We had the opportunity to sit with the founder and CEO of Beeblio for a brief interview. In case you’ve never heard about it, Beeblio is a mobile app and web application that aims at helping students, business professionals or anyone learn words quicker without the need of sitting in a boring class or breaking the bank.
Q. Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
A: My background is in technology. I did an studied physics in my country, then engineering in Italy. I’ve worked in the tech industry, in different roles for many years now. I love thinking about, designing, and building products. Not only software products but everything that can stimulate my engineering mind. I have had previous experiences with other tech startups, but this time around, I wanted to take things in my arms, from the technical to the operational standpoint, and develop something that has been on my mind for a long time now. I believe in using technology to improve people’s lives, from the most mundane aspects to the most serious.
Q. How will you Describe Beeblio?
Beeblio is a multi-faceted application, suitable for international students, business-oriented English learners, writers, journalists, tutors and anyone wanting to improve their vocabulary in a specific area. The beeblio app is driven towards helping you learn new words without the structure of a boring English class or certification course. It was created to make learning new words stress-free and less time-consuming.
Q. What was the motivation behind Beeblio?
Several times througout my life I had to learn a foreign language. The first few times, it was more of learning a language as a subject during my school years, the experience was sometimes exciting and often times dull. I suspected many pupils felt bored aswell. However, a few years after high school, I ended up learning Italian in order to attend college in Italy. The only Italian word I knew when I started was “ciao”. And over a time frame of about 4 months, I noticed I begun using the dictionary more than I had ever used it in my entire life. It is very typical of most languages that as your knowledge grows, you need to look up fewer and fewer words in the dictionary. At some point, I started wondering whenever I would study a new text: what if I could instantly get from this text a list of all the words that are new to me? How fast would that make my studying? How many more texts would I be able to study in the same amount of time? How quickly would that help me master the language? Now, of course, knowing a language is a lot more than just knowing a list of words. Grammar and idiomatic expressions are just a couple of language concepts that might seem not directly correlated to vocabulary. But in reality, there is nothing that can make you trip more in the comprehension of a text than a word you know nothing about, and that you can’t accurately guess based on the context. This is also true whether you’re learning the basics of a language, or you’re learning a very specialized topic at the most advanced level. So that’s how Beeblio was born as a concept, even though it took many more years to materialize.
Q. What kind of people were your target market when you decided to create Beeblio?
A: The interesting thing about Beeblio is that it can be useful to every language user, regardless of the level. As a software, it is currently available in English only, and it does require some familiarity with the environment and the device where it is executed, but any user aged 10 or older can benefit from Beeblio. That being said, people that we’ve seen were able to take the most advantage of this product are: 1 – schoolchildren after the 3rd grade. 2 – language teachers or tutors of any level. Parents also fall into this case 3 – people studying English for academic purposes, or other specialized uses.
It has been a hit with people preparing for certifications like ESL, TOEFL, GRE, SAT, IELTS, etc… It has also been a hit with people studying business English, and those looking to sharpen their language skills to be better in their fields; these are bloggers, journalists, writers, scientists and so on.
The way Beeblio is able to achieve relevance in such a wide range of the audience is by applying a very simple concept at different scales. See, regardless of your mastery of the English language, they will be words that you are unfamiliar with. Beeblio just helps you find those words, and let you decide how you want to learn more about them, by showing you how each word is pronounced, written and letting you listen to the audio of sentences where the word is used in the context of the text that you provide.
Q. What is the aim of Beeblio?
A: The aim of beeblio is basically to make language learning even easier than what it already is, and also fun. We believe more than 80% of adults have a need to learn a foreign language at some point in their life. If we can improve the experience of only one person who embarks on the journey of learning a language, whether it be a new language or just improving their level in the native language, then we feel it will be worth it.
Q. What makes Beeblio standout from other vocabulary apps and platforms?
A: I personally believe Beeblio stands out with not only its design but in so many different ways. Beeblio has been praised for the ease of use of its interface by its users. My team and I like how the main interactions that the user has with the application occur in just a couple of pages with a clean and simplistic design. One of the main design objectives was to keep everything that the user doesn’t need away from the sight until the user needs it. And when the user needs a feature, it’s intuitively available while remaining discreet. We’re very proud of the result, and the user feedback so far confirms our optimism.
Q: Why should anyone use Beeblio and not any other vocabulary app?
A: That’s a good question. For one thing, there is no other application (as far as we know ) that takes the same approach that we’re taking. They are other tools to help a user improve their vocabulary out there, but none takes the systematic and personalized approach that Beeblio has. If you want to improve your vocabulary based on texts that you have no control over, if you want to use vocabulary lists pre-built by some statistics and other analytics then Beeblio might not be the right tool for you. However, if you want to be in control, by deciding which news article you want to learn from, which classic work of literature you want to draw your inspiration and vocabulary from, if you want to study a text that was recommended in a class, or build your very personalized vocabulary list, then we think you’ll find Beeblio to be quite uniquely positioned to help you. Naturally, vocabulary is not everything when it comes to language learning. But drawing from my own experience, as someone who speaks 3 languages fluently, a good vocabulary is the cornerstone of language fluency.
Q: Is Beeblio only an ios app or is it available on other apps stores?
A: Today Beeblio is available as a web application that you can use from your browser by visiting https://web.beebl.io You can use Beeblio from a computer, a tablet, or a phone. We’ve designed a responsive experience that adapts to your screen. But we’re also very excited to announce that Beeblio will be available as a mobile application on Android Play Store and Apple store no later than February 2021.
Q. How many users do you currently have?
We currently have several thousands users and we are not even a month old. We are looking forward to thousands if not millions of users using Beeblio to improve their vocabs. Our current registered users already love using our platform because they are getting the results they want.
Q. Where do you see Beeblio in the next 5 years?
We are seeing a lot of users come to our platform, and we just recently launched. The journey is a long way from being done and we keep on developing. Our objective is to make Beeblio the number 1 vocabulary application that actually helps users learn languages with ease. Identifying what our users want and doing a better job of improving our platform and giving them what they need in order to excel, will make all the difference in our company’s future.
Q. What challenges are you facing with your startup?
Challenges are part a startup or an entrepreneur’s life. We’ve faced our fair share since we launched the online platform, however, this hasn’t discouraged us in any way to. We believe in order to succeed, you have to go through some trials and tribulations. The more mistakes we make, the more we learn from them and hope to improve ourselves to better serve our user with our software.
Q. What are you working on right now?
Beeblio all the time. I mean it’s my new project so I’m focused on that all damn day. I spend about 10 hours in my office (from home) almost every. I also do a lot of work on the weekends but I mostly like to use that to relax and plan for the week ahead.
Q. How are your mornings like?
My morning routine is quite normal, at least I like to think that haha. I wake up around 8 – 8:30 every day, get ready, make some coffee and head straight to my desk. I know I might sound like a workaholic because maybe I am. I love what I do. I get excited working on new projects and I have a passion for building new things.
Q. What will you like to say to anyone reading this?
First of all, I’ll like to thank you for reading until this point. If you have an idea and intention of building something awesome to help people better their lives, don’t give up! You never know who your product, app, or service might help. No matter how lame you think your idea might be, someone somewhere right now in maybe another country or anywhere might need that “lame idea” to help his/her life become better than it is. Secondly, be focused, this is very vital because it helps you think effectively.
Focus on something you want to do and make sure to get it done no matter what. Focusing will also help you work and study better. People who tend to focus on anything they do tend to be more successful as compared to people who do not.
The last thing I want to say to anyone reading this who wants to improve their vocabulary is to visit web.beebl.io and download the Beeblio app when we publish it on the app stores in February 2021 to start learning new words.
Thanks for reading!
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