1515T6g1 South Korea/Project Teams/Team 6/Companies

BeNative

BeNative is a language-learning service provided by SMATOOS, Inc., an edtech startup based in Seoul, South Korea. Unlike many language services, they focus on the actual speaking, rather than reading and writing of a language. They believe speaking is the most important aspect of learning a foreign language and while they are currently focused on English, they plan to include valuable languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. They film, edit, and transcribe unscripted interviews of real global CEOs. After the transcripts are stored in our large database, their professional language analysts sort through and organize the most commonly used business vocabulary and phrases. Then, three to four examples of specific words or phrases are assembled together in one video. This creates easily digestible and practical lessons, complete with lectures, quizzes, vocabulary reviews, and a voice recording function.

Business Model

• CEO language
• Chinese content
• Marketing to the China civil servant staffs

People

Photo	Name and Position
	Alan Moonsoo Kim CEO and founder of BeNative
	Jonathan Moore Vice President
	Jennifer Shubilla Global Director
	Hank Park CTO
	Jaehyun Lee CMO

Learning points

• Core Strategy of the company
  • Winning without fighting
  • Knowing thy enemy
  • Economic moat
• They have very high scalability as the same product can be easily sold at other parts of the world with just a change in the subtitles of their videos, allowing them to easily enter new markets.
• As they found gamification to be the highly receptive and additive, they are coming up with a free application that has advertisements. In this app, there are many gamification features such as gaining experience points, having a leaderboard and a social board. As they are trying to encourage usage of the application, rewards are given as incentives for active participation or usage of the application.
• They have a learning organization culture where everyone in the startup is very open to asking questions and gaining of new knowledge. Their company culture is very diversified and they welcome open minds with fresh ideas. I feel that this is very important in a startup that is growing as such a culture promotes learning amongst fellow colleagues allowing the company to grow together at a faster pace.