Learning any language can be an exhaustive process. The vocabulary aspects of the language have to be perfect to get anywhere close to talking or understand the language. Moreover, learning any language overnight is never possible. Constant efforts have to be made daily to get a grip of any language.
For the same venture, a company named Deck mill allows users to learn any language through cards. These cards comprise of frequently used sentences that could be used in our daily lives. Speaking with the CEO of Deck mill, André Melo, a few excerpts from our interview is provided below.
What is the startup / product / venture about? Give us a brief description of it.
Deckmill is a one-stop shop for high quality, affordable flashcards for language learning. We charge a one-time fee of 15€ for access to all our flashcards in 8 different languages.
Our flashcards were compiled using a mix of machine learning and hand curation by native speakers. The result is 3000 flashcards (per language) that guide you from a beginning to advanced stage in your language learning. Additionally, all the flashcards have top notch audio so you can learn perfect pronunciation.
How many co-founders are there? Please introduce them and their backgrounds.
André Melo is a PhD student working on quantum computing at the Delft University of Technology. When he’s not thinking about physics, he enjoys working on software engineering projects and learning new languages.
Miguel Jaques is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. His work focuses on integrating physics with deep learning from vision, with connections to control, interpretability, probabilistic modelling and reasoning.
How did you come up with the idea? What motivated you to do this?
Flashcards are one of the simplest, yet most effective tools for language learning. However, it’s surprisingly hard to find high quality decks online. You certainly can make your own, but it’s pretty time consuming. That was our motivation to build Deckmill, a website with high quality language learning materials that don’t break your bank account.
Who is your target market? Why do you think your product will appeal to them?
language learners
Who are your competitors? How are you different from them?
There are some apps with good flashcards (Memrise, Glossika, etc), but they tend to be prohibitively expensive and require subscriptions. This excludes a large portion of users who simply cannot afford to pay 15-25$ per month to learn a language.
At Deckmill we believe language learning materials should be accessible to everyone. Due to our highly automated way of building flashcards, we offer high quality decks at a fraction of the cost of our competitors. We will never charge you pesky subscriptions: you pay once and get access to all our content forever.
What are the future plans with the product/startup? Any new features you are planning on?
We are working on expanding to more languages, namely Japanese, Russian and Mandarin Chinese. We also plan to expand our material for users that don’t speak English (e.g. a Spanish-speaking person that wants to learn English).