An amazing fact that everyone usually forgets. Learning is primarily about memorization! If we remembered everything we read, heard, and watched — we’d know a ton of things 😉 It turns out you can earn money not only by “teaching”. But also by helping to remember what has been studied elsewhere. And here’s a live example to copy with 300,000 users.
THE ESSENCE OF THE PROJECT
Gizmo offers the “simplest way to learn anything.” However, I noticed that they are still testing the main offer by inserting different slogans into the header of the main page upon the first visit to their site.
For example, “Ace your exam, spending only 10 minutes a day.”
Or “Learn 10 times faster with our AI.”
The peculiarity is that Gizmo is not a platform with educational courses. It’s an AI-machine helping to better memorize what you’ve just learned somewhere else – on an online course, in class, or during self-study.
The method used for this is old — cards with concepts, facts, formulas, and other things, which you should periodically go through, reminding yourself of what you want to remember. Such cards are widely used in language learning — when a foreign word is written on one side and its translation in the native language on the other side.
The main feature of the platform is that you don’t have to bother, independently and from scratch, creating sets of cards on the studied topic. Although this can also be done here — but, the AI-machine of the platform can suggest the content of the cards during the process, for example, offering ready-made explanations of concepts and terms that you enter into the card.
There is also a simpler option. You can upload educational material (textbook, instructions, article) to the platform — and the AI-machine will create a set of cards with key points from the uploaded material. These cards can also be edited or you can add your own to this set. The platform supports different formats of uploaded materials — text documents and PDF files, PowerPoint presentations, web pages, and even YouTube videos.
Also, on the platform, you can find already prepared sets of cards on the required topic — if someone else created them and allowed access to them for everyone.
Access to your own sets of cards doesn’t necessarily have to be allowed to everyone — you can share them only with colleagues, classmates, or friends found on the platform.
In this sense, the platform is structured like a usual social network. Here you can follow each other, you can accept friend requests — and after that, see the feed with new sets of cards from the people you have subscribed to.
Moreover, the platform tracks how regularly users review the sets of cards and tries to stimulate this — praising you for progress and calling on all your subscribers to rejoice at this with you.
What’s most important — Gizmo itself suggests the sets of cards that need to be reviewed right now, to remember and better memorize the information contained on these cards.
The startup claims that they have already gathered 300 thousand users on their platform and are growing by 50% per month, mainly thanks to word of mouth.
Investors found such indicators promising, as now the startup has raised its first round of investments amounting to 3.5 million dollars.
What’s Interesting
Online education is a huge market. Yet, most startups focus on creating platforms for conveying information in the form of educational courses, short videos, or any other formats.
The astonishing fact that everyone usually forgets is that learning is primarily about memorizing! If we remembered everything we read, listened to, and watched — we would know a ton of things 😉
However, the problem is that an average person can only remember 60% of what they have just learned after 20 minutes. And after a week — at best 10%.
Therefore, the quality of our learning will depend not on how many lessons we watch — but on how much we remember from them.
Moreover, to remember something, we don’t need to spend time to repeat it every day. There’s an experimentally confirmed “Ebbinghaus forgetting curve,” which sets the necessary periodicity of repetitions, necessary and sufficient for achieving a high percentage of memorization. Gizmo will provide sets of cards with such periodicity.
Gizmo decided to enter the huge education market “through the backdoor.” While most other startups are churning out educational courses and platforms for educational courses, Gizmo provides a useful tool for those users of all these courses and platforms who really want to remember more of what they have just learned.
The more educational courses and platforms there are, the more users they have — the larger Gizmo’s potential audience will be!
This reminded me of the startup Context. They noticed that AI chatbots began gaining popularity sharply — but didn’t make yet another platform for creating chatbots. They made a “debugger-platform,” which helps to analyze the effectiveness of real usage of chatbots created on any other platform.
So the “second derivative” approach from the hype — rules. If the “first derivative” is called more obvious things like platforms for educational courses or platforms for creating chatbots.
Also, Gizmo has a very cool monetization model — although the service is free in principle.
They give each user 15 “lives” per day. Each time a user guesses the answer on the back of the card incorrectly, one life burns.
If all lives are burnt, then to add a new life, allowing the continuation of card usage, you need to wait 10 minutes. Or pay for a monthly subscription right away — which will give an unlimited number of lives and will be extended for the next month automatically.
Moreover, in free mode, the platform’s AI-machine can create only 10 new cards per day for the user. And with a subscription, the number of new cards becomes unlimited.
The subscription costs 8.8 dollars per month or 52.8 dollars when paid for a year at once.
In other words, those who use the cards more often and learn better — might not have to pay at all. And those who are lazy and, as a result, remember little — will have to pay. It’s similar to if fitness clubs would charge their members not for the calendar year or for visiting the club — but for each day of non-attendance 😉
A cool monetization method that can be tried elsewhere.
Where to Run
Gizmo made an excellent choice — to enter the large and growing education market by creating not a “core,” but an “ancillary” product. In this way, it can successfully “accompany” everyone who is engaged in creating educational courses, platforms for educational courses, and platforms for creating educational courses.
Assistance in memorizing the covered material, like in Gizmo — is just one option for an ancillary product.
Another option was offered by the startup Sizzle. It created an application that helps high school students and students solve problems from homework assignments. Its feature is that the app doesn’t give ready-made answers — but suggests the path to solve the problem, which the student must follow themselves.
And these two options of useful ancillary products are surely not the only ones.
Well, the general direction of movement can be formulated like this — creating ancillary products based on AI technology.
For instance, in the field of education — in the likeness of Gizmo or Sizzle. Or in any other theme, where AI can start bringing accompanying benefits to the main processes.
What other ancillary products in the field of education can there be? In what other themes can AI be applied to create ancillary products? What main processes and how exactly can they accompany?
About the Company
Gizmo
Website: gizmo.ai
Last round: $3.5M, 21.09.2023
Total investments: $3.5M, rounds: 1