Beepboop was founded in 2019 and has attracted investments from notable companies like Google and Techstars. The platform gained recognition for its "online language drills," which are live group classes where students build confidence in speaking new languages through rapid role-plays that mimic real-life situations. Beepboop’s AI-enhanced platform allows instructors to customize lessons for individual students, even within group settings. Teaching in groups promotes accountability among participants while encouraging students to embrace mistakes as part of the learning process. (Try a Spanish Drill for free here)

As Beepboop transitions to a digital learning cooperative structure, Devon Saliga, Beepboop’s CEO, will step into a new role as a board member. In this capacity, he will guide the cooperative’s strategic decisions, particularly in product development, AI integration, and Web3 technology implementation.

Daily operations of the cooperative will be overseen by Monica Armenta, who will take on the role of Chief Steward Officer. Monica brings a wealth of experience to this position, having trained in the Rassias Method at Dartmouth College and served as Beepboop’s Education Director for the past four years.

In a recent interview, Devon shared his excitement about the transition to a cooperative: “This move is a significant milestone for Beepboop. It underscores our commitment to creating a community-driven, transparent, and inclusive educational model. I am proud of what we have accomplished since our founding. We've developed a technology platform that has significantly lowered the barriers to becoming an effective instructor. Our instructors have taught over 100,000 students Spanish and English using innovative methods that were previously out of reach for most people.”

“With the improvement of Web3 technologies and recent cooperative-friendly legislation, we have a clear path to create a new standard in edtech. I’m excited to see how our talented team and community will shape Beepboop's future in this new chapter.”

Beepboop instructors will take ownership and control of the cooperative in Q2 2025, with students gaining the option to become cooperative owners in the fourth quarter of 2024. Stay tuned for more updates on this exciting journey.

Take a Spanish Drill

Get Swag

Beepboop Hats - Say "hola" to your new favorite accessory! Our Beepboop Hats are available in white, pink, or black, featuring the iconic Beepboop logo. Perfect for sunny days or finishing off a casual look.

Zip-Up Hoodies - Keep warm and stay stylish with our Beepboop Zip-Up Hoodies. They’re soft, snug, and sport the Beepboop logo. Ideal for those cooler evenings or cozy study times.

Beepboop Tanks - Cool down in style while turning up the heat on your Spanish skills. Available in multiple colors to suit your hot-weather vibes.

Get Swag

“Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.” - Edwin Land

At Beepboop, we are motivated to re-engineer the classroom so that each additional student enhances the learning of their classmates. We know that as class size grows, additional learners usually detract from student learning. But technology and advancement in the implementation of science-based, empirically-proven methods can, will, and should help solve this issue, leading to improvements in educational outcomes, globally.

How do we ensure that educators can effortlessly use proven teaching methods at scale? How do we make students comfortable being vulnerable and making mistakes in front of peers? How can we make sure students hold each other accountable? Answering these questions require relentless experimentation — exactly what we’re doing.

Class Leaderboards

On January 16, 2023, we beta launched class leaderboards, which is a daily competition where classes compete to see who can create the most supportive learning environment. Each student is emailed the following day after taking a Drill a report detailing what their contribution to their class was and how their class stacked up relative to other classes. The class that is the most supportive each day wins a prize (like free VIP access).

From previous experiments with leaderboards, we’ve learned that the majority of our students STRONGLY disliked being compared to students within their classes and actually found it demotivating. This knowledge helped inform how we structured the class leaderboard experiments.

Also, if you’re wondering how we objectively measured how “supportive” a learning environment was, look at the example Class Leaderboard Email at the bottom of this post.

The preliminary results have been shocking.

In just three weeks of tweaking, the average amount of time active users spent learning in Drills increased 114% from 24 to 51 minutes each week. Users also increased the Celebrations they give to peers 17,160% from 0.1 to 14.9 Celebrations per user per week. A Celebration is a button classmates can press while a student is speaking that animates a little celebration on the speaking student’s screen. Students have also increased the amount of post-class feedback they submit to their instructors by 91%, which gives our instructors more information on how they can improve.

Sometimes experiments fail…

During the last three weeks some experiments have gone horribly wrong and as a result some students have been negatively impacted. We’re sorry for that.

One notable failure was our effort to make our more self-conscious students feel more comfortable getting Beepboop’d (aka making mistakes). To test this, we had our instructors at the beginning of every class say “Beepboops earn you more Quokka Point than correct answers.”

Before we went live with the experiment, we understood that a negative externality of our implementation is that it would incentivize students to fake mistakes. What we didn’t know is if students would actually follow through with faking mistakes given that doing so could be viewed by peers as anti-social behavior and may negatively impact the learning of others in the class.

One day into the experiment, we learned that about 5% of students would aggressively fake mistakes to see how many points it would earn them. We would learn of these instances from upset students and instructors who detected insincerity. So after only one day, we killed the experiment and went back to awarding Beepboops and correct answers with the same amount of points.

Not to worry! We’ll find other ways to encourage students to speak their first words of a new language and embrace making mistakes.

V1 of the Class Leaderboard Email

That’s it for now! If you’d like to support our mission and help us help you learn, become a VIP!

Regards,

Devon Saliga
CEO | Beepboop

• After 90 days of intensive prep in the Techstars accelerator program, Beepboop presented at the Techstars Demo Day at the historic Howard Theater in Washington, D.C.

• How we’re positioning ourselves:

  • Company Description:

    Beepboop is a global platform that brings people together to learn through role-play subjects that can't be taught with books.

  • Problem:

    For people-facing jobs that require us to think on our feet, the most common study methods available (books, lectures, apps, etc.) don't prepare us for using our knowledge in real life.

  • Solution:

    Beepboop is the Roblox of role-play. We are a global platform that streamlines lesson creation, simplifies teaching, and brings people together to learn through role-play. Role-play is learning by acting out parts in real-word scenarios with real people. We've taken a role-play teaching technique from Dartmouth College, proven to help students learn 40% faster, and made it scalable so it’s accessible for all students.

Newest Team Member: Raul Lopez Acero

• Please welcome our newest team member, Raul Lopez Acero, who trained and worked with the Dartmouth College legend, Professor John Rassias for 7 years:

  

  • Raul has run international workshops training thousands of teachers in the United States, Mexico and China

  • Before joining Beepboop, Raul trained Beepboop’s CEO, Devon Saliga and ~40% of Beepboop’s instructors in person at Dartmouth College

  • Raul has taught ESL for over 30 years and Spanish for 13 years

  • “Raul is the most inspirational, talented, and passionate language instructor I’ve ever had. He has an amazing skill of making students feel comfortable speaking their first words in a new language and then getting them to fluency fast. He makes large classes feel extremely personal. If through Beepboop and our technology we can empower the world’s teachers to be even just a fraction of how effective and compassionate Raul is, I am going to die a happy man. I’m so excited. We have the perfect team to transform how language education is delivered globally.”

J.P. Morgan Pitch in NYC

• Last week, Beepboop pitched to investors at the Techstars Advancing Cities Joint Investor Spotlight at J.P. Morgan in NYC. It was a busy event and we didn’t get to speak with everyone, so please feel free to reach out to us at devon@beepboop.us if you’d like to schedule an meeting.

That’s it! Join us at speak.beepboop.us if you’d like to learn some Spanish and experience how our product is evolving.

Part of the magic of Techstars is their emphasis on mentorship. Over the last three weeks we’ve pitched to over 100 industry experts in a process called Mentor Madness. It was a lot! And we’re extremely grateful. We’ve been pushed. Our assumptions have been challenged. And we’re much stronger for it.

Techstars has matched Beepboop with five amazing lead mentors who will work intensely with us over the next two months as we refine and execute our B2B strategy and inch closer to fulfilling our mission of expanding economic opportunities for over 1 billion people through language learning. More to come next month on our lead mentors…

Beepboopers are building an amazing community & helping drive product direction

We owe everything to the Beepboop students who recommend us to their friends and family, cheerlead us online, and go out of their way to build an amazing language-learning community. Here are some major student shoutouts:

• Jacqueline for coordinating a cruise for Beepboopers from San Diego down to the Mexican Riviera where they will be meeting with our Mexico-based Drill Instructors at a port stop and practicing Spanish over margaritas!

  

• Anna for becoming the first student turned community instructor! Anna recently taught her first English Drill to students, guided step-by-step by our Teach App. We have big plans for the Teach App and will be opening it up to all teachers globally so they can start using the Beepboop Method and our educational content to create fun, group-based learning environments both online and in the physical classroom.

• Janet, Amee, and Miguelito for creating our first community-generated language-learning modules. Creating an easy-to-teach and engaging Beepboop module is an extremely challenging task. We’ll be investing heavily into the tools to make this process easier so that Beepboopers can build and share their own language-learning modules. Much like how all sections of every major textbook have a user-generated Quizlet flashcard set, the Beepboop community is Beepboopifying every section of all major language textbooks. Soon, teachers everywhere will be able to use the Beepboop library to teach all of their classes. No more hours of lessons prep. No more boring lectures.

• Damon and Sabina for reviewing and improving the English text and copy in our modules. A thousand thank yous for the thousands of mistakes you’ve caught.

• Karen for holding reoccurring conversational Spanish classes covering the Destinos series in our Beepboop Facebook Group.

Funnel fixation: Signup flow enhancements

Students were having trouble navigating our signup page and were confused how to select the language they wanted to learn. As result, only 30% of first time visitors to our website were creating accounts. We just deployed a new signup flow with the aim of solving these issues. Our goal is to increase the the account creation rate to over 35%. Here’s to iterating until we get it right! We’ll keep you updated.

Asks:

• Become a VIP or email us at investors@beepboop.us to learn how you can participate in our growth and impact the future of language education.

We have to get back to work! See ya.

Please reach out if you want to dive deeper into anything!

More 💰 for Top Teachers

Society does not reward amazing teachers enough. Beepboop does!

Two months ago we launched an in-app tipping feature. Our top teachers are now earning 8% more than previous months. Here’s how our first implementation of tipping works: Before a Drill starts, students can anonymously tip their instructor $2. Tipping an instructor before a Drill also unlocks the ability for the student to set the topic the entire Drill will learn. This effectively overrides our proprietary topic selection logic that analyzes all students’ learning preferences, skills, and topic history in order to choose an optimal topic for everyone in a Drill.

Beepboop is going to continue iterating on this and similar features to ensure we remain the best platform for teachers.

600% Increase in Daily Feedback from Students

The compassionate delivery of feedback is core to the Beepboop method. It’s so important to us that we named our company after it. In a Drill, “Beepboop” is sometimes said over 50x by the instructor and is used as a lighthearted way to alert students that they have made a mistake and that the class will then work together to fix it.

First, we prioritized building the infrastructure so that our instructors could provide feedback to students at scale. To date, we have delivered and tracked over 500,000 Beepboops!

Now, we’ve turned the tables and have given our students the ability to quickly give feedback to instructors. We’ve replaced a clunky Google form sent to students after each Drill with our own purpose-built survey that is 10x faster to fill out and has resulted in our instructors collecting 600% more feedback each day since launch.

Welcome to our newest teammates!

Janna Goliff - Software & Design Engineer (LinkedIn)
Janna recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Design and Computer Science. Janna previously interned for Beepboop for over a year, blowing us away with her ability to not only design delightful user experiences, but also do the coding to make her designs come to life. Janna’s first project as a full-time team member will be improving our new student onboarding flow so that more students who create an account actually attend their first live Drill. When not standing over shoulders to understand a user’s every click, Janna can be found rock climbing in and around her home in Philadelphia.

Emily Pommier - Growth & Product Marketing Analyst (LinkedIn)
Emily recently graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in Romance Languages and is a polyglot, speaking English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Emily has over 200+ hours of experience teaching foreign languages at Dartmouth College using the Rassias Method. Emily has interned for Beepboop since Beepboop’s creation and has become an expert at creating engaging, witty, and effective lesson plans that instructors enjoy teaching and students love so much that they go viral in the language-learning community. In addition to turning our educational content into amazing marketing material, Emily manages our email marketing channels, coordinating over 400,000 automated emails sent to users each month. Emily will be moving from the US to Spain next month where she will teach English in public schools part time in addition to her work at Beepboop.

That’s it for now!

Please reach out if you want to dive deeper into anything!

🌐 We Teach English Now

For companies that struggle to recruit, retain, and upskill the 25 million non-English speakers in the US, Beepboop now provides on-demand group English language-learning classes, where live instructors guide students through exciting "hot potato-like" speaking exercises using techniques pioneered at Dartmouth that are proven to be 40% more effective than traditional methods. → Jump into an English (or Spanish) Drill

We are now extremely focused on on-boarding B2B clients who need to teach their Spanish-speaking workforce English. If you know an organization that could benefit from Beepboop, please let us know!

🚀 Fundraising Milestone: Funding from Google!

We are proud to announce that Beepboop has raised $100k in funding from the Google Startups Latino Founders Fund to expand our English language-learning product into more businesses. In addition to capital, we’ll have access to the deep resources and scaling expertise that only Google could provide. → Learn more

🔦 Goldman Sachs Gives Beepboop the Spotlight

Goldman Sachs blasted its 200k+ alumni network an interview our founders had with the Google team about how we are using the Google Cloud Platform to teach massive live classes of up to 200 students and power peer-to-peer language-learning games that run autonomously without live teachers. → Read the interview

See you next month!

Visit Beepboop

Share

Subscribe now