06: Reinventing How We Learn Languages with Taylor Nieman & Toucan

Hey, I'm Dan with Product Market Misfits, and when you think about learning a new language like Spanish, you immediately think about how there's no way you'd have time to do it. Well, now with Toucan, you do. Toucan is a free browser extension that teaches you new languages while you browse the web. Toucan was co-founded by Taylor Nieman, Sean Merritt, and Brandon Dietz in his race $3.5 million from a long list of amazing investors, including but not limited to GSV Ventures, Golden Ventures, Wonder Ventures, and Halogen Ventures. So I'm very excited to welcome Taylor to Product Market Misfits today to talk about her startup Toucan. Well, Taylor, it's great to have you here today. Thank you for your time. I would love to hear how you came to be a co-founder of Toucan.

Yes, so it's been quite the journey, but The 2 of my other co-founders, there's 3 of us total, we've worked together in the best consumer tech companies across Los Angeles. And this is actually the 4th company I've tried to start. So I have 3 failures under my belt already.

Nice.

But I kept trying. And after every single full-time job, I would jump to try to start something new. So slowly but surely got better every single time until This time around, we have a massive vision with 2 amazing co-founders alongside me. And we got to work.

That's awesome. So was it just a distaste for working for other people after?

So, so funny. I actually think I'm a very good employee and I would add so much value to the companies, but I used it as a playground to soak up all of the knowledge possible because being the scrappy generalist, that I am. I bounced around from distribution, product engineering, customer experience, wherever people needed help. And it was really, how can I learn everything at ground zero to then take off when I wanted to build something of my own? But I think it was really just me always wanting to build something from the ground up myself.

Yeah.

And then always having that kind of curiosity and like desire to go after that.

So everything you learned at a job, you like wrote down, oh yeah, I'm going to use that later.

All the good, bad, and ugly. Lots of like really great things, but also lots of things, ah, let's avoid that next time around.

Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit about Toucan? What does it do?

Yes, of course. So Toucan is a free browser extension that teaches you new language— languages as you go about your day. If you can imagine you're reading New York Times and the word coffee is on the page, we'll translate that inline to café. So through context, you can kind of figure out what it is. But if you don't understand, you just hover over it, see back to your native tongue. So we're leveraging this concept called contextual immersion, like immersing people on top of what they already love so that they can learn a new language. But also on top of that, it shows off like Our backgrounds in consumer tech. And all of those years we learned how hard it was to get anyone to open an app or do anything, even if it was just 10 minutes a day. So with Toucan, we decided let's instead intentionally layer on top of existing behaviors and meet people where they already are.

Brilliant. Okay, so this is like super relevant for me because I just spent 6— not too long ago, 6 months straight learning French. In a, in a room with no windows from 9 AM to 3 PM every workday.

Amazing.

And it was like textbook-based, like flip to page 37 where we're gonna learn how to conjugate French verbs. And I wanted to die. I did die a little bit inside. But at the end of the day, they would say go home and go to France 24, it's the 24/7 French news, like, source around the world, and you can read in French what you would otherwise learn out of this book that we, we know you're not learning from. So, like, kind of funny that I did most of my learning online anyway.

Yeah, no, I love that. And I mean, you're not alone, right? I took Spanish for 8 years, probably the same exact way you did, but all I remember from that old that whole time is, ¿Dónde está la biblioteca? Where is the library? And it's Spanish 101 for so many of us. But if you really dive into the pedagogy of like, how do people learn languages? It's really this concept called comprehensible input. So read, read, read, listen, listen, listen. And the best thing to be able to learn French is go watch Friends with French subtitles or go read Harry Potter in French, like things you already love that you'll get excited about. So you'll keep going with it, but then also you have some concept of what the heck is going on.

Yeah. Okay. So where, can you give me more about where you were working before that gave you all of this like context for the problem?

Yes. So what's very interesting about us 3 co-founders is our background is consumer tech, and we were toying with a bunch of different ideas, but Toucan is the one that really like hit the 2 main pillars for us. Like one, Can this be a massive iconic company? And then 2, is this going to do a lot of good in the world if we can execute on what we think we can do? And so with that, we were like, got it.

All right. How many, how many ideas made it all the way through like product requirements before you decided, no, let's just go with Toucan?

So we were whiteboarding a bunch of different ideas and I think we built some different prototypes even now, at least the design phases and like showing it to people. Toucan's the only one that That got engineering time from us. Yeah.

So you, you like iterated quickly through a couple ideas and just—

Yeah.

How did you sunset it? Because like, I've got a list of this, it's literally called a backlog, a startup idea backlog in my Notion. And it doesn't get any shorter. I'm curious how you sunset, how you make the decision to never revisit that idea again.

And the problem with that type of mindset is that you'll always have ideas. I still have ideas and I have to write them down because I can't not work on Toucan, you know.

Yeah.

Like, I think when, when you have, when you have started exercising that muscle of creating new ideas, it does not stop, and you just like keep that backlog of notebooks. I have so many notebooks with so many ideas, and for us, it was really like, Let's focus on this because it has so much potential. The other ideas, if this doesn't work out, we can come back to those other ideas and like revisit. But this one just seems like the most viable and the one that we can really execute on.

Yeah, well, I'm super interested in this because I'll bet you that your other ideas weren't horrible. So I don't know by how much Toucan won the race, but If it was close at all, I'm just curious how deep you went into market opportunity or your 2 pillars, I understand, but how quantified did you get in this process?

So it's very interesting too, because when I'm reflecting now back, thinking of it with you, I think half of it was gut instinct.

Sure.

Yeah. Just like, what are we most excited about? What do we think based off all— because we have a ton of experience under our belts too, because when we would join these tech companies, we joined really pre-funding and then we scale it past Series B. So we weren't joining like past Series B companies that were already big corporations. We kind of knew like the DNA and what to look for of like even small inklings of ideas. And so we could kind of flex that muscle, but then it becomes like, okay, we're kind of taking a guess on this, but let's see if it works out. And then if not, like let's revisit something else. And I think it goes back to like, What we were talking about, fear of like failure, rejection. Like for whatever reason, I've gotten over that fear and like let's go full force on something. I think it's the competitive nature in me. See what works and take learnings from it if it doesn't work.

Yeah, okay. So you mentioned like 3 or 4 startup experiences before Toucan and talking about things that may not work. I'm curious if you have any Like high-level takeaways from your previous attempts that really paved the way for Toucan?

Yes. So a few things. One, always, or in my experience, find a co-founder, co-founders that you've worked before with before in these high-growth environments, because they are very unique experience that are extremely high stress, where you know how they handle these situations. One of my first ideas that I built, I recruited a technical co-founder who I did not know. Wow. Because I was not yet technical. And as you can imagine, that ended miserably. So the next time around, which is why I taught myself how to code with YouTube videos, because I wanted to become dangerous enough to build any of my ideas, to excite other people who were way smarter than me and really true engineers to come join along for the ride. And then the other piece of that that I did too is when I would join these high-growth tech companies, like I became friends with everyone on engineering team, everyone on the product team, every one of those designers, because I was like, I am starting to recruit for not just my future co-founders, but my first like level of team. And as the team expands, like who can I identify with and want to work with? And it's funny because it's proving actually, I didn't even realize that to It would be for Toucan, but 3 of our newest engineers were some of the top, top talent engineers at Headspace with us.

Okay. So, so no new friends on the core founding team. Friends in life. Yes. But maybe no new friends on the, on your like technical co-founders.

Yeah. There's just so much risk that comes with the founding team that if you can de-risk even small things like who you're working with, who you're partnering with, why them versus other people, it not only helps you to grow the company from the beginning stage, but also when you go out to raise venture capital. Like, if you're raising from a really early standpoint, they're going to look at the team and why this team.

So there's like, if you're a new company, there's some risk for you, but if it's also a new, you just met sort of situation, there's like risk within a risk, and then the VC is like, no, no, no.

Yeah. And they can tell pretty early on as well. And it really then comes down to like, do you want to raise venture capital? If you do, then that's something to be aware of. If you don't and you just want to bootstrap, then maybe it doesn't matter.

Yeah. That's so tough though, because, you know, I'm also a non-technical founder and I think back to the days before I knew any engineers and I was from Nashville, Tennessee, and there's not a whole lot of engineering talent running around Nashville, especially back in like 2010. So it's, it's hard out there as a non-technical founder when you don't have a network of technical talent to like even try to have one coffee with. Like, so I think that's getting easier today. There's some like really awesome online communities that are popping up. If you're interested in founding something like On Deck, I've seen a lot on Twitter.

Yes. They're great. I was part of their community, I think a few years ago. Eric Torenberg is amazing and a really great investor too out of Village Global. But you're right. That's a really great community for non-technical potential founders to join, to try to pair up with technical founders.

So you went YouTube, like, I'm going to really white-knuckle this learning experience here with no ropes and learn it on YouTube. Did you even evaluate any like courses or anything, or did you just go

So I did a lot of searching in the YouTube search bar. I knew for whatever reason I chose to not do a General Assembly or a bootcamp or anything because I just wanted to dive in as deep as I wanted to at my own pace, which was like a fast pace. Mm-hmm. And so I found like 3 different like YouTube channels that were teaching Swift, which is for iOS, how to build iOS apps, and just dove deep in. And they were all for free, which was amazing for me and my perspective. But I just wanted it to become dangerous and like build at least the initial aspects of my ideas to show it to other people.

And then you were working a day job at the time when you built your first one?

Yeah, definitely. Just nights, weekends, any free time that I could have.

That's awesome. That's awesome.

So we really do not have education backgrounds besides Having gone to college, except Sean actually has only gone to high school. He's a badass engineer that skipped college. But we spoke languages and learned languages throughout school, but that's pretty much it. We have no like teacher professional background side. But I think our consumer tech background gives us that nugget of insight and consumer knowledge that otherwise a traditional edtech company might not have noticed. And so with us being early employees at Headspace, at Riot Games, Fair, Pray.com, like we know all about consumer behavior and the science of habit formation. And really even just trying to get people to open apps for 10 minutes was really hard to do on a consistent basis. Even when you had all the science and research to show people why these behaviors were so good for you, that we decided like, let's intentionally layer on top of existing behaviors. like I mentioned before, but that's really where we knew this had amazing insight from the consumer behavior side, but we had to do so much research on the teaching side, the language learning side, to back up both ends of it.

Okay. So how did you pick language? So no education background per se. Is there someone on the team who loves learning languages or?

Yes. The 3 of us love learning languages. I mentioned I learned Spanish in school. I also learned French in school and then I taught myself Portuguese as well. And that's really the language that I fell most in love with. And same with Brandon and Shawn, different languages, Spanish and German, but throughout school. But with us, like, we're such busy people that we could not find time in the day to learn and study up on the languages we love. And so we're like really scratching an itch that we had ourselves. Like, we wanted to learn, we couldn't find time to learn. So let's see if we can hack together a solution. Mm-hmm. But on top of that, like when we started building Toucan, we pushed out the first version when we had the idea and it was so ugly. It was beautiful. And it was a terrible user experience. If you can imagine installing Toucan into your browser and then the word the translated hundreds of times on your page, like not the best experience, but we were just trying to test, is there something even magical here for us to then create more hypotheses and start proving things right and wrong?

Okay, so how did you build it, like, at first?

So Sean is our amazing engineer developer who built that first version, and it really was just a switch out for— find the word the, switch it for le in Spanish, or el. Spanish was our first language. And then just do it hundreds of times. Every time you find that instance, switch it out. And then if you hover over it, you'll see a hover state to see that, that word back to your native tongue.

Okay. And so you had this like first feature and at what point in that feature, or maybe the next one, did you see the magical engagement that you wanted to see?

Yeah. So that version we put in front of strangers at coffee shops and we're like, hey, look at this, play around with this. And actually, can we install this on your computer? Because we want to see how you'll interact with it, which was very fun to do in general. I always try to push the boundaries of like, Trying to get people to say no because a lot of people have fear of rejection. I just like want to see and get real feedback instead of just sending it to friends and family who would be like, amazing, great job everyone. That's not very helpful for us.

The mom test. Have you heard of that one?

Exactly. Yes, that's really interesting, right? Like you're not supposed to show it to your mom.

Because she's gonna be like, oh honey, I love it.

Yeah, exactly. And my mom would totally do that too. And so trying to avoid that to get real feedback. But from that, we started building more hypotheses like, okay, now what happens if we do 10 words? What happens if we don't do them every single instance? What happens if like we do other concepts besides languages? Like our vision for Toucan is to be beyond languages. And very early on, we were testing concepts even alongside of language. Like what does this look like paired together? But then we really noticed our team In general, we were boiling the ocean too soon, so we decided to laser focus.

So when you go into a coffee shop with this, like, I'm going to ask 5 people how they want to interact with my new app, how do you think about question formation so that you don't get that biased answer?

Yep. And Brandon, really, who's leading product for us, is the best at this. I've never seen someone ask questions so well and intentionally, but what I try to do is actually not ask questions and instead like put it in front of them and see where they're touching, where they're not, where they're getting frustrated, like where they're looking at us and being like, hey, like, is this supposed to be doing this? Or like, am I doing this wrong? And kind of seeing what they're asking. Because we have a lot of assumptions when we're using a product we're building ourselves every single day. Like we know how it's supposed to work. And so we assume just everyone knows. Right. But that's not the case most of the time.

Were you way off on first version? Did you have to come back and say—

I mean, a lot of like the pieces, like on our assumptions too, but what was magical about Toucan is when we proved hypotheses wrong or questions we had wrong, the idea still got bigger. And that's where we were like, okay, there's something really interesting here.

Can you give an example of that? Like when I was like, oh, we were wrong about that, but now that means We need to cover this.

So some different of these teaching techniques where we were like hover for more or this inline translation, like, can we have it paired together? Do we need to do it separate? Like, do people even like this? Like, we are physically changing the web pages. Like, are people going to be annoyed with Toucan that they say screw you, I'm uninstalling you, see you later? But it was completely the opposite where they are asking us for more, like more moments of interaction. More features, more ways to engage. And we're like, this was completely against our thesis because we're like, they just want this like small little thing here and there, very gentle, but they're like, give us more.

More was like literal word, like give me more of the words in the other language?

Exactly. More inline translations, additional words, phrases, maybe even a small sentence. When we were really just trying to be like little tidbits, maybe 5 per page, just to make it not As little intrusive as possible.

Okay. So you had engagement and next up is like, as a founder, monetization strategy. Early on, did you have any like conception of what that would be or concept of what that would be?

Yeah. So we had 3 strategies right from the get-go. And actually something we've always told investors is path to profitability. Like we've had this on our mind since day one, because we want to build a sustainable long-term business and like really, and I iconic company and the path to get there is becoming profitable. So for us, we've always been thinking about this. We're generating revenue 2 different ways right now. One way is through a freemium subscription model. Like we built a bunch of subscription businesses. It's our bread and butter. Like that's what our core way of monetizing right now, Toucan. We also have this second monetization stream that's live right now called Own the Word. And we're really using it as a massive growth vector for Toucan. But people are still transacting. And this is an idea we had from day one, really, but just recently implemented. And so we have a lot of these words, phrases translated inline. We thought, what better way to give people a piece of the dictionary and ownership over our product if we allowed people to buy them? So if you see the word coffee translated inline and you hover over it, you'll see Morning Brew newsletter owns that word.

Oh, perfect.

Or if you find the word science translated line, you hover over it, you'll see Bill Nye owns the word. And any word purchased, you can include an optional URL. So if someone clicks into that, then we send them over to Morning Brew newsletter. And now they're on this website because we work across every single website. We don't care where people land.

Oh, perfect. So is it like a forever and for always you own this word?

It's a weekly subscription right now, and it's set up to increase churn, which is why it's a growth factor right now, because we want someone to share it out their network and then give us the word back so someone else can share it.

Yeah, that's brilliant. How much is a word? Are you bidding it?

Only $1 a week. If we wanted to start transferring it over to monetization, think of like very simple bidding structures or like more common words at a higher price as a starting point.

Uh-huh. Okay, so with profitability in mind from day one, maybe you weren't always thinking about raising venture capital, or maybe you were?

Yeah, so this is an interesting question for us, especially because my background also is in distribution and really organic distribution. So the growth of Toucan has really been organic. Like, we will at some point test paid acquisition just to understand our numbers, but like, we're not relying on our growth for that. And so a lot of people ask us like, why venture capital if you're so into organic distribution and also path to profitability in mind? But for us, venture capital was a way for us to go faster and really grow that team quicker in order for us to hit some key milestones and really just grease the wheels of everything that we were doing. So for us, like our entire— what the capital we've raised to date really has been to expanding the team and human capital. Really, that's it. Paid is a slippery slope, especially if you get started. It's almost like a drug that you can't stop. And I've seen Companies spend $100 million in one month or maybe less than a quarter. Like, that is something that is hard to unsee once you see it. And it's part of the things of like learnings from being within all of these high-growth tech companies, right? So with also my background in organic distribution, I like never had to like deal with, okay, CAC, what does this mean for us? Where are we putting our spend this month? Instead, my role has always been like, okay, who are the giants in this space? How can we work with them, partner with them so we can ride their coattails and their amazing audiences? And some examples of this too was when I was at Headspace, getting our content into every airline you can imagine in the in-flight entertainment consoles. Mm-hmm. Or partnering with Spotify to become the first ever bundle partner. Like, what are these really interesting partnerships where you can get access to these big audiences that you didn't have unless you unlock that? Own the Word is like partnership playground. Think of every music label you can partner with, all of their artists that want to launch songs or do press around that, every film studio, TV studio with upcoming launches there as well, even like TikTok influencers, micro influencers. It's owning words that then they can share out to the audience and Toucan gets eyeballs because they do that. Next massive playbook for us would be who are all the massive giants from Rosetta Stone, Babbel, Busuu, Duolingo? How do we partner with all of them? Because whether you are using a mobile app every single day or even textbook companies or a tutor marketplace, like we want to accelerate all of that learning that people are taking the time to do otherwise.

So you took this big story to market in the VC world. Can you tell me about the process? How long did it take you to raise? All the details.

All the details. Of course. All the scoop. So when we first went out to fundraise, we really just fundraised off of the team, the vision, that idea. We had a baby little alpha, but it broke everyone's computer if you installed it. So half the investors definitely did not install it. And it was really betting on us as a team that we could execute on what we said we were going to build. And it was very interesting reflecting to 12 months later, our lead investor GSV Ventures, they were actually talking to us and they're like, it's been 12 months since you closed that first round of funding and you're doing everything you said you were going to do and more. And like, it was just a vision at that time and like you've proved everything like that you said you were gonna do. And not even that, like the vision is still crystal clear of what Toucan can become and is on the path to becoming, which I think was really amazing to see. But when we went out to fundraise, I set it up very strategically in where I met with founders first, the first 2, 3 weeks, started pitching them. Founders know the questions that our investors are gonna ask so they can pull coals. They understand what the story to get through. So I was just And just rapid iteration, refining that pitch over and over again, just through pure repetition. And at the end of these meetings, I would ask for intros to investors that they loved working with that were on their own cap tables. And I was able to start stacking up meetings a few weeks from then and putting things back to back to back. And why I take the strategy of back to back is momentum, like making sure you're creating a market for your shares for this company that didn't really exist before. And some founders, it's really tough because these meetings can go so differently, even from within an hour. Like the first meeting can be, this is amazing, the best idea I've ever heard, to this is a terrible idea, this company is going nowhere and you should— don't waste your time on this.

Did you get any, this is a terrible idea?

Oh yeah, many, many times. Yes, especially because we were so early, they had nothing. They didn't have that many proof points to show them otherwise. And so it was just their gut and what they thought might happen. I mean, we had a lot of tough sells with Toucan right off the bat. One, our go-to-market is a Chrome extension as a product vertical. Every investor is asking, what's your mobile strategy? Because all they care about is mobile. But one of our unique insights is browser extension space is completely overlooked, massive distribution channel with so much potential. Then the other thing against us was edtech. Like language learning, super competitive space. So many people there, lots of incumbents, all doing very well, but like not people not wanting to bet in that space again and just being burned from edtech. Like since COVID now there's the brand halo around it again, but before there wasn't. So what was interesting after though, when we had closed, it took about 3 to 4 weeks to close our first round of funding, which was like very humbling and exciting. We got 3 different term sheets and were able to negotiate.

To the end was 3 to 4 weeks?

Yep. It went really fast for us. And I think it's because I did that back to back to back. That's great. But a few weeks after that, maybe 4 weeks after we closed, Honey got acquired for $4 billion.

Which put a spotlight on extensions, right?

Yes. And all of those investors that were telling me the idea was so terrible, Flooded my inbox right after that.

They just— everyone's got a theory for, you know, early-stage investing. Even the best VC firms, they're like, no, we got early-stage investing figured out. And then you see just terrible misses like Quibi where everybody poured on, but then you see these like completely overlooked investment opportunities. And like, from what I've heard listening to just other podcasts, it's like the VCs are more shook by the ones they missed. They look back and they're just like, hmm.

Yeah.

Right, you know, like everyone's got their little theory and it seems to break down at some point.

No, it's so true. And actually, like, that's something that I'm excited about too, being that one that people miss back when they look back, like, ooh, what did we not see? Or what did we miss? Or what did we hold too tightly that actually they proved to be wrong?

I'm curious what your metric for that will be.

One, just growth. So pure amount of users having used Toucan, but the engagement retention side. Our engagement retention metrics are really world-class, which is pretty exciting. Which means if someone installs Toucan, they are extremely sticky and they are learning every single day. It's not just you bought a product, it sits there, you never use it again. Or you never open the app or you never open the website. They are engaging with Toucan every single day. And if we can keep proving that piece out, that means Toucan becomes one of 5 products consumers use on a daily basis, which a lot of companies cannot say.

So your seed stage, which is right around the time you should have a great idea of product-market fit, but maybe not quite be there yet. Where are you on that curve? Are you satisfied? Are you ready to raise your Series A based on product-market fit, or do you have some work to do?

Yeah, so it's an elusive question, right, that we'll probably always— we'll have to keep an eye on too as we continue scaling. For us, one of the reasons why we're gearing up for that A next year is because we've hit product-market fit, and we think that we have, just purely based off of our growth. We've been growing close to 100% month over month. These past few months and our retention engagement metrics, world-class in this consumer tech arena. And with those aspects, we're like, okay, there's only a few more things we really want to unlock, prove out before we go out to raise our A. But with our A, like we have money in the bank, we have a lot of runway. So it's like, how do we pour fuel on this fire and scale this thing as we look to raise a bigger amount of venture capital?

That's awesome. So what do you think makes a great Series A company?

This is a good question. They become profitable, hands down. Like with that extra cash, like path to profitability within the next 12 months, like boom. They dominate the market. Like whatever they've proven to be true and how they believe they have product-market fit in, they now like hyper-scale to be the winner in that. Class, category, whatever it is that they hold true, that they've found this nugget of magic in, they become that winner and go after it quickly. Because if not, copycats or incumbents will come and build that magic themselves. I think the other piece too is on the hiring side. Can you hire the right team to build that thing as you continue growing simultaneously? And like, we've all been in companies where you can tell, like, people may be insanely talented, but they could also be huge assholes, and that doesn't help anyone. So hiring the right people, even though there is urgency, is a really important discipline and balance to be able to hold.

How do you do that?

So for us, it's like just really being able to understand and communicate with the whole team. This is a really important hire for us, but we want to create this amazing culture and maintain it where people are like value adds, not even culture fit. Like, how can they add to the culture and bring more on top of what is already happening? And I think as long as the team understands that, then it's like, okay, let's go after it quickly, but still have really high standards still.

How do you think about mapping your own current culture? so that you can look at the next hire as this like opportunity to balance in? I don't know what you would call it. Any, not shortcomings, but like culture areas of opportunity.

No, 100%. It's such a good question. And it's something that I have my eye on all the time. 'Cause I'm, I'm like 10 moves ahead in my head, as far as like who we're hiring and warming up those hires and not just relying on my network because even my own network has its own biases. Right. And how can I access people outside of my network? So we're getting all these new perspectives within Toucan. And so almost like being okay reaching out to people you do not know, because that is probably where some of this magic is going to happen. And what happens a lot of these like high-growth tech companies is you start needing to hire people really fast. So you can just really hire the people you know. And that's like okay for the first few hires, as long as you're diligent about like why and are they really the right person to hire. Right. But you start getting a lot of the same person teams because you just, they're all just friends from over the years.

So you touched on winning the market as part of a fundraise. Like, are you going after language edtech?

Yeah. So when we look at specifically language learning, like we're probably never going to build our own mobile app. Like, have no intention whatsoever to do that. I think all of the players that exist are doing a really good job. And if our thesis, right, is layering on top of existing behaviors, when we go into mobile, the strategy would not be to, let's build an iOS app or an Android app. Instead, it's how do we now layer Toucan on top of all of the existing major social apps and messaging apps? Or what does Toucan look like as a browser extension on mobile? So like very different type of strategy. But for us, it's like owning browser extensions from Chrome, Firefox, Safari, having the 80% of the language learning market dominated. So that's 30+ language vectors. So not just English to Spanish, but Spanish back to English. And then starting to explore what does this look like on mobile and even also starting to explore what are different education content verticals. articles we go after next. Is it history? Is it science? Is it sports trivia? Urban Dictionary information? Yeah.

Oh my God. Okay, so you could— I've always had a ton of trouble learning French slang. There's like the academic French language and then there's how French people speak in a bar and it's not— it's 2 different languages almost.

Totally.

Social networking, like written social networking language would be awesome for that.

100%. And what's very interesting about Toucan is we will be creating the largest up-to-date corpus of how people talk. And like, what the heck is a corpus? I didn't know what this word is. It's literally like, how are people talking and communicating to one another? Just by the fact that we're layered on top of Facebook and Twitter and Medium, these are people talking to each other in real time, like up-to-date slang or verbiage that we can start using our machine learning to understand how to translate from one language to another, which then allows people to understand, okay, I want to talk to another human, not in academic French, but how people are really speaking to each other in French.

Have you hit a growth wall? Probably not. But where do you like forecast that you'll run into growth issues?

So it's a really interesting question because if you look at how laser-focused we are. We are literally just Google Chrome, an extension, and we are only English to 5 languages. So the addressable market for that is small when you think of, okay, what can we start unlocking to open up this potential addressable market, whether that's Firefox, Safari, to like have all browser potential. Then like new languages, Japanese, Russian, Korean, those languages back to English. Spanish to French, vice versa, like then that addressable market keeps getting bigger and bigger and opens up even more growth potential. Like for us growing 100% month over month, we're not slowing down anytime soon and still like early enough to know we're not tapping out of organic growth. But as we start looking like really early already, like how do we ride on top of big giants that exist to get as many people as possible that we know are already interested in learning languages?

Well, we're coming up on time here and I want to make sure that I ask you if you have like a good call to action for the audience.

Yes. If anyone's interested, download Toucan for free, it's at jointoucan.com and feel free to shoot me any feedback that you have at all, or even if you just want to say hello, my email is taylor.nieman@jointoucan.com.

Amazing. Well, thanks so much for your time. This has been great.

Thank you, Dan. This was awesome. And thank you everyone for listening to this story about Toucan. Really appreciate it.