Kantalk is more or less a social network for language learners. It’s a place where non-English speakers can find topics of interest practice their English on a native speaker and share the lesson through video. I had the opportunity to talk to David Liu, one of the creators of Kantalk. Here is what he had to say about his product, and about digital entrepreneurship.

Kantalk

When I first came to the U.S. over a decade ago, I had no culture shock; I had a language shock. No one seemed to understand my English. That’s after I had studied English for ten years prior. I only managed to pick up spoken English thereafter, not in the classroom, but mostly in the social settings.

My experience wasn’t alone. Millions of English learners had similar shock, mainly because it’s hard to access to a community for frequent practice and feedback outside classroom. That’s the problem we tried to solve; that’s why my friends and I started KanTalk.

We want to create a vibrant, supportive network for the non-native speakers to learn and practice English with ease and confidence. We can do it because of ever-growing Internet users worldwide. It’s dirt cheap, if not downright free, for anyone to talk with others in any part of the world over Internet. It’s a mouse click to reach a vast amount of English contents, in the forms of text, audio and video.

At KanTalk, we leverage the free VOIP tool like Skype, the video-serving site like YouTube, and the digital recorder we developed to connect the global learners and let them practice and share with one another. These features make it much more effective for our users to improve their spoken English.

Developing KanTalk and growing the community has been an exciting journey for us. The best lesson we’ve learned is that we can’t plan every feature and function in advance. It works more like a trial-and-error. We need to be creative to come up with new ideas, built some of them quickly, and let our users tell us how it fares. That’s how we successfully released the features Recording, Video Transcribing, and Lesson.

Once we put out a new feature, it’s also critical that we stay open-minded to the suggestions and criticism from our users, and be flexible to make the changes accordingly. It’s easy said than done because of priorities or resource constraints, but we did our best to keep a good balance.

The major challenge for us is not from the technical but marketing front. We spent almost next to nothing to promote our site. The user growth has been steady mainly due to the word of mouth. However, we want to grow our user base aggressively. We need to be more creative
in reaching a much larger pool of English learners worldwide.

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I just wanted to thank David again for taking to time to talk to us. If you are an entrepreneur with a story to tell, drop me a line.

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