactly the same. So We felt, especially at that time, Facebook was coming strongly into Europe, if there is a smart way of using technology and this whole concept of a social community to learn languages.
7:17 So, we developed the concept as part of our MBA, pitched it at the end, didn’t get a very good grade on that, but still decided to go forward and whereas all our colleagues went to London to become bankers for Goldman Sachs and G.P. Morgan, we decided to stay in Spain and founded the company right after graduation. So in 2008, we founded the company, we developed the business with a very small team. So as it was 2008 and 2009, it was quite difficult to raise funds because it was right in the middle of the Lehman brother crisis.
7:53 So a lot of the funds we met at that time didn’t want to give us the money. So we decided, okay, we just do it with our own money and went on the bootstrap trip. So we were only a team of four or five people And very lean approach, always very careful of where we’re spending our money. And we grew the business with a few angel rounds, two then nearly 10, 15, 20 million users. And in 2012, when actually the whole economic situation in Spain wasn’t that great, big economic crisis, strikes on the streets, it was not a very good environment to have a high-growth start-up.
8:29 We decided to exchange the sunny tapas for the rainy pines and took the whole company and the whole team and moved them over to London.
8:38 Colin Pyle: After your financing round?
8:39 Bernhard Niesner: After the financing round, exactly. Don’t do it before, because otherwise it’s too expensive.
8:45 Colin Pyle: Was that an obvious move?
8:47 Something that everyone was thinking you had to or because it must be a comfortable hanging out in Madrid. Yeah. You got everything you want.
8:53 Bernhard Niesner: Well, that’s the thing. Like with hindsight, we should have done it a few years earlier.
8:57 Believe you would be now in a complete different situation if you had moved early on. So we’re really trying to scale the business and to scale our team. But I think that’s a big difference. And now getting to know the London tech scene also more, you realize how wonderful this ecosystem is, how big it is, how much talent you have in this city. And that’s not easy to replicate. There are probably a few places in the world and obviously in the US and maybe in Israel and then London and maybe a bit in Berlin. But in all the other countries, it’s very difficult to replicate such an ecosystem because you might have only maybe 10 startups which have come to a considerable size whereas here in London you might have 50 or even 100 which are bigger and therefore you can get access to a lot of knowledge. So we tried to do it in Madrid, couldn’t find you know iOS developer, Android developers, their knowledge wasn’t there at that time. Everyone was studying law or business and you maybe had only two or three other startups doing something in that area. So we said, let’s just move it out. We considered New York, we considered Berlin, and we considered London. And at the end of the day, we came out with London as a clear winner and took this decision, which obviously was an important one. We cut down completely operations, took the team of around 10 people, had a big moving van with over 200 moving boxes. Everyone had to find new apartments. Some people took their
10:21 Kids from the kindergarten, from Madrid to one here in London, we had to set up our operations completely from scratch, so no office, no liars, no tax advisors, no, you know, it was really literally beginning nearly from scratch just as a website which was still up and running and a few bunch of very motivated people and then here we are.
10:39 Colin Pyle: That’s a story. That’s a good one. That’s a real story. Now, New York really wouldn’t have been practical because you couldn’t have got the visas for those ten people.
10:48 Bernhard Niesner: Exactly. It’s also a pain in the ass to move a European entity into the United States, especially if you are at the latest stage and have already a certain IP. So moving within Europe is okay, New York would have done at the end, we discarded it because of that.
11:04 Brian Rose: Okay. That’s a great story.
11:06 Just to finish off my question, what is the plans for the future as in you’re at 40 million users now, what do you want to be or where can you realistically?
11:14 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah. So we’re talking about the market, which is probably around 250 billion dollars big and where there’s a billion people out there who are learning English, which is going to be 2 billion by 2020. It’s a massive market. If you live in an English-speaking country, you’re obviously not necessarily that exposed to this whole idea of language learning, because asking the question, how many languages do you guys…
11:35 Everyone has to join your party, right? Exactly. So if you live in Austria, like myself, or in Spain, everyone somehow has to learn English, and I learned four languages in total. So it’s kind of a very known concept, and it’s part of your life. And the same applies, obviously, to all these emerging markets.
11:52 So we’re growing massively in Brazil, massively in Russia, in China, talking about countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, where language learning is not a hobby, but it’s a route to success. The taxi driver in Rio de Janeiro, with the upcoming World Cup and Olympics, knows perfectly that he will make more money if he just speaks a few words in English. He doesn’t need to be able to read Shakespeare. It just needs to be able to bring someone to the airport and say a few numbers in English.
12:18 And that’s the core motivation of those people. And that combines with growth in mobile penetration. So people suddenly getting access to mobile devices, especially smartphones. In Brazil, they have very strong mobile smartphone penetration. And also getting access to credit cards or payment methods just creates a massive change for this industry.
12:39 So it’s a huge market and it’s growing at a tremendous speed. And what we want to be is we not just want to create offline language learning replicated and do it online. We want to make sure that the way you learn a language is simply much easier and more efficient if you do it with Boozoo. So we’re currently working a lot on the product itself. We realized that motivation is one of the key obstacles to learn a language.
13:05 It’s not necessarily affordability. it’s not necessarily access to the content because now people more and more can get access to it. It’s really about keeping the people motivated because we’re competing against the Candy Crush and the Facebooks and the Twitters. So we wanna make sure that language learning is so fun and engaging that people actually stick with it. And by that advance.
13:26 So we wanna do is to make it much more motivational and engaging, but we’re also working on an adaptive learning system which easily recognizes what kind of level you have, realizes what’s your objective in the level, in the language, visualizes this goal setting, like we all know from running apps or the jaw bones of improving life and the whole idea of quantifying yourself, using that for education and making sure that the content that we show to you is important to you and is interesting for you. So also adapt the content according to your specific needs. And if you’re achieving that, then we should be able to create a system you simply can cut down maybe on 30% of acquisition time for foreign language as opposed to other materials.
14:11 Brian Rose: Colin, you spent some time in this space. Yeah. You had the whole Mandarin language school, right?
14:17 Colin Pyle: Yeah. Well, I did the Mandarin language school and then, you know, invest in Lingos now and sort of on the board. Lingos is much more offline learning. So we do zero online learning. We just connect people offline.
14:30 Brian Rose: In the same geographic space.
14:32 Colin Pyle: Yeah. But, you know, Looking at Busu, it’s just it’s incredible. I guess you have so much data You know, where are people learning languages? What language are they learning? Is it majority on mobile?
14:44 Is it on the web? Maybe you could just elaborate on some of those points
14:48 Bernhard Niesner: So that’s the thing like at the moment we’re turning more and more into mobile companies And when we started it was pure web and then in 2008 again The iPhones started to come out there and be more used to now we grow 50% more on mobile devices than on web We also have more active users on mobile than web, because again, in emerging markets, people might have actually more a mobile device than a desktop at home. And second, it’s just the perfect tool for this quick action of learning once you’re on the bus, on the tube, you know, when you have to spare time.
15:20 So we’re, you know, creating our content much more usable for mobile devices, because it’s so easy, because again, it’s about motivation. If you have this one hour on a Sunday afternoon to sit in front of your computer, you might actually never do it. But if you do it every second day in a bus ride for 10 or 15 minutes, you’re more likely to succeed. So therefore, mobile is the clear focus. And with mobile, you know, also in terms of user motivation, we can send you push notifications at the right time.
15:50 When you’re more likely to learn something, we store all your mistakes and your learning history so we know exactly which words you saw, when did you see them, did you know them or not, and thereby create a very specific learning path.
16:01 Brian Rose: You’re talking about push notifications, what are you pushing at your customers?
16:05 Bernhard Niesner: So it’s something we’re still developing at the moment, at the moment there is internal reminders and push notifications if someone else has corrected you, because something I haven’t mentioned yet about Busu, which is unique, is that we allow the users to actually interact with other members of our community.
16:20 So the whole idea of Busu was that you’re not only a student of a foreign language, but you’re also a tutor of your own native language. So when you sign up and you want to learn, let’s say, Spanish, we show you the Spanish-speaking community and you can directly interact with them via an integrated video chat application peer-to-peer text corrections. So you click on a person and your video chat opens and you can directly practice your skills. And that’s super powerful, again, in countries where if you live in the middle of nowhere in Brazil, it’s not that easy to get access to real English native speakers.
16:51 Brian Rose: That’s an amazing possibility there. That kind of blows my mind. This is silicone real, and so it’s time to get real. We’re going to ask you a couple questions about your business model. I’m going to go first.
17:01 But you know what? When I read it’s a social network for languaging, I think, okay, I already try to juggle right now six social networks. I got Facebook, I got Instagram, I got Pinterest, I got all these other things. How can you convince people that they need a new social network on top of all the other ones they’re trying to catch up with or the other ones that they’re leaving? I mean, a lot of people are leaving Facebook and getting over it to come to you guys.
17:24 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah, that’s a very good question. And I think there was this time when everyone created the social network for everything, but you can have a social network for cooking, but it might not actually necessarily improve your cooking skills. Whereas a social network for language learning you can practice your language skills with someone else, that’s a fundamental part of language learning. It’s not just a shiny feature. If you want to learn a language, you need to practice and resolve that by interacting with other users.
17:56 So I think it’s just an integral part of language learning is to practice your skills and that’s done with the social community. And second, I mean, with the social plugins and logins, nowadays it’s just so easy to sign up and we don’t want to have any long sign up processes and you know something so you can obviously Facebook connect and you have a Google Plus sign up so it’s very easy to get into the site. And you are just there to learn a language, full stop.
18:22 So there is no need to necessarily stay in touch or if you want, you can obviously have friends and chat etc. but it’s really more about the language learning program.
18:31 Brian Rose: So it’s a secondary effect if people get social.
18:34 Bernhard Niesner: Exactly. making people communicate with each other.
18:37 Brian Rose: It’s a byproduct.
18:38 Bernhard Niesner: It’s a byproduct. Obviously, we had our first busu babies, so people met on the website and got engaged and married and had the first babies. It’s like when you have a bar, you might serve food, but then again, some people might be flirting at the bar. It’s a byproduct of what you’re doing, really.
18:53 But the main core focus is that people actually learn a language, and for that, they need to practice, and for that, we offer them real people to do so.
19:02 Brian Rose: And are people doing this? Are they texting each other?
19:05 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah. video chat where you can just try text and you have also video if you want to turn it on. Our most popular feature is the peer-to-peer text corrections where you write something that say in Spanish, we show it to Spanish people and they correct you normally after a minute or two. So on a daily basis we have around 30,000 texts being corrected within our community. And the interesting part is as well, we have a few users who just correct other users. So we have this lady in Australia who has corrected more than I think 120,000 posts of other people learn English.
19:37 And obviously she’s a retired English teacher who just does nothing else. Get up in the morning.
19:41 Brian Rose: Is that for fun or do you pay her?
19:43 Bernhard Niesner: For fun. If you don’t pay anything.
19:44 Brian Rose: Okay.
19:44 Bernhard Niesner: And I just, you know, one story, a fun story to tell. One day I sent her an email saying, like, thank you very much for this amazing commitment you put into my community. She just replied by correcting my email, so it’s kind of, you know, and we have a lot of retired people on the website who simply enjoy the fact to help others. Right.
20:05 Brian Rose: What a tremendous resource, right?
20:07 Bernhard Niesner: Exactly. The syllabus surface for us, our tremendous research in order to help other people. And especially when you learn another language, you’re normally a bit afraid of practicing and you make mistakes. And if you see actually native speakers of the language you’re learning also making mistakes in your own language, you lose this barrier and you’re just, okay, I don’t mind.
20:26 The guy from New York also makes mistakes in Spanish, but I have a problem with just doing a bit of English. And if I make mistakes, nothing wrong. So that’s a bit of the whole philosophy of pursue. It’s a very open, friendly place where you can make mistakes and you just practice with real people.
20:44 Brian Rose: Colin.
20:45 Colin Pyle: 50,000 users a day. It blows my mind. And from running a few businesses and trying to acquire customers, I just think that’s incredible. And so I guess maybe if you could give some advice or some insight into how how you scaled to 20 million with just angel funding and then how where was that tipping point yeah 100,000 people was it 5 million and and sort of is is all your user acquisition now just organic and you know I mean
21:10 Bernhard Niesner: okay so first maybe with regards to the angel funding and the fundraising in general we are super proud about the fact that we have raised only in total around 4 million euros and all our competitors have raised massive more amount and some of them failed actually because they have raised too much and we also saw especially as we couldn’t raise at the beginning fundraising now there’s a sign of success but it’s basically a promise you give but that’s it so you know you read always on the news about they have raised this amount and this amount it’s great but I think I’m more proud of building a sustainable business and having actually capital efficiency rather than raising money and
21:52 And just being in this loop of diluting yourself, obviously, as a founder, and just going from one round to the other. It makes maybe some VCs happy, but the end of the day it’s about building a real business. So we tried to raise as little as possible. How did we do that? By being super analytical about user acquisition cost versus lifetime value.
22:11 Actually at a time where it wasn’t really cold like that, which is, you know, it was basic math of how much does it cost to acquire user and what do the people spend on our website. And we realized that if we optimize this funnel, that we can actually get good returns and therefore can increase our marketing spendings over time. So we then said, okay, if we are able to buy a user for nine euros and he spends 10 on our website, let’s just get as many of those nine euro users as we can for our platform.
22:40 So we scaled automatically our marketing spendings. And that then simply drives obviously organic traffic because we realized that if you acquire 100 users via SCM or paid advertisement, normally they also give us another 100 users on top which comes for free because there’s a word of mouth effect. And by that, again, we could increase our marketing spending. And as our users, we have a premium business model. So there’s a basic version where you can get access for a few stuff and few units and exercises.
23:10 And then there’s premium, which costs around five to six pounds a month. We get access to grammar or a mobile app, additional review types, et cetera. And if people pay, they normally tend to pay like in the early days of sign up, so therefore we get the money cash up front. And then we pay Google in Spain after two months and UK after one month, so we are basically working capital negative and could finance our own growth with the money we collected from our users.
23:37 Therefore, we suddenly realize that we don’t need to raise a lot of money because we could rather finance our growth with our own cash flow.
23:45 Colin Pyle: So I guess the most difficult thing there that you said was getting your CP8 and 9 and your lifetime value.
23:51 Bernhard Niesner: Exactly. Making sure your numbers are right. Because if your 10 is really 8, then you might have a problem with that.
23:57 Colin Pyle: Yeah, once you get to that point, then it’s just dump some money in the hopper. Open the gates.
24:02 Bernhard Niesner: And by now, it’s still, don’t get me wrong, by now, only 50% and I think even less actually if we include mobile. If you include mobile, only 20% to 30% of our traffic comes from paid channels, so you’re not just fully dependent on Google. It’s just something which keeps the machine going, the boat floating, but then suddenly we’re going quicker and quicker because more people jump on that and come into our funnel.
24:25 So I think it’s a lot about optimization of the funnel. You did so many iterations of our landing pages, and then you always come with this beautiful design page where it’s like this converts better and it converts much worse than actually the shitty one, which looks really ugly. But it really depends on the country and language, and we have done a lot of optimization there. And I think we got our numbers straight, and we are very much analytical. We track our cohorts on a weekly or monthly basis.
24:53 So I think that’s kind of the trick and the secret sauce of how to scale.
24:57 Colin Pyle: And are you heavily focused for online acquisition, or do you do offline acquisition as well?
25:03 Bernhard Niesner: We don’t do any offline acquisition. We were lucky enough to win 4 million euros.
25:07 Colin Pyle: You’ve got to tell this story.
25:09 In 2012, you won, is it Proseibn?
25:11 Bernhard Niesner: It was Proseibn. So at the NOAA pitch conference, there was a pitch event from Proseibn and it was a startup competition. I think, I don’t know, 60 people.
25:21 Colin Pyle: Proseibn is a big German media company, right?
25:24 Bernhard Niesner: Exactly. It’s one of the biggest German media companies and I think there were 100 companies applied And then, you know, we went into the final and we won the first prize, which was four million euros of gross budget for TV advertising, which you could spend for free, which is fantastic. So we were lucky enough to win that.
25:44 Colin Pyle: How many hours of TV advertisement is that?
25:46 Bernhard Niesner: Good question.
25:47 So to have a rough idea, like one ad at prime time on a Saturday night might be up to 40,000 euros. So it’s quite, I mean, if you look at that and it’s only 20 seconds, so like 40k, 40k, it goes quick. And then again, you spread it across and then it really depends whether you do Monday morning or it goes down much lower than that, maybe 1000, 2000. There’s a big difference between cross value and what you really pay. So the way it works in Germany is that there’s a very like big number of gross value, but no one pays that.
26:19 Everyone just pays a discounted price, which might be up to discounts of 50, 60, 70 or percent of the gross value. So gross is a big amount, net is still a very good amount, and if you get it for free, you definitely don’t complain. And it gave us a big, big exposure with this acquisition channel, and we learned a lot. So typical thing, we did a first spot, which was super branding. We flew to Tenerife and filmed this with the models on the beach, and fantastic weekend we had.
26:47 The spot converted really bad. So you can look it up YouTube.
26:50 Colin Pyle: If you were already, you said you had all the monitors, you had real time.
26:54 Bernhard Niesner: Exactly. Yeah, we looked at analytics and absolutely nothing happened when we put this spot.
26:59 Nothing. Nothing. It was exactly the same. So we all felt a bit frustrated. Then we did another spot and also what we did, we actually combined it with a full 360-degree marketing campaign.
27:10 So never do just TV advertisement alone and it’s pretty obvious now but at that time we just ran it out and didn’t think it completely through. So we did retargeting, we did display, we did Facebook. You know, a lot of the typical online marketing stuff to build a campaign around it. And we did a pretty, you know, performance-oriented TV spot with kind of Germanic humor, if that exists. Because it was just a German audience.
27:37 It was just a German audience. And it’s basically a guy explaining how he used bazook in front of a whiteboard. And it converted 30 times better than this beautifully filmed, branded spot on an island. And obviously production cost was a big fraction of the first spot. So at the end, the spot converted quite well.
27:59 We, I think, more than at the end, I think tripled our brand awareness in our relevant segment in Germany.
28:05 Brian Rose: Did you get David Hasselhoff to give an advert?
28:07 Bernhard Niesner: We should have, no. Exactly. That would have been it.
28:10 Exactly. That’s an accent, yeah. Should have thought. No. He would be…
28:15 Brian Rose: If he was on the beach in the canary, I would say, he was a big engineer.
28:19 Bernhard Niesner: Next time, I should hire you as the creative director. But I mean, it’s at the end of the day, it’s an expensive acquisition channel. I mean, you cannot compare TV to SEM. It’s simply different metrics and it’s a more long-term thing to do.
28:34 So as a startup, it really depends on the stage you are, the money you have and what kind of resources. But what you definitely need to make clear is that your funnel is super optimized as well as on the normal SEM funnel, that you are capable of getting all this traffic in, But you also do testing of the spot, so in the second spot we had focus groups, we tested the claim of the spot in display campaigns, and actually said what converts better, like learn English for free, or learn English with the community, or whatsoever, what converts best. We put on the logos of the Google Play and iTunes, which automatically then triggered quite a lot, mobile downloads, which wasn’t in at the first time, and then how you need to show the logo constantly at the spot.
29:18 So there are a lot of learnings and obviously we’re very glad that we had this opportunity to do TV.
29:23 Colin Pyle: Well, so some of those lessons were put the player up there, put the iTunes, put the Google Play logo, put your own logo up a lot, you said?
29:30 Bernhard Niesner: Put your own logo up constantly, have one call to action. Just a single one. Not too many messages.
29:35 Don’t say, join up and do this, or join a community. Yeah, and then now, exactly, like very clear message. And as an internet company, unless you have a lot of money and it’s a different segment, it’s a lot about performance. So I think just this idea of getting in with a branded spot, which tells a very beautiful story about a guy being lost in Spain, it doesn’t work, we need downloads, we need signups. And then people get into our funnel and then they know what the product is about.
30:03 So the stage we are, we should have gone straight away for a performance spot, which is much more blunt and direct and explains the product and optimizes the spot a bit more. But at the end, we learned the lesson, and it’s a good channel, but it’s not cheap.
30:19 Brian Rose: So it’s a great story. So are you using that channel now after the freebies?
30:24 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah.
30:24 For the time being, we have put it on hold because we are actually soon going to raise money. So we want to make sure that we have a bit deeper pockets before doing that. But it’s a great channel, and there are competitors out there in our space which do great TV ROI, positive TV campaigns in emerging markets. So you can do it, but you need a bit more of money in order to risk it.
30:47 Brian Rose: Because most internet startups would never consider television, I’m guessing.
30:52 That would be the old school way, very hard to track, etc. But you say targeted, it’s something you should do.
30:58 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah, exactly. And you can track it. So we had like a 15-minute pixel tracking in place, we had quite a sophisticated attribution model where in a certain window after the spot was shown, you actually attributed this lead them to the specific campaign.
31:12 We knew exactly how much the spot was, how many users it generated. But at the end of the day, it’s a more long-term acquisition channel. So if you want to grow fast, you’d rather go for SEM than go for TV.
31:26 Colin Pyle: You’re very analytical. Is this a Viennese thing?
31:29 Because a lot of companies talk about EV testing, but very few of them actually do it. You have to run these analytics, but so many times, you run in a seat of the pants company, you make these subjective calls about the look of something, and you don’t go by the numbers.
31:43 Bernhard Niesner: I mean, I think it’s more an ex-consultant approach. So I used to spend a lot of time, too many hours in front of an Excel sheet when I was a consultant. And we have the beauty of being in the internet business, where you can measure everything.
31:56 So why should we just rely on opinions? And on all the decisions we take, we try to have quantified analytics behind. we all might have like green or red or orange, but just test it and then take the winning option. So we built this company from the beginning, maybe also out of necessity. We never had 10 million to spend on something just to go out and do it. We were all, it was always our money.
32:21 So therefore, you know, we, I think it was out of necessity. And then we built like a real religion about that.
32:27 Colin Pyle: That’s an important lesson. We’ve never heard on Silicon real is to do the ABC testing and then run the numbers. Yeah. Your opinion means nothing.
32:35 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah, exactly. Absolutely.
32:36 Colin Pyle: Yeah, you’re so right. But you think your opinion means everything because as an entrepreneur, the reason you’re there in the first place is because you believe you know something that someone else doesn’t. But once you create the idea, I guess you have to succumb to the market.
32:49 Bernhard Niesner: And the thing is, we have clients from over 200 different countries, so literally from all countries in the world. And I don’t know what the Turkish female user who is 18 wants from a language learning course. My opinion is not valid for that. That’s why we do landing pages for specific countries and specific regions. Just make sure that it’s optimized. And I think out of that, you can build quite a good business around.
33:17 Brian Rose: All right. Let’s talk quickly about the freemium business model. It’s had some success. It’s had some failure. Some gaming companies have been successful with it. Some are having a hard time lately. How are you guys going to do it differently? And is it the way you want to keep it?
33:33 Bernhard Niesner: So at the moment, I think there are a few success cases of Freeman. I mean, if you think about SurveyMonkey, if you think about Evernote, I think they’re Spotify to a certain extent. I think they’re now changing it. But they have one problem, which is we have kind of zero marginal cost of our product. We don’t pay any music industry amounts if our free users use our product.
34:00 In theory, it doesn’t cost me anything whether someone else now uses a premium membership or not. So that’s a big advantage with virtual goods. That’s why it’s so good for a premium model. I think we really want to create a global business. We want to be the largest random language education in the world.
34:18 And by that, by nature, we just want to be used by millions of people who potentially also might not pay for our platform. And there are several reasons why you might not be able to pay because you don’t have access to a credit card or to a payment method or you might not have the money and it’s an education business where I also believe some people simply cannot afford it, fair enough. But there might be another percentage, and obviously we’re optimizing the number of percentage, is those who pay for that and very happily pay for that.
34:47 And it’s just making sure that you cut the product and the features right so what you get for free is good enough to get a taste of the product and to also use it constantly but also to get this impression of actually I should upgrade because then I will be much quicker in learning a language and I will just get more out of it. And if you face it, I mean honestly ours is maybe five, six dollars a month, what you spend on in a pub or even if you are in Brazil, I mean it’s not that expensive. So if people know what impact it might have for them and their studies of how much more people can earn if they know English, let’s say in China or in Brazil, it’s an amazing investment you can do.
35:30 So therefore, it needs just to be the right cut between free and premium at the right time, not so early. Don’t push the paywall in the face when you’re just signed up and people don’t even know what this is all about. It’s a lot about payment optimization, where you need to, especially in our case, we get payments literally from countries I’ve never heard of, very small little islands in the Caribbean sending us over 20 euros a month where honestly it has a lot to do with optimizing you know the payment local payment methods that you offer in some countries people don’t like to pay up from its installments others like premium SMS other you know you offer a whole bunch of payment platforms and I still need to optimize on that.
36:12 Colin Pyle: Who’s behind the payment?
36:13 Bernhard Niesner: So we offer different different platform we use ADN as a platform you use PayPal we use ADN Yeah, it’s the guys from the Netherlands who have done a lot for Groupone and other big players.
36:24 We use also payment wall, we use local providers in Brazil and in Turkey. So we literally had to build up quite strong localization because payment methods and payment habits are completely different in Kazakhstan versus Venezuela.
36:39 Brian Rose: How about Bitcoin?
36:40 Colin Pyle: Yeah, I know. I was about to say.
36:42 Brian Rose: Really? You don’t want to test that, do you? I would solve all your problems.
36:46 Colin Pyle: Yeah, you remember that company Busu? They were big till they touched Bitcoin.
36:51 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah, exactly. Then hold on. I don’t know. I’m not sure about that.
36:54 Colin Pyle: You tell your investors, we got a million in the bank in Bitcoin.
36:57 Bernhard Niesner: I probably missed a Kaiser. He might have a different opinion on that.
37:00 Brian Rose: Yeah, he does. He just started Maxcoin, by the way.
37:03 Bernhard Niesner: I imagine.
37:03 Brian Rose: So don’t get me started about that. But I mean, if any company should adopt Bitcoin, it’s you, because you’re talking about these crazy countries. You can’t do credit card payments in Brazil, these tiny little countries where they could easily do you a micro payment?
37:15 Bernhard Niesner: I’m still looking at that. So I wouldn’t discard for the future.
37:18 But right now, you have the buzz of barriers which you collect over time. But I mean, I wouldn’t right now, it’s so unpredictable of what’s going to happen. And let’s see.
37:28 Brian Rose: Do you think if you could integrate Bitcoin in some way that it would really help your business?
37:34 Bernhard Niesner: I think whether it’s Bitcoin or simply solving payments in general, I think there is, you You know, several billions of dollars which could be unlocked if payments is solved in a very good way for emerging markets.
37:47 There’s so many platforms which still, let’s say in Brazil, some providers only accept national credit cards because in Brazil, even if you have a credit card, you might not be allowed to pay on a foreign provider. So you actually need a local entity connected to a local bank. It’s a nightmare.
38:04 Colin Pyle: So many issues in Brazil because the AI isn’t transferable out of the country.
38:09 Bernhard Niesner: Exactly.
38:09 Yeah, the tax is a nightmare. And that’s one country, also China. I mean, there’s a lot of issues there, and I believe, you know, PayPal is doing a big bit progress, you have Stripe, et cetera, et cetera. It’s getting there, but companies like ours, you’re just trying to optimize as much as we can. It could make or break your business at some point, because that extra 20% in revenue from a Bitcoin or a Stripe could, yeah.
38:30 We see people in some countries who, you know, accept terms of conditions, put a product into their basket, and want to go to checkout, And we only might have 2% or 3% conversion rate out of that, of people who literally want to hand the money into your account and you can’t take it. I mean, it’s a big, big… But then again…
38:46 Colin Pyle: Do you watch that happen?
38:48 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah, I watch this graph nearly every morning and it’s frustrating, but it will be solved.
38:52 And also I think mobile carriers are going into the direction, mobile billing. I’m going to the NWC in a few weeks. And there’s a big topic of always the charging directly such services via your mobile invoice. You get it on a monthly basis. It’s getting there, but still big opportunity, I think.
39:09 Brian Rose: Okay, let’s talk London really quick. You moved your business to London. I’m just curious if you’re gonna expand to the US at some point with staff over there. What do you think London needs to change if it wants to become more competitive and what do you think we’re doing right? Interesting, yeah.
39:26 Bernhard Niesner: So I came from Madrid to London and obviously once I always heard about this tech city and Silicon Roundabout, I always thought it’s kind of the Champs-Élysées the internet business, like the golden roundabout and you come to the future and you’re just fucking hell. I come off from all two stations sometimes and I’m just like, really? Yeah, exactly. That’s what I thought. But, I mean, apparently, I don’t know whether these 50 million pounds go into the station or not, but in any case, maybe if we just paint it, it would already look a little bit better.
39:55 But besides these very superficial comments, I think London, honestly, it’s a super place for an international startup hub. I think it’s such a cosmopolitan city where, especially in our case, where we would need people with language skills and international background. I mean, we have in our office, we are nearly 40 people now and we have people from, I think, 20 different nationalities. I don’t think it’s that easy to hire that if you’re in Silicon Valley or in the US. So it is really an international hub and people understand international business here in London, international expansion. I think people in the US understand very well how to grow and scale tremendously fast, but mainly in the US.
40:37 And I think people here understand how to scale beyond those borders. I think the government is doing a great job and I’m always comparing it kind of to Spanish and the kind of Austrian network. I think government is doing a great job of putting digital on the agenda, putting, you know, learning to codes within the educational system. I think actually UK is doing very well and the tech city as such is already a strong brand. I would rather focus my efforts into London, I mean maybe the guys in Manchester don’t want to hear that and in other places, but it is very important to focus all the efforts into one city.
41:17 Because I saw it fail in Spain where it’s about Barcelona and Madrid and the government or two governments struggling about where the funds are going and I think an ecosystem survives and succeeds based on the number of people it has and then it’s kind of a snowball effect which gets bigger and bigger and therefore I would rather focus you know all my efforts into into this city and London is doing a tremendous job on that. A lot of networking opportunities in general I think people are very open and very eager to help each other. I’ve never seen a network which you know does networking so professional even if at the end they might the old drunk after a few pints but like at the beginning it just works very well and people come prepared and go to a networking event in order to network. In Spain it happens that after five minutes you talk already about football and that’s it. Here really I think people understand how to leverage the value of the network and I think you know in general I’m super happy about our decision and there are very few things that would change.
42:16 Brian Rose: Are you going to the states at some point?
42:18 Bernhard Niesner: So we are in the States, we have probably a few million users now in the States. It’s nothing necessarily I would consider to have a physical location because we don’t need that necessarily. It’s a B2C business. We can acquire users from all over the world sitting here in London.
42:34 And for tax reasons, et cetera, I don’t necessarily see us having a physical location there. Obviously in regards to fundraising, it’s a different topic. And yes, we’re talking to US funds. I think they’re great funds here in London. And they obviously also need to compete with the US competitors.
42:55 And funding also, especially if you compare it to continental Europe, in London is already pretty good. But still, I have the impression that obviously check sizes are a bit bigger, it’s easier to raise money, it’s a higher valuation. So there is simply more simpler access to capital. And I think what London needs is a bit more time, because it takes time to create an ecosystem like in Silicon Valley, where you have not 10 or 15 people who have done a big IPO and have seen how you scale a business from one to 500 employees and to $3 billion valuation.
43:30 There are a few more people out there, and this knowledge automatically triggers down. And it’s not about the founder, it’s about the first CTO and the first head of marketing and so on. now in the US suddenly have made money and reinvested into the ecosystem. This just takes time. So I think it’s getting there in London, but probably it’s a few years where hopefully many of us have done this, these exits, have learned the lessons and can trigger down this knowledge to other people who want to go there.
44:00 Colin Pyle: I’m just thinking as you, from a venture cap guy in America, you have some real numbers that speak for themselves and you’re like, we don’t need to go to the US and scale and most of the people that sit in that chair are thinking about how they’re going to go and how they’re going to tackle the West Coast versus the East Coast, but you obviously have a really big market, you guys have come a long way, so it must be something that these people would look at.
44:24 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah, I mean, obviously from a market perspective, language learning is simply much bigger in China than in the US, I mean there’s simply more language students out there in China than in the US. Our market, our consumer is for a certain extent sitting in the US, but the much bigger opportunities in emerging markets.
44:40 Colin Pyle: How many users in China do you have?
44:42 Bernhard Niesner: Very limited for the time being. I think now we had been featured by Apple at the beginning of the year, and we’re number two in the Chinese education store for a few weeks, which was great. But then again, in China, you have not only one, not only iTunes or Google Play, We have several stores, and finally, Refshare is 70% for the telecom and 30% for the publishers, so it’s the other way around. We might have now, I think, 400,000 to 500,000 users in China, but we still need to get into that market.
45:11 So that’s a place where probably you cannot succeed unless you have a local partner.
45:17 Colin Pyle: Right. And where’s your biggest, in terms of user base, where do you find most of them?
45:22 Bernhard Niesner: Number one is Brazil, number two is Russia. And number three, interestingly, is still the US, but other countries like Turkey, China, Colombia are also growing quite substantially.
45:34 And English is by far the most learned English. It’s like 60% of our users are learning English. But as we offer 132 language combinations, because we have 12 different languages, and you can learn always like in all the complementary languages, and we have very interesting combinations It’s like Spanish for Brazilians, Mandarin for Japanese, German for Turkish users that goes into all combinations.
45:57 Brian Rose: Interesting. You know, we’ve heard the word gamification thrown around a lot.
46:01 I think we should gamify Silicon Real at some point, maybe getting on the show as a game. I don’t know. But is it something that you’re trying to introduce for Busu and is it a fad as well?
46:13 Bernhard Niesner: I mean, actually, I think we were one of the, we were probably one of the first education companies who implemented gamification. So from the beginning, the concept of busu was super gamified.
46:25 For example, every language you learn is represented by a tree. The more you learn, the more the tree grows. If you’re lazy, the tree shrinks and we send you motivational messages. We introduced Busu Berries in 2009 or 10 when no one actually spoke about gamification as a word, which is our currency which you collect. And people are super eager to collect Busu Berries and you can spend it in a ritual garden to buy some stuff for your garden where you know you have to buy a sheep or a dog or something.
46:54 So we have implemented gamification quite a lot and as mentioned in the beginning it’s a lot about motivation and if people find it somehow motivational that they have more points than their friends then let’s just let them play and yes for sure I think it’s a core theme in education as general we need to get rid of this whole concept of I need to learn and this automatically like triggers this negative stimuli of learn like me sitting as a student at home and doing homework. Sounds horrible, learning should be as positive I need to play and it should be in a way that actually you play and you learn something behind but you don’t even notice that it’s you know it’s a learning hour it should be like a playful hour and it should be very satisfactory so we are whatever you do in the new version of our product we will give you very positive stimuli so you’re always doing something good because it should not be I have done a mistake and I’ve done this wrong and again it’s like this negative idea of learning and we want to get rid of that it should be just fun
47:52 Colin Pyle: yeah languages are true I try to learn Italian like eight ten years ago and I had a guy coming over every week and then I wasn’t listening to any Italian radio or TV and so like all I did was talk to him once a week like that didn’t work you know languages are fascinating so that’s interesting you know what do you say to your critics that say I don’t care the
48:12 The only way, the best way to learn a language, the only way is to be immersed and private lessons.
48:18 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah. So we did a study among 40,000 users. What’s the most effective way to learn a language? And number one clearly was to go abroad.
48:27 And I 100% agree on that. I mean, honestly, if I can choose to go to Brazil and learn Portuguese or sit at home and do a few exercises, obviously I would choose to go to Brazil. But the fact is that for the vast majority of the people out there learning a language, not affordable and possible to be in that country and for many also for visa purposes they cannot even be in the country where the language comes from, Mexican, Venezuela, etc. I mean you need to be in that country before you can actually apply for a visa you need to have English skills in order to apply for the visa. So therefore I completely agree yes full immersion is the best but then second it’s probably the tool which is most accessible and easiest to be used and if you think about driving to the language school, sitting on the table around with 10 other English native speakers, talking Italian to each other is definitely not the most effective way language learning should work.
49:18 So if I rather go in there and spending my time in the tube and then coming back after work, I should be just doing it on a very quick way with a mobile phone. Therefore our goal is we want to be the most efficient tool to learn the language, which is besides going into the language and spending time there.
49:33 Brian Rose: You know, Bernhard, we always ask people at the end a question I’m going to hit you with. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Bernhard, I guess you were probably undergraduate as well, and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him?
49:46 Bernhard Niesner: Oh, Jesus, an interesting one. 20-year-old, since years ago.
49:50 Brian Rose: Still in Austria.
49:51 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah, exactly. Still in Austria, still not finished with university.
49:56 Bernhard Niesner: I mean, I think I honestly wouldn’t change that much, and I honestly definitely wouldn’t tell this guy to avoid the mistakes that I have done because I think it’s so important to make mistakes and just learn from that and therefore it’s important to make those mistakes and even if it takes time and money and whatsoever. I probably would have told this guy if you ever found a company don’t do it necessarily in Spain at the beginning but you know do it in a hub where there is already an ecosystem so I think that’s definitely an advice but then again I mean just stay passionate with This other idea, don’t let yourself down with people who tell you that your idea is not going to work. Just keep on hitting it, stay focused, and then you will have a joyful ride.
50:41 Colin Pyle: Did the 20-year-old have any idea that you would be doing a tech startup?
50:45 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah, I had really shitty ideas, I think, at that time, and I’m very glad that I never implemented them, so I’m glad I met my co-founder, and we did Dembuzu together.
50:54 Colin Pyle: So it’s interesting to touch on, you know, you wouldn’t change being a consultant for some reviews.
50:59 Bernhard Niesner: Not at all.
51:00 Colin Pyle: That’s exactly what I meant.
51:01 Bernhard Niesner: I definitely recommend in terms of career path, study business, go into consultancy because it is a tough world. You learn a lot about Excel, about numbers, about how to present your ideas, to solve complex problems. You learn how to work hard. I mean, if you face it, I mean, we had, as in consulting, as in the startup world, like hundred hours, weeks, and that’s the way it is. And I think I just learned it in the consulting time.
51:28 So it shaped me as a professional and gave me to a certain extent the tools which I then needed for my startup. I also enjoyed the MBA a lot and now I’m a married man, a father, so I wouldn’t change that much.
51:42 Colin Pyle: When do you have had a kid earlier?
51:45 Bernhard Niesner: No, no, no.
51:46 Colin Pyle: Good timing there.
51:47 Brian Rose: Just the second part of that question, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
51:55 Bernhard Niesner: Best advice I’ve ever received. It could be business advice. I mean, there are so many and it’s always tough to choose one and they might fit in one time of your life than others, but I think it’s really about focus at the end in business and being persistent, I think, which you hear from different people, but it’s so important to just stick and continuously go with it and don’t put yourself off.
52:31 And maybe it’s not an advice, but it’s a common knowledge. It’s a bit about the idea, but it’s much more about the execution. And I think that’s what we really realized, that we had a good idea, several people had this idea, but at the end of what made the difference was actually the execution of it. And I think that’s the advice I would give people, like focus on execution, don’t do too many things at the same time, and just pull through and go ahead.
52:58 And at the end, hopefully it will turn out well.
53:00 Brian Rose: That’s good advice, man. Very good advice. Last part of that question, you touched on it a bit earlier, but to the 20-year-old listening to us in China or Brazil or Russia, what advice do you give to them, you know, if they want to, I don’t know, maybe get involved in the tech industry or follow a path like you did?
53:16 Bernhard Niesner: Yeah.
53:16 You know, I think it really, as mentioned before, it’s obviously once you’re not in those startup hubs, it becomes more difficult. But then again, there’s so many talented people out there around the world. and if you go to Bogotá or to São Paulo, you’re amazed about the amount of talent. As London will maybe take a few years to get to a stage in the US, those countries will take a few years to go get to that stage. But then again, they’re super hungry.
53:44 And especially with being a mentor, also at Vyra, and going to different events, you really see how ambitious those people are. And I think we all have to speed up and catch up in order to compete internationally. And those people should also learn from other international startup success cases, connect themselves, and also be very open. In some countries, it’s not so open. It’s not so common to share your knowledge, to share your mistakes as well.
54:13 And even if people are in a competitive area, I have the feeling in London that actually people are very happy and it feels like a bit of a family. And that’s something I would also recommend to people in more emerging markets to create this sense of community and ecosystem, meet up as much as you can, learn from each other, help each other, because that’s what drives then the whole community forward.
54:34 Colin Pyle: I like that sharing information. We had that guy, Steph, the hacker that was in here, and he wrote a blog talking about signing disclosure agreements, and he’s like, I don’t sign disclosure agreements.
54:45 That’s just a big waste of everyone’s time. Absolutely. He’s like, if you really don’t trust me, don’t tell me the idea, but most likely, by having a conversation about what I’m doing and what you’re doing, the problem is going to get solved, And it’s gonna be down to execution anyways.
55:00 Bernhard Niesner: Exactly, absolutely.
55:01 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, that’s really well said.
55:03 Anything I missed?
55:04 Colin Pyle: Just one thing I’d love to hear your thoughts. So you are going up against some massive giants in the education space. How are you gonna beat not only the competitors of the EFs, the Rosetta Stones, the Berlitzes, but also the Duolingos of the world and some of the other guys, How are you gonna win this space in five years?
55:27 Bernhard Niesner: So, the thing is, luckily, the industry itself, or the market itself, is big enough.
55:33 It’s not a winner-takes-it-all market. It’s not the Facebook and there’s will-we-only-one Facebook. I believe there might be several players out there in a few years. And that’s, again, a bit about personal taste. Some people might like more grammar, others might like more unstructured courses, and others really like the practice with native communities.
55:52 I think there is Coca-Cola and Pepsi and all sorts of drinks we take. I think there’s not just one route to learn another language, there will be several routes. The market is big enough. But the way we see ourselves competing, and obviously, yes, to a certain extent, it is a competition on clicks, on attention with users, and you won’t have five apps on your mobile phone to learn Spanish, but rather maybe one, is a lot about super high-quality So at the end of the day an app might be super gamified and fun But if the content isn’t good enough, then I don’t think you know, it will succeed So we are investing a lot on content. I think our big differentiator is the community so we have something very unique where people you know practice with each other and are in touch and that really differentiates us and Also in terms of the adaptive learning, I think we’re ahead of our competitors We’re doing something unique in that sense, and I think we can differentiate there.
56:53 But then again, if you now go on the street in Istanbul and ask the people, how do you learn English? I don’t think anyone will name nor Brazil nor a Duolingo nor maybe Berlin, I don’t know. But it’s really about the market is big enough, and the industry itself needs to evolve a lot. And publishers, to a certain extent, are not that quick. They come from a world of books and an industry which hasn’t really changed that much.
57:20 We have been living and breathing and starting to grow up now with mobile devices and we understand how to develop this kind of product on a mobile and web platform. So I think we are quick enough to move fast.
57:34 Brian Rose: Excellent. For people that want to get your app, what’s the best way? What’s the easiest way?
57:40 Bernhard Niesner: It’s busu.com, B-U-S-U-U dot com slash mobile if you have a mobile device. If not, sign up for free and yeah, hope you enjoy it. And actually, by the way, I haven’t mentioned, but we’re about to release quite a big change of our existing product. If you still go to the old website, it looks like the old websites and it’s not, you know, it’s basically a site which is based on what we did from 2008 till 2010-11. I didn’t want to say anything. Yeah, better not because it will change dramatically We have spending actually we have actually spent and that’s that’s a big thing for a startup like Lily’s 7-8 month Developing something completely different behind the scenes We haven’t released it yet only in a few test markets only to a certain percentage of users But the rollout is going to happen as you speak so I think by next week We will increase the threshold of people seeing the new website and it’s a complete different animal So I can’t wait until it’s out the new mobile app is already out check it out It looks good, but on the website it will come very soon
58:42 Brian Rose: exciting stuff How can people get in touch with you? Are you a Twitter guy?
58:47 Bernhard Niesner: I’m a Twitter guy My name is Bernhard with three O’s at the end I think I’m not as I don’t use Twitter as much as I probably should do and if not It’s Bernhard at busu.com just sent me an email more than happy to meet up
59:00 Brian Rose: fantastic story. I love it very pro London
59:02 Colin Pyle: Yeah, it’s super cool, some great tips and some things we haven’t heard here before on
59:07 Silicon Reel. So, love it. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can check out all of our faces on our YouTube channel or on Twitter, at Silicon Reel.
59:14 Brian Rose: We’ve gotten a bunch of volunteers recently, right?
59:17 Colin Pyle: Yeah, it’s been amazing.
59:18 So, it keeps coming. It’s like our tipping point, you know?
59:21 Brian Rose: Yeah, no worries. We’ve got all sorts of some guys, some girls, some video people, everyone is just helping. Yeah, we’re, yes.
59:26 So, you know, cool guy Simon from, who’s lived in Spain now, Ozzy guy, he’s cutting up some of our clips for us. We’re trying to take some great stuff that we’ve learned from all of our different interviews and kind of put them all together in one clip, which I think would be really cool. I think like the 20-year-old question I asked you, I think he’s putting them all together.
59:43 Colin Pyle: Yeah, that’s great. So thank you guys and yeah, all the help.
59:46 Colin Pyle: We’re doing this for you guys and just feedback, help, guest suggestions.
59:50 Brian Rose: Yeah, guest suggestions, all that stuff. Fantastic. As we say at Silicon Real, it’s about the people. You are one of them.
59:56 Thanks. Thanks so much for coming. It was a pleasure.
59:58 Bernhard Niesner: exciting thing to watch and it’s gonna be a lot of fun so I wish you guys all the best. Thank you very much, it was really a pleasure being here. Okay guys, take care.
1:00:06 London Real promo: When we first started it you know it was just a monster in a room and kids went crazy for it because you could adopt your own pet monster which was the cool kind of tagline and then we built out the world and it was kind of like Frankenstein’s monster because we just added this and added that and added this and so now the world is huge. There are six main monsters you adopt you nurture and you play with but you can also message your friends you You can have your best friends on there. It’s really kind of got stealth education baked in.
1:00:35 Once we did all of that stuff, it really started to take off. It was one of those hockey stick curves that you don’t often see.
