I appreciated this - well written and useful review of their business and why they think it didn't work.
In addition to the challenges listed here, IMO there are rapidly diminishing returns for the type of recall learning that spaced repetition enables. As you progress further in your career, there is much less emphasis on what you know, and more emphasis on how you apply it, how you communicate, and how your knowledge ends up helping others around you. I suspect most professionals decide at some point that they need to start "paging out" specific knowledge to make room for broader experience, retrieving it from the bookshelf (swap partition) when needed.
I'm also curious on the fixation with creating a startup in the VC-funded sense. Why choose able-to-find-VC-funding to be your metric of success?
Hi Giacomo, I am sorry to hear it did not work out for you and it is great that you can share your experience with others. As much as I love spaced repetition, and as much as I continue to use it on a daily basis for years with great result, I would need to (unfortunately) agree with you on this one.
In college, spaced repetition helped me get ahead, but it felt nearly impossible to convince my peers of this. While I was able to effortlessly remember thousands of vocabulary words in my language program, my peers struggled and failed to heed the simple advice of "just put it into Anki". Spaced repetition is valuable, but much like having a good diet or exercising regularly, it is really really hard to convince people of the benefits. A spaced repetition SaaS can easily become akin to an unused (and eventually cancelled) gym membership.
It seems that most of the apps that make it in this space ultimately need to compromise on their fundamentals in order to get traction. I don't need to name any names here, there are plenty of examples of SRS apps that started as solid tools for learning but evolved down a path of gamification to a point of diminished usefulness.
Anyway, sorry again to hear about this one and best of luck to you on whatever you decide to build next. Like you, I am continuing work on my (noncommercial) SRS and I always enjoy hearing your perspectives. Feel free to reach out if you ever want to bounce ideas around.
lol I just started building this, but I will make it more like wanikani levels which helped great for learning kanji where cards accumulate with further intervals with promoted levels. Even have the domain , nemorize.com (some dummy game is there now)
I appreciated this - well written and useful review of their business and why they think it didn't work.
In addition to the challenges listed here, IMO there are rapidly diminishing returns for the type of recall learning that spaced repetition enables. As you progress further in your career, there is much less emphasis on what you know, and more emphasis on how you apply it, how you communicate, and how your knowledge ends up helping others around you. I suspect most professionals decide at some point that they need to start "paging out" specific knowledge to make room for broader experience, retrieving it from the bookshelf (swap partition) when needed.
I'm also curious on the fixation with creating a startup in the VC-funded sense. Why choose able-to-find-VC-funding to be your metric of success?
Hi Giacomo, I am sorry to hear it did not work out for you and it is great that you can share your experience with others. As much as I love spaced repetition, and as much as I continue to use it on a daily basis for years with great result, I would need to (unfortunately) agree with you on this one.
In college, spaced repetition helped me get ahead, but it felt nearly impossible to convince my peers of this. While I was able to effortlessly remember thousands of vocabulary words in my language program, my peers struggled and failed to heed the simple advice of "just put it into Anki". Spaced repetition is valuable, but much like having a good diet or exercising regularly, it is really really hard to convince people of the benefits. A spaced repetition SaaS can easily become akin to an unused (and eventually cancelled) gym membership.
It seems that most of the apps that make it in this space ultimately need to compromise on their fundamentals in order to get traction. I don't need to name any names here, there are plenty of examples of SRS apps that started as solid tools for learning but evolved down a path of gamification to a point of diminished usefulness.
Anyway, sorry again to hear about this one and best of luck to you on whatever you decide to build next. Like you, I am continuing work on my (noncommercial) SRS and I always enjoy hearing your perspectives. Feel free to reach out if you ever want to bounce ideas around.
lol I just started building this, but I will make it more like wanikani levels which helped great for learning kanji where cards accumulate with further intervals with promoted levels. Even have the domain , nemorize.com (some dummy game is there now)