Summary
How is Finland exporting English to America? Timo-Pekka Leinonen’s Tampere-based company Master English has grown in three years from zero to over €5 million in run-rate revenue, 100% of it exports. The product being exported is English-language skill, and the target market is Spanish-speaking America — remarkable for a product that can’t even be bought in Finland. The conversation covers the future of language teaching, what the team learned from WordDive, and how Translink Corporate Finance fits into the growth story. Master English’s goal this year is to grow monthly recurring revenue (MRR) to €700,000. At the end, Sami asks Timo-Pekka how to dive from the 10-meter platform and win a national championship gold — the members-only segment continues in the terrifying world of platform diving.
Transcript
English transcript derived from validated English subtitles (WebVTT · SRT). Timestamps link to the original video.
00:01 All right, welcome to the Negotiator channel. My guest is Timo-Pekka Leinonen, owner and CEO of Master English. Welcome. Hi, hi everyone, and thanks, Sami, from Tampere. We actually share this Translink history from the WordDive-Otava transaction — Otava being the Finnish publishing house — I think that’s almost a year ago now. Yeah. And before that we also did some sparring sessions, a bit pro bono, about what would be worth doing and what the… …valuation and that kind of thing would be. Yeah, Tampere is always nice to visit, my hometown. But you could almost say you’re a man who’s brought a revolutionary language-learning solution to little Finland twice now. So let’s talk about this second one, Master English. I thought it was pretty revolutionary. What is Master English and which languages does it cover? Master English is a service… …where you can learn advanced English. The idea is basically to reach a level of fluency where you can handle demanding work tasks in English, and right now it only works in Spanish — meaning it only serves Spanish-speaking customers. Yeah, so all the Hispanic listeners out there who want, say, negotiator-level content can go check it out, but not much else applies — actually, does it even support logging in from Finland? No — actually it doesn’t, because our market is Latin America. Which…
01:25 …in practice means North America, Central America, South America, Spain, and native Spanish speakers, and it doesn’t work in Finland — you can’t pay for it, you can’t buy it, other than in that target market. Yeah, and it’s funny with the Americas — I was in Miami last spring, and interestingly two [unclear] didn’t speak English, and in a way they’d be potential customers for you. But in a way this merging of the Americas… …is really happening, and the rise of Hispanic professionals is quite significant, but they do recognize that English is the global language, and in a way this is a huge language pair. Let’s bring in — can we call it a competitor — Duolingo’s analysis: these are the world’s biggest languages, English of course number one, Spanish number two, but here it’s interestingly the other way round — from Spanish to English. Yeah, a couple of comments on that: we actually had a team out just in February… …interviewing users, potential users, in Los Angeles, in a Spanish-speaking area, and there was a shop with a sign that read, basically, ‘English spoken here’ — hey, English is spoken here. And we see Duolingo more as a kind of market-opener — it brings in people who try it out. A lot of our users have tried Duolingo and gotten used to the idea of, ‘hey, I can pay for language learning, this can be done through an app,’ and then they’ve moved on…
02:50 …moved on to us. Yeah, but this is specifically a pro-level market. So basically, if you had a ‘negotiator Miettinen’ down in Colombia who specifically wanted to start doing business with the Americans, he’d specifically want to speak proper, professional English, not some — what would their word be for survival English? Yeah, the line probably falls somewhere around there — there are quite a lot of people, and our typical customer has a university degree, maybe a lower one, and then… …they’re in a demanding specialist or managerial role but can’t do their job in English, and they feel that if they knew English, their career would advance and their salary would rise. And over there a pay rise is a completely different matter — if you get a promotion, your pay genuinely goes up, unlike here where you get a few hundred euros extra and the taxman takes half, so your net pay barely inches forward from the old base pay. Yeah, but it really does matter for job… …qualifications. And in a way this conversion rate is interesting — aren’t we talking about percentages, single-digit percentages here? So what’s the population, what’s the target market here? We did a fairly large analysis, and according to our analysis roughly 2% of the population falls into our target-customer group in non-English-speaking countries, and in Mexico, for example, it’s about 4%, but when you have 12—
04:12 —27 million inhabitants, that 4% works out to 5 million. And Latin America really is your number-one market, but then you could think about these other four regions — Asia is probably next. Asia is interesting, there’s real strong demand there, and especially your salary rises if you can speak English. And actually, as an example of countries where Duolingo isn’t number one, even though… …South Korea and Japan, where English-learning apps are in a completely different league — ahead of Duolingo even. And didn’t this — didn’t your enthusiasm for languages start in Japan, Korea… [unclear] …just in Yokohama — I mean, I lived, lived in Yokohama. But basically this started a long, long time ago. I did judo and wanted to learn Japanese, and actually I was pretty terrible at English too — I have this memory of having been through upper secondary school, but in London I tried to buy from McDonald’s…
05:31 …orange juice and didn’t manage it, because if you say it the Finnish way, ‘juice,’ they don’t understand — it’s ‘juus.’ And I had trouble with that, so I had to come up with something. I bought some software, these kinds of programs you’d install on your own computer, to study Japanese, but they were really bad. But my own mother happens to be a language teacher, with 40 years of experience in learning and teaching, so I built myself an app to learn Japanese… …so I could learn to speak and use Japanese as effectively as possible, and I used it myself, and it worked reasonably well. So I ended up — I was working there, living in Yokohama, and I was in Yokosuka and Tokyo for work in the late ’90s, a couple of years. Yeah, that’s an interesting language pair — at business school you had to reach a third language at intermediate level to graduate, and I’d never really managed with these languages. I started with Spanish, but I had a summer job at an investment bank, so… …I just barely passed the basic course but then dropped out at the intermediate level. Then I tried the same thing with German, but met the same fate, and graduation started to look delayed. So the basic Japanese course ended up being enough — that’s where I picked up these small skills. Japan was really trendy when we were studying, and it was interesting — there were probably a couple hundred people on the introductory Japanese course, but…
06:55 …by the fourth year there weren’t even ten left, so the drop-off was pretty steep. Yeah, and it’s a hard language, especially the written form — by the way, I bought a bonsai tree that dried up within two weeks, so I had this fine dead bonsai the whole time I was a student. Small detail, but in a way it demonstrates what’s hard about the language. And you have six levels of what gets learned, and you could say your Master English… …is the only one on the market that covers all six at a professional level. There’s a customer satisfaction score of 4.9 here. Doesn’t that come precisely from the fact that it’s a comprehensive, all-six approach? Yeah — so we split it up, basically it’s reading, writing, listening, speaking, grammar, and vocabulary, and we aim for a high level across all of them, and our goal is… …to build a fully digital app you could use to learn high-level English. I’m not claiming we’re there yet, but we’re moving fast, and customers feel it’s good enough to use — it really helps, they’re very satisfied. So that’s, in a way, what I’d say — we’ve reached the commercial stage, and that’s actually the right way to develop a service like this, because you have users you can watch to see how things work, and you can try out different…
08:14 …options, different versions. Yeah, I remember from the WordDive days that you were a bit hesitant about the word ‘AI’ back then, since it was more of an algorithm-type approach, at least as I understood it — but hasn’t AI come into the picture now as well? Yeah, we actually use quite a lot of AI, in a lot of different ways. The pronunciation optimization we got a patent for is more like something an engineer wrote — maybe now you could… …call it a smart algorithm. But then, together with the University of Tampere, we built a system that recognizes speaking-related problems. So if I say, for example, ‘I have a paper here’ — and I pronounce it the Finnish way, or incorrectly, without the aspiration on the ‘p’ in ‘paper’ — the system picks up on things like that. And actually, we got a US patent for it just last week. …that it can do this — that’s AI. Then we also have things based on a small language model — these ‘React by Speaking’ situations, where you respond to something. Now, if you’ve done textbook exercises at school or elsewhere, often only one correct answer is accepted. With React by Speaking we can cover things much more broadly — you can answer in many ways, and if it’s correct, it’s accepted. And now we’ve also gotten a GPT-4-based system, built on large language models…
09:35 …where you enter a specific situation, based on what you’ve been learning recently — vocabulary, grammar — and then you handle some matter by speaking for two or three minutes, and it basically understands your level and gives you feedback on it. I actually think that’s right at the cutting edge of what language-learning apps are currently capable of. Yeah, in both of these — Master English and [unclear] — I think there’s this… …sensible SaaS, B2C business model, with a consumer-conversion approach — not a freemium model, so you have a calibration phase, then onboarding, and then straight into improving your skills. Doesn’t this go straight to the point right after that initial calibration? Has that always been your philosophy? Yeah, very much so — in Master English, right now it actually works so that you go to our… …website and fill out a form, completely free of charge, and we map out your skills. Then we can tell you: hey, if you practice 40 minutes, five times a week, in six months you’ll reach the level you want. And then it’s like, oh, okay, I’ll buy it. And after that we also run a kind of baseline-level test so we can build a genuinely individual learning program for each person. Yeah, I think that’s — I’ve personally been wary of the freemium model for a long time, because that’s how…
11:00 …a lot of competitors operate — they try hard to reel people in through trawling, and then they hope for a couple of percent conversion. I think that’s a bit pointless — you’re left with a lot of sand on the doorstep, so to speak. Our customers are really the ones who feel they genuinely want to improve their language skills, and they’re willing to pay, willing to start right away, willing to use a mobile app. It’s a bit like a gym membership in that sense — you pay… …first, then you’ve paid, you go, and you notice it works. And one of our big competitors actually said years ago already that in their view this pay-first-then-use model is the best one for this kind of language learning and for building commitment. But then there’s the pronunciation side — if you go the more desktop-style route, say the basic WordDive-type formula where you match up pictures and text, like Duolingo does…
12:00 …this four-panel picture-selection format is a strong one — of course that kind of visual association is a good thing. But then combining that with pronunciation correction reinforces the learning quite a bit. Yeah, and it’s interesting that phones were originally developed for listening and producing sound — it is, after all, a phone — so it’s an excellent device for practicing pronunciation, and it’s much easier than on a desktop, for instance, because there you have to calibrate what kind of microphone and what kind of… …speakers you’re dealing with. But a good phone has decent microphones and speakers, tuned specifically for the human voice these days. Anyway — sort of broken English myself — I lived in London for 13 years, where my English, I can’t really call it survival English, but it was still strongly accented English. By the way, my last episode was entirely in English with Korkia [unclear], so I’ve started trying that too. But in a way… …intelligibility is really the key now — maybe that’s the last bit of polish. Yeah, the question these days is really this: there’s an accent, and it doesn’t really matter — the question is whether a native speaker understands what you’re saying. And then once you reach a certain level, rhythm and intonation start coming into play. If you get the rhythm and intonation right and the speech sounds natural, your credibility is much higher, even if you make a few pronunciation mistakes, or…
13:26 …especially if a strong accent is audible — different elements come along with that. Yeah. You could think about what AI brings to this — because now this too is coming: this very conversation, probably — one of my goals is that, if I wanted to, at the very latest by the end of it I’d be able to make… …versions of this in other languages. Of course, syncing our voice — speech, lip-syncing — isn’t easy, but it is possible to create other languages using our voice style. But this kind of immersiveness, whether it’s computer-generated or not, is still a batch-type process, in the sense that… …real-time, in-the-moment interaction probably still needs an app like this for a long time to come. Yeah, and immersiveness is really important to us — we try to create a state where you focus, a kind of flow state, where all your senses are concentrated on it. And that’s why I don’t believe in ad-based models — if you’re studying a language and then an ad pops up, it breaks your flow. That’s why we’ve ended up going with the paid-service model instead. Yeah.
14:45 But in a way, doing communication live — just think about whether at some point there could be an app that whispers in your ear, or gives you real-time feedback. We’re probably heading that way. Already now, if you go to a hotel in Greece and the toilet doesn’t work, you can probably talk to some AI and it translates for you. Or in China this has already been done, where basically you… …just speak and get things handled. But then if we’re talking about demanding work tasks — say you want to close a deal as an investment banker or something — a relationship still needs to be built there, and for that you need a shared language. That’s actually one reason we operate here at, what would I call it, the top of the food chain — we focus on high-level English proficiency, because we believe it’ll be needed for quite a while yet. Actually, this kind of globalization… …actually seems to be increasing the need for English right now, if anything. That’s how it stands now. Since I’m an investment banker myself, I’m curious — from that deal I was involved in — about your growth profile: over these three years, or however you’d describe it, could you walk through this growth on the Master English side? Yeah, so basically we launched the service, and…
16:09 …we got about 260,000 in revenue in 2021 — we started developing it in 2020, and in ‘21 we hit roughly 260,000. Then the target for 2022 was 800,000, and we got 1.2 million in revenue. And last year it was 3.1 million euros in Master English business revenue. And now that we’re here at the end of March… …if this pace continues through the end of March the way it has so far, the run rate is probably around six million euros now, so pretty solid growth at the moment. Yeah, and your aspirational goal of seven million doesn’t look at all impossible at this pace, if it’s already at this level — of course that’s the run rate, but really the goal is to be above… …700,000 in monthly revenue, MRR — that’s really the core target. Yeah, that’s impressive growth, and this is essentially pure export, and your team is a global team, isn’t it — don’t you have several nationalities? Yeah, we have about ten non-Finns, and a significant portion are native…
17:31 …Spanish speakers, from Latin America or from Spain, or people who’ve worked in Latin America for a long time. But it’s still a Tampere business at heart. Yeah, we go a bit against the grain there — everyone’s at the office on Mondays and Wednesdays. We believe, and we’ve noticed, that if you’ve got, say, a language teacher and an AI person and a mobile-app person and a marketing person, and… …you put them in the same room, things stick together better and collaboration flows more smoothly. I do believe engineers will talk to each other, and teachers will talk to each other, and maybe even the marketing people will talk to each other remotely, and things get handled even over email. But when you’re innovating and creating something new, it’s really nice to get into the same room. Yeah, agreed. Now, by the way, changes to the hybrid model might interest our listeners and viewers — who would be… …good to talk about these things — for instance, at Translink we introduced a 9:30 internal daily kickoff call during Covid, and it’s stuck religiously to this day: every weekday there’s that 9:30-to-10 slot where we talk about projects and organize the day. But now, on top of that, office work has come back. But I’m just curious as a side note — what is, in a way, this work…
18:51 …future — is it maybe two days in person plus these virtual morning kickoffs, would that be a good model? I’d guess maybe two or three, depending of course entirely on what you’re doing — if we were both making sales calls, we could do those pretty independently, we’d just need to know who to call. But right now we have it so that on Mondays the whole team is physically present, and we always go through what everyone got done last week, and… …what’s most important this week — a short 15 to 20 minutes, but we still get everyone together. And then teams have their own morning scrums or whatever, freely as needed — a bit of that Agile mindset, with demos and scrums and kanban boards and so on, in office work. But since you’re a software company, of course that makes sense, though it’s probably sensible practice in plenty of other workplaces too. So one maybe interesting thing we’ve now… …ended up trying, actually after Covid, is a kind of focus time: until lunch, everyone works on their own top-priority task, and meetings happen in the afternoon. But if you and a colleague are working on the same top-priority task, sure, the two or three of you can hold a meeting if that’s what’s needed. But in principle, the morning is for the number-one thing at the top of your to-do list, and in the afternoon, after lunch, that’s when meetings happen and you check in…
20:17 …with colleagues and so on. And it actually started from staff feedback — there was a feeling that too many things were going on and there were too many interruptions and so on, so it’s been well received. And I believe it looks like it’ll stick, though of course if new ideas come up we’ll change it, but right now this arrangement feels pretty good. Is your working language English? Yes, English is the working language, and everything is documented and recorded in English, but of course if you’ve got two… …Spanish speakers, or two Finnish speakers, or whoever, they speak among themselves whatever they want. Yeah, yeah — maybe we could talk more about this Spanish-English combination — or actually, on the Finland-Japan side: did you have Japanese people working here, at this company? At least earlier on, back when the WordDive business was being built and Japanese-language courses were being invested in, there were Japanese people on staff, but right now… …there’s no Japanese involved in the Master English business. Yeah, maybe I should explain that a bit — we talked about this once. One of my regular guests has a Japanese wife, and we talked about how Finns and Japanese are actually quite a good match, in a way, on the relationship market — there’s kind of the same spirit to it. So maybe a tip for people who want a foreign wife or husband: it might be a surprisingly good match, Finland…
21:42 …and Japan. Haven’t you had several situations like this yourself too? Yeah, there’ve been things of that sort. Someone came along — I was, well, over in Japan I was heading online product development, and once someone asked to meet, a young woman, maybe 25 to 30 years old, wanted to meet, and of course we could meet. And what was her business? She started presenting herself, going through her CV a bit, basically saying she was looking for a husband… …and I was like, okay then, so a Finnish engineer might be a good fit for her. But that’s a pretty — for a Finn — a pretty bewildering situation. Yeah, a bewildering situation. Maybe, if we take some work examples from Japan — what I find interesting: one thing that comes to mind is we had maybe 40 people on staff, and we had this kind of evening get-together, everyone paying their own way, and we went to some restaurant… …and there were people who’d come from all over, moved there from different places, and so on. So there were 40 of us at four-person tables in that restaurant, and the Japanese people started swapping tables completely automatically, without anyone arranging it — they just rotated through the tables. Everyone ate and drank in moderation, and when the bill came, it was split evenly. But after that one evening, all the Japanese people knew each other — whereas if you try to organize something like that in Finland…
23:03 …where you take 40 people to a restaurant, everyone just stays at their own table — maybe one odd person wanders around, but that’s about it. Over there it just happened automatically. Yeah. And another interesting thing was with action points: when they came up, they wanted them assigned to a group or a team, whereas I was used to thinking, okay, this needs a name attached, someone specific has to handle this — not just ‘assign it to the team.’ And when I looked into it, the reasoning was that the team matters more to them; whoever from the team gets to it handles it. If the team has… …an open action point, whoever gets to it first handles it, and only then their own. Whereas in Finland it works the other way around — if your name is attached to something, like ‘Sami handles this and Translink handles that,’ then naturally your own task comes first. But interesting things — you only really notice, once you’ve had those experiences, hey, this is different. But I’ve actually noticed myself that using Slack a lot pulls Finnish culture a bit in that same direction, since there isn’t…
24:03 …to Sami — it’s just posted to our project-specific Slack channel, and whoever notices it picks it up and takes it on, and everyone else gives it a thumbs-up or whatever. It’s actually a pretty fun system, and it removes a kind of unnecessary communication bottleneck — which is what happens in the traditional email model, always that question of who to cc, and then someone doesn’t get included… …and so on, and who’s actually dealing with this. Whereas here you see it right away — hey, someone’s already started on this. So the whole cc-and-bcc layer can still be a nightmare in those emails — it’s clunky. But let’s get back to Master English — there are a lot of Spanish speakers, but first, on the calibration question: is Portuguese, in your view, close enough to Spanish that… …it could get up to speed on that fairly easily? Well, in a sense our natural next market would probably be Brazil — there, of course, it’s Brazilian Portuguese. And the neural network that detects pronunciation errors would need to be retrained for the new language’s new speakers and their new mistakes, but my hunch, my gut feeling, is that it would probably work well enough directly for Portuguese speakers too, that…
25:26 …there are only a handful of mistakes Portuguese speakers make that Spanish speakers typically don’t, and if there are such cases we’d just teach the model those, but it should basically be usable as is, as long as you gather enough voice samples yourself. Yeah, and by the way, I did some forest-industry deals once, in Portugal and in Spain, and one thing that stuck with me was… …their Portuguese, or this Spanish pulp company — this whole ‘F’ versus ‘S’ thing. Yeah, but is that actually an issue, or is it pretty simple? Well, I don’t really know — since our focus is on English pronunciation, and there are real differences between the various Latin countries. In Spain there used to be — in nearly every region — some twenty Spanish-language academies, each of which… …would claim to define what ‘real’ Spanish is. But they have harmonized somewhat. We’re really only interested in the English-learning side — the written text, giving instructions — and in that sense the same Spanish works across the whole of Latin America. So we don’t need to reverse-engineer things any further from English into Spanish — the flow from there is good enough. We do still identify each individual user’s individual…
26:46 …mistakes and address them, teach to their weak points — it doesn’t matter where they come from, or where they’re from, or if you live on the other side of the world but happen to have a mistake that’s typical over there — it doesn’t matter, the system catches it anyway. Could you build something like a ‘survival English’ correction course out of this, or how does that philosophy get going, if someone’s… …just stuck in some kind of mannerism, or intonation pattern, or recurring word errors — how does the model start correcting things like that? Well, basically, in principle all humans in the world have the same vocal apparatus, so we could all learn any language. But of course it’s easiest to learn pronunciation and intonation and so on when you’re young, as a child, and that’s partly stored in muscle memory, and… …that kind of thing requires repetition. And that’s why technology like Speak With, which can train you specifically on the pronunciation issues that matter for you, is important — because we all have different mistakes. And I’m not knocking classroom teaching at all, but if you’re practicing pronunciation there, you often end up practicing something you already know and don’t need, and conversely, you don’t practice enough of what’s actually your problem. And that’s where we get to the dilemma…
28:09 …that effective teaching of spoken language skills, of pronunciation, is fundamentally one-to-one: one teacher teaches one student at a time, and that just doesn’t scale at all. And on top of that there’s this cost problem: if you think about, say, native English-speaking American students, they come from wealthy countries, whereas if you look at somewhere in Latin America or Asia, there are… …lower-earning people who’d need personal tuition — not to mention Africa. So a digital solution is really the way to handle correcting or developing language skills reasonably efficiently. Yeah, that sounds sensible, and it’s good to think these things through. I remember from my own school days, even in the lower grades, I had a lisp on my Rs that they tried to fix… …but with completely incompetent teaching methods. Then one time, when I was 12, my brother just said — since he’d also had trouble with his Rs around age six — ‘how is it even possible you still have that?’ And he told me, just say a ‘D’ and blow air through it, and using that simple technique I learned the R in a single day. Okay, but it feels absurd that teaching that bad has existed, and…
29:30 …it’s kind of a tragic mistake, in a way. Yes, I remember suffering from this speech issue myself. And then, in turn, on English courses, spoken skills weren’t addressed at all — it was all written, so really only two or four of your six levels were ever in use, since the speaking side wasn’t there at all. And once things get stuck like that, they’re much harder… …to grind away and fix. In the development phase of our technology, Tampere University of Technology — or actually the Hervanta campus of Tampere University — their Language Centre was a support partner and pilot customer, because they had this situation where they had just a handful of English teachers and 8,000 students who, for the most part, needed their spoken English improved somehow, or needed to build confidence in it. So they were… …basically a partner during that early phase when we were developing the technology. Yeah, and this language skill really is an important skill, and I was just thinking about immigration trends — because these days it’s this whole ‘demography is destiny’ idea in American discourse, that tens of millions of people would come to America from these Hispanic…
30:53 …countries. And of course there are populist fights against it now, building walls and so on. But this NAFTA region is probably still the world’s biggest economic zone for a long time to come. I was just wondering — is there some cultural angle you could build into this, like how you adapt if part of the population is moving up to North America from South America, or are there trends like that visible? Well, you could… …think that way, but my understanding is that most of our users don’t intend to move anywhere. But for example in Mexico, nearshoring has confirmed that subcontracting has been shifted from China to Mexico via the US, and the Mexican economy is doing well from having American partners and principals and so on. But then, another thing is that it does carry a certain career significance if you want to… …become a director or some other senior specialist — you need the ability to operate in English. So it’s an enabling factor for career development, even if there isn’t a hugely concrete need for it right away — it seems to be regarded as an important factor in career progression across all of Latin America, English proficiency. So in a way this is somewhat a professional-elite matter rather than any kind of…
32:15 …immigration issue, at least among our customers. Of course, our customers — when I said earlier that we talked about needs in non-English-speaking countries — actually, in the US about 13% of the population speaks Spanish as their native language, and there is indeed a strong need there. And if you look at our markets, the US is the single biggest country we sell to, even though our service only works in Spanish. But it’s still that 40… …million-strong Spanish-speaking population — such a big pool that there’s a genuine need there. If you live in the US, there’s surely benefit in speaking English fluently. Yeah, I was just wondering, since this operates outside Finland — is there, over time, some kind of Finland angle to this after all, or something like support for expats, for immigrants… …a support angle that could be valuable for Finland, or for any other country, in increasing communication fluency. So in that sense — well, for a foreigner living in Finland, even just English is probably already a big step, speaking fluent, understandable English instead of speaking with your home-country accent, which native Finns then can’t understand. Yeah, our technology in principle isn’t tied to…
33:39 …that language, so it could be trained for other languages too. But depending on the source, half or more than half of all language learning in the world is English learning, and that’s why we decided to start out by building an excellent app for learning English. But maybe our long-term vision is that the technology could indeed be applied to learning other languages too. But we genuinely believe that if the world could just get one common language… …it would help with all sorts of conflicts, with cooperation, with everything, really. So a lingua franca, or an Esperanto — well, English has clearly won that game as the shared connecting language. And this AI boom is now bringing in a bit of localization, because now you can ask questions and get answers more easily in your local language too, and… …more easily, yes, but the strongest language models, the ones that get trained, are still built with English as the base. And then, in a way, the interface starts to — take this phone example — I’ve had big hopes there myself. For instance, Petteri Järvinen was a guest, and he said that people always hope that something like Siri or others would…
34:59 …be good, but somehow a voice-based interface is still pretty far from practical, everyday use — text still dominates in these things. Yeah, it’s interesting — one thing is, we perhaps see these Latinos as, in a certain way, what I’d call laid-back and spontaneous, but they get nervous too — yes, they’re shy about speaking English too, and other things. But with us, things actually go quite nicely… …users practice with the mobile app, and one key point is that you get to practice alone — you practice by yourself, nobody gives you feedback or laughs at you or anything, you can practice whether you’re bad at it or good at it. And that’s one important thing a mobile app like this can guarantee — you don’t have to go to any classroom, you can just practice on your own. Yeah, and our user ratings are strong, and user retention too… …is among the best in the comparison group. So, I’d guess some kind of learning path gets built. Yeah — basically it’s built on that initial questionnaire, asking what your goal is and how much you want to practice, and then there’s a path like: hey, if you practice 40 minutes, five times a week, in six months you’ll reach a professional fluency level. And then we can also show…
36:23 …that progress, and that’s really important for motivation. And then we also track your learning so we can adjust the pace accordingly — for instance, we might say, hey, you’re progressing well, or, you need to add a bit more study time, or take a bit more time on this. But being able to show that learning progress is something that’s genuinely been missing in language learning, where we… …study and work at things, but we don’t see how much is still left to reach our goal. Maybe AI comes back into this a bit — I’m involved in this project run by Risto Linturi, which has quite a lot of different representatives from schools and organizations in it, and there we’re getting to know a lot of video- and audio-based AI tools, and I have one goal: to actually be able to… …make both video and audio simulations, in a way, out of this Finnish-language training material, so that it would also translate into some other language. And I keep thinking about this metaverse thing, or augmented reality, or this combined reality where you yourself are present, but then also someone, something…
37:43 …augmented reality or virtual reality layered on top of that. So are those the kind of visions you have in your development pipeline? Well, I’ve actually already built — we sometimes hold these ‘Mad Scientist’ days, where people get to develop whatever they feel like for an afternoon, and we order pizza. And on one of those, for instance, we built something where there’s a head that looks like a person, and it talks, and the voice… …sounds real, and you just feed in a text prompt, and something like this can be built in a few hours — it’s pretty massive, and you can’t immediately tell that it’s been produced this way. Yeah, yeah. That’s certainly an interesting development. Now, in your growth journey, what other development steps… …do you have. Of course now you’re trying to scale it so that it’s already big enough to hold its quality-market leadership, but possibly also outright market leadership by volume. Maybe I’m still curious about this conversion rate — you’ve got billions of people in the world, but your target market is still just that few percent, meaning tens of millions. So, we did a fairly extensive…
39:08 …market mapping a few years back — surveys, for instance, in different countries, interview questions and so on. And in my view it’s roughly this couple of percent of the population who have relatively high education, a demanding job, but whose English isn’t at that level. And there really are a lot of them — if you start thinking about the people around you, you’ll surely know people who are… …highly competent, in demanding roles, but for whom English is a bit of an Achilles’ heel. Yeah. Maybe to wrap up on this, let’s think about the WordDive deal you did with Otava. I actually talked with Ilkka Liljeroos, who was the responsible partner on that at DLA Piper, and with Tero Nummenpää, who’s my colleague at Translink — and this business transaction is really… …rightly rare, compared to a share deal. In this Freeman Group deal we did something of a similar arrangement, where we transferred [unclear] Business’s operations to a Canadian giant, CGI. It really does take tweezers to pick out the assets and contracts to transfer. What kind of memories do you have of that transaction? Well, I have a good feeling about it, and about that transaction…
40:29 …I think we got to a point where, in my view, everyone won. Because basically, the problem is that we’re a startup with limited funding, so we can only do things that pay for themselves within a month or two. But then we were looking for someone who could invest more significantly. And I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised — if you think about it, we sell these language-learning courses, and of course it’s important that you use it and continue… …your subscription a month later. Well, Otava’s media business is actually pretty similar — magazines, sure, plus digital services too, but basically the customer needs to be satisfied and keep renewing their subscription. So from what I remember it’s felt like it went quite well, starting that collaboration, or however it got going. Yeah. And now we’re back in matriculation-exam season again — there’s always… …this recurring nature of language teaching — even though customers change to some extent, similar customers come back year after year with pretty high likelihood. For example, matriculation students always take language courses over and over, but different students each year. And that’s maybe one thing behind Master English — if you think about it, Finland has about 30,000 matriculation students a year, and WordDive sold twenty-some thousand exam-prep courses a year. So no matter how much you improve the product, and even if all your users are genuinely…
41:51 …satisfied, once market penetration gets into the same range as, say, Alko or Prisma, where more than half the population uses it, you can’t grow much further from there. So we started thinking about whether we could take this and build something similar on a global scale. And there, basically, if you speak English and write it, you already have quite good reading, writing, and listening skills, so then we added this Speak With… …technology, and that’s, in a way, the recipe, and it was central to how Master English came about. Yeah, is there something to learn from that thinking for Master English — you say it’s the ambitious, promotion-seeking type who does this — is there a certain career-stage age group that’s exactly the sweet spot, and then next year they’re a year older, but a new cohort rises up from the pyramid, and this… …in Finland it’s really an inverted population pyramid, but in those South American countries there might still be genuine population pyramids, so in a way the dynamics there are quite favorable. Yes, you do get that, but I find it interesting that if you look at Master English users, which countries we’re succeeding in right now doesn’t correlate very strongly with how much…
43:13 …language-learning apps are used there. My understanding is that our customers don’t come from winning market share off competitors — instead, they’re customers who simply didn’t know before, or at least weren’t aware, that they could use a mobile app to study advanced English, and now they’ve started doing it. And that’s actually what’s enabled this rapid growth — we’ve had almost 200% year-on-year growth, and we’re now heading into our fourth… …year like that, if this goes according to plan. So basically, it’s not that we’re taking market share from others — instead, they’re genuinely new customers, and there’s such a huge pool of people who could improve their English. Right now it’s really about whether new ones keep emerging — and to me the key point is that the market is only just now being born; people are only just realizing, hey, this problem can actually be solved… …with a mobile app. Yeah, but it’s great that a growth-export technology company focused on South America like this has emerged in Finland — Master English — and good luck on that growth journey, on internationalizing, or really, since it’s already international, on scaling further. Good luck with it. Thanks, Sami. And now let’s really move on to the Inner Circle segment — you’re a many-sided guy, so at some…
44:31 …point you noticed that diving and platform diving started to interest you. And I have to admit, I’ve never jumped feet-first off a five-meter platform, and even just the thought of coming down feet-first from five meters fills me with deep dread — we can talk about how that dread gets overcome. So, underwater — I like being underwater, I’ve done a couple of scuba diving courses… …however many, so I like being on that side of things, but even just the thought of this terrifies me somehow. So maybe give me the first step, how to get started — with these first jumps, where you basically fall and go into the pool — how did it start for you, really? Well, diving — I’d honestly recommend it to everyone. If you’re thinking about work stuff while jumping, you very quickly feel in your gut that you’re forced to concentrate, and… …if we’re specifically talking about platform diving, and for a slow-moving guy from Häme like me, the 10-meter platform is of course the absolute favorite, since it gives you a bit more time. And take something like a forward fall from a handstand — that starts first with, do you dare to stand on your hands…
45:52 …right at the edge of the platform, and basically the trick is really just to think through what can happen, pretty plainly, like this. Well, but if you start falling — if you start falling backward, you just stand back up. Okay. But if you start falling forward, then you just keep yourself straight, and a guy my height ends up doing a somersault — basically, the momentum that builds… …from that fall carries you into a full somersault, and then you go into the water hands-first, which is actually the easiest dive of all for me — the handstand somersault. You don’t do anything else besides a handstand and then let yourself fall, and that turns into a somersault. But let’s continue over on the Inner Circle side with this terrifying world of platform diving. Thanks, see you over there.