French entrepreneurs who are Stanford Engineering grads<\/a>) and recently announced that they’re in the process of raising a 300,000\u20ac round of funding to continue growth.<\/p>\nI talked with Guillaume about how Fleex is doing, what makes it awesome, and what we can look forward to:<\/p>\n
Was Freemium always the goal? Why do you think this model will work for language education?<\/h4>\n
![\"FLEEX1-1024x682\"](\"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/assets\/FLEEX1-1024x682-e1363700217192.jpg\")
We see ourselves as pragmatists, and we\u2019re willing to iterate until we find the right approach. We did that with our product, initially giving it for free in order to get as much feedback as possible from our community. We\u2019re having a similar approach with monetization, and freemium is probably the first of several iterations. I can\u2019t guarantee this is where we\u2019ll end up – we\u2019ll have to see how people respond.<\/p>\n
Freemium was a rather obvious first step though. Consumers have learned that they can find a great number of resources for free on the internet, and in that regard education makes no exception. It\u2019s become really hard to get people to pay upfront, especially when they have no way to tell what exactly they\u2019re paying for. In the end, I think the success of any sales business on the web relies on your ability to convey a sense of the value you\u2019re bringing to your customer. Freemium is great for that, unveiling just enough for the user to get a sense of what they\u2019ll get while keeping some of the best value behind a paywall.<\/p>\n
We also think freemium is coherent with the fact that there are different kinds of learners, and we want to cater to both. The free version will satisfy casual learners, providing them with a couple of tools to occasionally enhance their video experience. Fleex premium is our full-blown suite, targeted towards serious learner and giving them access to all they need to make fast progress.<\/p>\n
Tell me a bit about the technology that’s powering Fleex – what makes you uncopy-able?<\/h4>\n
It\u2019s the web – no one is uncopy-able! There are, though, several things that we think give us a considerable edge.<\/p>\n
One of the core principles we try to respect at all cost is scalability. Technically-speaking, fleex is designed as a service-oriented, plug\u2019n\u2019play component that can be used with any subtitled video stream. We\u2019ve implemented integrations with YouTube and Vlc for local files, but in the future there may very well be a fleex for Netflix, for instance. That means we\u2019re very flexible and can adapt to a whole universe of content.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re also flexible in terms of languages. Today fleex is only open to French speakers, but the reasons behind that have more to do with our early stage and the size of our team \u2013 they are in no way technical. Preserving English as the target language, fleex\u2019s reach can very easily be extended to any other language and that\u2019s something we plan for the coming months.<\/p>\n
Another thing we\u2019re particularly proud of is our user interface. We\u2019ve polished every aspect of it, and our users are particularly vocal about how intuitive and easy to use they find it. This is the result of hundreds of successive iterations, and we\u2019ve developed a certain sense of what works and what doesn\u2019t with interactive videos.<\/p>\n
What do you need the 300K for? Will you be raising in France only?<\/h4>\n
Foreign investors have become very wary of the French fiscal environment, and taking outside investments usually requires moving out of France – something we\u2019re not ready for yet, mostly for personal reasons. So France it is.<\/p>\n
We estimate that 300k\u20ac will buy us about 18 months. In this timeframe our objective is to get to 100 000 registered users and turn our first profit. With that in mind we plan to experiment various distribution and marketing strategies, and are currently looking to hire a Marketing director to assist us with that.<\/p>\n
What is your biggest problem today?<\/h4>\n
The first funding round is always a difficult moment for early stage startups, because they have limited resources and fundraising eats up a lot of time. We have tons of plans for our product, and how to sell it, but 50% of our workforce (that\u2019s me here!) can\u2019t work on that. It can be a bit frustrating.<\/p>\n
Photo via Numerama<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After wrapping up LeCamping, EduTech startup Fleex\u00a0has launched a premium version of its video language-learning service. Taking advantage of the international tendency for TV viewers to watch US TV Shows in VO (Original Language), Fleex hopes to help users learn English by providing dual subtitles – 1st language and English. Fleex launched its free beta<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":11126,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10564],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tech-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"fleex\"](\"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/assets\/fleex-01-e1363699440530.png\")
<\/p>\n