Summer French Testin' Happened So Fast ...

Posted by Gruff Davies

on 07 July 2015

Comments: 2

The last few months seem to have flown as quickly as we’ve grown! We’ve doubled in size again in just three months, both in total tests taken and registered users. Thank you so much for all the wonderful feedback and comments you’ve been sending in, too. It makes our hard work worthwhile. Keep ’em coming!

Click a headline to skip to that section. Here’s the roundup:

Kwiziq’s exponential growth continues
We’ve partnered with Laura K. Lawless
Features for Teachers is now live
Kwiziq is about to raise money through CrowdCube

Kwiziq’s Exponential Growth Continues

Kwiziq doubled in size Apr to June

When I last posted in April, we’d reached 45,000 tests and just three months later we’ve had more than 90,000 (94,209 as I write), so we’re going to hit the 100k mark in the next week or so. As well as our lovely students telling all their friends about us, several things have helped pushed us along:

Firstly, an answer that I wrote to a question on Quora about the best ways to learn a foreign language proved really popular and was featured in Huffington Post and Business Insider – check it out in any of these places for a my top tips.

Secondly…

We’ve partnered with Laura K. Lawless!

We are very excited to announce that our first online Education Partner is none other than the legendary Laura K Lawless!

Laura is an incredibly prolific online writer as well as a renowned language expert, and is the author of several books including Intermediate French for Dummies.

If you’ve ever searched the internet for help on a point of French grammar then you will have almost certainly read something written by her. Laura wrote all of about.com’s French content in the years between 1999 and 2014. Then she decided to set up her own French learning resource site: Lawless French.

This terrific site now features a Kwiziq-powered section called Progress with Lawless French, which adds Kwiziq’s A.I. Language Coaching to her brilliant content. If you already have a Kwiziq login, you’ll be able to log in using that. Your French learning dashboard will look familiar and contain your existing data. Over time, we’ll be improving the integration of her content with our technology.

We have developed a suite of tools to help the amazing language writers out there supercharge their content. We’ll be launching with more partners soon, so watch this space.

Features for Teachers is now live

We have also now officially launched the first of our Features for Teachers. It’s called Studygroups and allows anyone who works with groups of students (teachers, tutors or even study buddies and Meetups) to manage groups of students. You can see how the group is doing as a whole, and drill down into individual students. We’ll be adding a lot more to this feature in the coming months, including the ability to set homework and study lists. If you’d like to use this feature, get in touch.

Kwiziq is about to raise money through CrowdCube

Our application to raise money through CrowdCube has been accepted and we’re nearing the end of lengthy due diligence process prior to launching the campaign. If you’d like to learn more, details are on Kwiziq’s main site.

Crowdcube is the world’s leading investment crowdfunding platform. Unlike shares purchased through some other services such as KickStarter, investors through Crowdcube own shares in the company.

We have entirely self-funded Kwiziq to date and, while we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved, we now feel the time is right to accelerate with some seed capital. As well as vastly improving the product, this will enable us to launch in Spanish. It will also help us to add more content for advanced French students.

I’ll be posting more about this very soon!

Author info

Gruff Davies

[Follow on Twitter: @gruffdavies] Despite the very Welsh name, Gruff is actually half French. Nowadays, he's a tech entrepreneur (and some-time novelist) but he used to be a physicist at Imperial College before getting hooked on inventing things. He has a special interest in language learning, speaks five languages to varying degrees of fluency and he often blogs about language learning, science, and technology. As well as co-founding Kwiziq, he is the author the Amazon best-selling SF thriller, The Looking Glass Club and the inventor of the Exertris gaming exercise-bike and Pidgin, a free online tool that makes drawing flow charts and relationship diagrams as quick and easy as describing them in pidgin English.