EXECUTION & SCALE-UP

Landing page eJOY SBC Round 3

Business Mantra

“Play, learn, grow. English joy for all”

We have created a personal development tool to assist individuals in overcoming language barriers and enhancing their skills for better job opportunities. Regardless of one’s background, social status, or financial situation, our tool strives to empower everyone in reaching their full potential.

Vision, Mission

Our new BMC

In the new business model, the value proposition that eJOY brings to all students primarily focuses on a 5x increase in learning efficiency and a 5x reduction in study costs for students who want to  improve English skills to seek suitable job opportunities.

Customer Segment

eJOY targets a mass market, with only one need in common: To optimize the time spent on learning. Our users come from all over the world and encompass a wide range of ages, professions, and financial backgrounds. We are thrilled to serve over 1.5 million people, and we are especially proud that 86.7% of them can enjoy our solution without any financial concerns.

However, we segment our customers into:

• Learners: People (including students and workers) who choose eJOY as a learning platform provider. With eJOY, they want to enhance their English skills to adapt with current working/studying environment.
• Non-learners: People without English proficiency who want to optimize their efficiency on working tasks especially secondary research.

A2.2 Social Value

Being an Edtech solution, eJOY contributes to breaking down the barriers of difference, confidence among public learning classes.

With the unique selling points of On demand and Personalization, our beneficiaries include:

• Students with disabilities: No need to depend on others or face pejoratives. eJOY creates a platform for learning which mitigates personal differences.
• Students lacking studying condition: Poor areas students recognize lacking access to technology-education as one of their biggest gaps compared to urban children. eJOY sponsors free pro-plans of subscription for those students in mountainous areas of Vietnam including Pu Mat and Cao Bang.
• People lacking English Proficiency: Accessing Internet resources without English proficiency is considered a big disadvantage. eJOY helps to solve this by creating a one-click solution to immediate translation and learning vocabularies.

With the freemium and the learn-to-earn model, eJOY is helping 1.5 million global learners easily and effectively access knowledge while improving their English skills, regardless of social status, location, language, or culture.

After the story of Tran Viet Hoang being released on eJOY stories feature, more than 10 analogous cases have been reported, which helps prove the eJOY range of impact. 32.8 of eJOY’s learners also said that they achieved the improvement of 1.5 band IELTS after only 3 months using this solution.

A2.1 Economic Value

• eJOY offers convenience and on-demand learning, enhancing user productivity by analyzing user behavior and integrating technology and design principles.
• With 5 years of experience in the Edtech market, eJOY focuses on data-driven decision making and cross-platform acquisition. By reducing churn rate, optimizing time switching features, and enhancing synchronization, eJOY achieves a 5 times efficiency rate in time spent on learning English.
• The annual subscription costs only $100, already 5 times lower than the average expenditure of over $500 per person per year on English language learning. Hence, 49.5% of active students are willing to pay for eJOY subscription plans.

A2.3 Profitability

Our profitability generation mechanism comprises of 2 strategies:

Reducing the cost:

• We collaborate with AI model providers (OpenAI, ChatGPT, Amazon) and receive sponsorships from cloud hosting services (Microsoft). Hence, we can reduce the cost spent on platform maintenance.
• Creating an eJOY learner community via social media has also helped us to reduce the cost paid for pilot users, conducting statistics and surveys.
• Attending social and non-social business competitions to seek for crowdfunding opportunities/investment/partnerships, social and intellectual capitals.

 

Profitability mechanism:

The income generation mechanism of eJOY is a circulation between business expansion, seeking for investment, users’ adoption growth, profit growth and reinvestment into expansion.

We generate our income based on these streams:

• Plans of subscription
• Ads for Freemium
• Coaching Service: eJOY soon realizes that an educational community has to include not only learners, but also teachers. Since then, we update our revenue streams of coaching services, where eJOY learners can register for free plans of learning and soon become English coach internships for eJOY. As they have deeply experienced eJOY, they can utilize the tools and widely introduce them to other learners.
• Corporate fee for talent acquisition
• Corporate sales for corporate training

A2.4 Demonstrate our past performance & Growth rate

Past performance:

– Users Acquisition: 1.5 million users in 20 countries, 800K active users monthly and 50,000 new app installations in a month

– Sales: 30.000 paid users annually

– Revenue per year by 2023: Approximately $2.000.000 compared to $700.000 of 2022

– Human capital: Most of the employees have many years of experience in their areas, and always fulfill their roles. They have unlimited creativity and enthusiasm that promote growth potential.

– Marketing: we use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and LinkedIn to connect with potential learners and businesses.

Result of the marketing campaign:

+ 52% GvA reach (+359% comparing to average number) 

+ 72% GvA new followers (+372% comparing to average number) 

+ 96% GvA new users (0% comparing to average number) 

+ 107% GvA DAU (10% comparing to average number)

We create and publish high-quality content that is relevant to my target audiences. This content includes blog posts, articles, infographics, and videos. We distribute them through website, social media channels. 

– Partnerships: We collaborate with language schools, educational institutions, and other organizations to promote our product.

Growth potentials:

– eJOY’s customer monthly growth rate: 10%

– Customer Acquisition Cost: 0.04 dollar/user

100% of eJOY customer acquisition was from world of mouth in 2022. In 2023, we started to invest financial capitals into marketing. However, eJOY realizes we have only invested in basic marketing strategies. In the future, to enhance the user growth rate and profitability, we intend to integrate gamification.

Growth mechanisms:

Here’s how we intend to acquire more customers and enhance potential customers’ awareness:

• Marketing: Integrate gamification into marketing strategies in order to demonstrate the product USPs of convenience and personalization.
• Releasing appropriate revenue stream: Collaborate with educational institutes, release educational plans of subscription.
• Product: Create features helping teachers to assign homework for learners with existing games on our Extension.
• Learning and adaption: Attend in social competitions to expand our impact and enhance SROI.

Our leading KPI (By the end of 2024):

• 3.000.000 users
• 50.000.000 paid users annually

B1.1 Human Capital

eJOY’s diverse and skilled team of professionals contributes expertise in product development, technology, and pedagogy, ensuring the company’s success. Our businesses’ priorities in human capital is creativity, critical thinking, open communication, mutual respect, and inclusivity, fostering a supportive environment for teamwork, knowledge sharing, and personal and professional growth.

Our strategy to maintain such working environment:

• Employees are empowered to take ownership of their projects and initiatives, encouraged experimentation, risk-taking, and learning from successes and failures. Among 20 features updated annually, the majority of them are not first suggested by leaders.
• eJOY invests in employee growth and knowledge: Recognizing the evolving learning landscape in technology and language education, our company also encourages mentorship and knowledge-sharing, fostering camaraderie and a user-centric approach to product development.
• Always prioritize learning and adaption: As a technology company, we foster a high learning curve. We attend global technological workshops hosted by big conglomerates, start-up discussion programs and bilateral relations enhancement programs. Since then, we learn and recognize the change in markets, and moreover forecast the trends so that we can adapt in such continuously changing era.

B1.2 Social Capital

eJOY’s social capitals comprise of:

• Bonding social gap: include Ha Noi University of Science and Technology, Lac Hong university and Foreign Trade University.
• Bridging social gap: Communities of specialists in marketing, design and education. (Ex: Vietnam Learning Design Group)
• Linking social gap: ABG Leadership institute and SBC Competition.

 

This year witnessed the newly established collaboration between eJOY and some universities as well as student associations all over Hanoi. It has been eJOY’s honor to attend the abc’s workshop, a grand scholarship for the less advantaged students.

Our strategy to expand eJOY’s range of social capitals is to taking parts in social-oriented competitions, seeking for partnerships and prestigious proof for our social impacts. Thus, it’s easier for next-stage collaboration with local authorities, supporting us to expand our sponsorships program to other mountainous areas and seeking for crowdfunding opportunities/investments.

B1.3 Intellectual Capital

eJOY’s intellectual capital comprises of:

• Three platforms (eJOY Extension, eJOY Epic app, eJOY Reader) with over 20 features updated annually
• Strong tech team
• Innovative algorithms
• Partnerships: AI model providers GG, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Strategies for maintenance and enhancement:

• To ensure data security, eJOY is submitting its source code for patents.
• Collaborating with partnerships
• Attending social and non-social business competition to seek for partnerships, investments, expand our social and business impacts.
• Attending bilateral relations enhancement program between Vietnam and other countries: To seek for opportunities for expansion to other potential markets.

 

B1.4 Manufactured Capital

Showcased on the picture is eJOY’s manufacture capitals. Since our most important resources are intangible, eJOY always tries to optimize the manufactured capital so that the tools’ depreciation time will be optimized, and we could do the tasks at our most productive. For instance, the software system downtime is only 2-3 times annually. These tools are 100% involved in our business expansion-oriented activities, which makes the ROA of 25%.

Strategies for maintenance and enhancement:

By showcasing the potentials and growth pace of our product, we can more easily collaborate with cloud server and AI model providers to not only integrate AI into our product, but also into optimizing our internal business activities for human resource management, data analysis tools.

B1.5 Financial Capital

Our main financial needs refer to RnD, which sums up to 100 million VND a month for operating cash flow and investing cash flow. RnD includes new product analysis, development which helps us to sustain our business and expansion.

Strategy for maintenance and enhancement:

Besides 100% equity capital, focusing on RnD also gains eJOY opportunity for new investments. Apart from the monthly sponsorship from cloud hosting platform Microsoft, since the success of calling investments from Thinkzone and BKFund, our team has made a leap in the numbers of users, from 500K to approximately 1.5 million users.

From the profit we have gained, we are now releasing more AI updates, which also helps us to access investments and crowdfunding sources.

We also attend social and non-social business competitions in order to seek investors, stakeholders, partnerships and more chances for expansion. With that in priority, we won the championship of Startup Viet in 2022.

B2.1 Past performance and strategy for improvement

Past performance:

Marketing and customer acquisition: We have lack investment in marketing campaigns. Before 2023, eJOY did not spend capitals on marketing. Our customer acquisition came from Word of Mouth. It took us 4 years to achieve 1 million users. After the seed round investment from Thinkzone and BKFund, it took us only 6 months to make a leap to 1.5 million users (now) by the integration of marketing strategies via browsers’ ads, campaigns and collaboration with institutes. Since this event, we understand a big gap, and a big potential to scalability by investing more into marketing.

– Users Acquisition: 1.5 million users in 6 countries, 800K active users monthly and 50,000 new app installations in a month

– Revenue per year by 2023: Approximately $2.000.000 compared to $700.000 of 2022

– Marketing: we use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and LinkedIn to connect with potential learners and businesses.

Result of the marketing campaign:

+ 52% GvA reach (+359% comparing to average number) 

+ 72% GvA new followers (+372% comparing to average number) 

+ 96% GvA new users (0% comparing to average number) 

+ 107% GvA DAU (10% comparing to average number)

+ Ad click-through rate: 17.3%

Realistically, eJOY’s now biting a small piece of Edtech cake. However, these numbers have a big potential to grow. eJOY’s current customer acquisition cost was 1.000 VND per user owing to the utilization of WOM. With the leading KPI of 20M users by the end of 2024, we are seeking for a huge scalability in our business. Here’s how we analyze the strategies:

• Realizing the big gap, we intend to release and focus more on marketing strategies and gamification as a free trial to our potential customers. According to our statistics, eJOY’s ad click-through rate is 6.7% Gamifications primarily demonstrate the USP: convenient and on demand.
• Besides, the technology era eliminates not only employees, but also enterprises which can not stay updated. eJOY knows that in order to expand, we have to integrate AI, optimize our design, features to become more convenient, user friendly and help users to achieve what they want. Since then, we observe the customer behavior through data analytics, brainstorming solutions appropriate with their needs and heavily using AI as a technique to deliver the values we create.
• eJOY’s internal business priority is to make decisions based on data.

By synthesizing customers’ feedback, we have released our product and business roadmap in 2023:

• Our customers’ prioritized needs is Synchronization across platforms. Since then, we release web-version epic and mobile-version extensions in order to help transfer data in just several actions.
• To make learning more enjoyable, we supplement Pro Game on eJOY app

B2.2 return on investment (ROI) and social return of investment (SROI) and strategy to improve

Why we need to improve:

• In phase 3 of the roadmap, we intend to seek for investors after developing Chinese learning features. The improvement in ROI helps us to attract new investments.
• In order to access funding sources, SROI will play role as a proof for our social impacts.

B3 major risks & Strategy to manage these risks

 

 

 

C1. the magnitude of your target social problem and the size of your market

Although we have just integrated some basic marketing campaigns (with the CAC of 0.04 dollar/user), we have achieved an incredible result in just 2 months:

+ 52% GvA reach (+359% comparing to average number) 

+ 72% GvA new followers (+372% comparing to average number) 

+ 96% GvA new users (0% comparing to average number) 

+ 107% GvA DAU (10% comparing to average number)

By 2024, we intend to expand our target audience to other countries with similar learning behaviors in APAC, with the expecation of 100-120% leap in number of users by the end of the year.

C2 Competition and competitive strategy

eJOY realizes that inconvenience is the deep pain point of users, causing low average retention rate and high churn rate. Hence, eJOY prioritizes convenience in product releases.

• Representing as an Extension helps us to achieve high ad click-through rate and observe customers’ behavior via many sources of data and statistics: Google, Bing, eJOY platform and marketing websites. eJOY conducts wide-ranging research about highly repetitive tasks in learning vocabulary and grammar, since then releasing features solving those points.
• Besides, eJOY’s customer segment does not only come from Edtech, and we do not only represent ourselves as an online learning website. Instead, we provide solutions to a wide range of Internet users who basically have a common pain point: Repetitive tasks and want to optimize their time. The willingness to adopt our solution has since then been higher, and it’s obviously easier to approach existing customers rather than a completely new one. In other words, we can also indirectly access non-learner users and transform them to learners even those having hardly any intentions to learn.

Talking to our customers, we have gained insights into one more benefit of eJOY that we can develop and scale-up:

• Frictionless system: Our Extension does not rely on user devices’ memory. Since then, their willingness to install is significantly higher.
• Reducing competitiveness: Users do not recognize us as options compared to our direct competitors. In other words, although having installed Elsa, Duolingo, they are still willing to adopt eJOY to achieve high proficiency in vocabulary.
• Real learning experience: Users say that learning on eJOY made them feel like a more on demand, convenient and personalized actual learning experience instead of being an online course with fixed content.

C3 window of opportunity and timing strategy

The problem:

Edtech is now expanding wider every year, many competitors appear with strong technical advancements. We understand that if we do not create and deliver the needs of customers, we will soon be eliminated.

Business’s internal capabilities, resources, and readiness to capitalize on the opportunity

Throughout 5 years inside the Edtech market, we have developed intellectual capitals (Strong tech team, partnerships with cloud hosting services/AI model providers) It helps us in the process of integrating innovative AI into our products.

Our financial state also gives us opportunities to expand our business activities and expansion.

Timing of market entry:

Since the release of ChatGPT, the development of AI among educational tools is very fast. Former conglomerates have successfully educated the market about AI. It does create a golden time for eJOY to start integrating more and more AI in our features, aiming to become the most convenient, most personalized English learning tool. 

This is the right time to create a new biz model. eJOY was founded in the peak time of Edtech, it is also an opportunity to build up experiences in the technology field.

B4. Lesson Learned