‣ Company: Falou
‣ Cofounders: Gabriel Higuchi, Vitor Marques, Matheus Medina and Gabriel Santos
‣ Mission: To make learning how to converse in a foreign language accessible, fun and sometimes a little bit silly
‣ Launched: 2019
‣ Team size: 12
‣ Go-to emoji: 🌎
The language-learning app Falou was built from the ground up on a simple premise: “We believe the fastest way to learn a language is by practising,” co-founder Gabriel Santos says. “We wanted to help people simulate a conversation.”
That’s why Falou uses short (and often silly) videos, word-match games and peppy repeat-after-me exercises to get you speaking aloud right from the start. A speech-recognition tool listens along to flag any words you mispronounce. And these conversations are set in real-life situations, like in a hotel or airport or at a sports event.
We spoke to Santos, who has been brushing up on his English with the help of Falou, from his company’s home base in Brazil about the app’s unlikely origin.
How did the idea for Falou come about?
It was a product of failure! My co-founders – Vitor, Matheus and Gabriel – and I spent four years developing about eight different apps. While we were making them, we were having meetings in English, and people who used to be so talkative were suddenly stuck. Despite the fact that we all had formal English education in school and a lot of us had had private teachers, we all froze at the English meetings. Why couldn’t we have a conversation? We realised we lacked practice.
How did that realisation inform the design of Falou?
In the app, you learn through conversations, as if you were on a trip. And important words keep coming back in the different lessons to help you memorise them. We also wanted to imitate a private teacher, who helps you learn a sentence one word at a time, the way some people memorise poetry word by word.
This app now teaches more than two dozen languages. How are you able to create all those lessons?
We are a small team here in Brazil, but we have over 300 contributors around the world. They are language instructors who help with course creation, voice actors, videographers and so on. They’re the reason we’re able to achieve what we have.
Falou has been growing steadily worldwide. How are you broadening your base?
At the beginning, we thought, “OK, let’s do a great app and the word will spread.” But it doesn’t work like that. You have to put the effort into getting the word out through ad campaigns. Working as partners with Apple is tremendously helpful as well.
How long did it take Falou to go from idea to launch?
Two months. I know that sounds short but our original app was far from what you see now. One thing we learned from our past failures is that, in this industry, you have to learn to fail fast or succeed fast.
Falou is a part of the App Store Small Business Program. If you are a developer and would like to learn more about the program, follow the link below.