Paras - this friggin awesome! As a 2x yc founder, who has chewed her share of glass trying to make something(s) people want, your bootstrapped story is inspiration for so many of us fellow founders. Congrats!
No. Respectfully, I do not share these concerns because we have grounded our approach in neuroscience of motivation rather than philosophical lore. By following the psychology of positive dopamine conditioning, we are helping children fall in love with reading, developing reading as a life long habit and helping them see real measurable results month over month (in just 4 months, comprehension went up by 70 percent, phonics by 40% and the average kid is reading for 40 minutes a day when they used to read less than 5 minutes daily).
These numbers have real impact. What the impact data I shared above will not show you is that our kids parents comment on the confidence their child develops after 2 months on the app. How they go from never raising their hand to speak in the weekly live to being eager to answer every question and be part of all discussions about the book in the weekly live meetup with their cohort in the app.
These numbers have real impact. Kids in the app are not rewarded with any use or monetary prize beyond their first tournament. Yet after the first month, reading levels do not drop and growth in phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary and comprehension still keep increasing (students have to do A LOT of work in the app beyond just reading. There is full reading courseware with quizzes, worksheets and mini lessons - our courseware is built on the Science Of Reading philosophy).
These numbers have real impact. Most of our parents could never get their children to take up reading. We don't just motivate kids with flashy use promotional tournament prizes. We turn movies into full n books and cartoons. All shot and filmed in our downtown Brooklyn studio. We have directors, producers, actors, recording artists and more - all to bring a book to life on screen. Children unlock episodes by doing the required daily reading and reading courseware. We are committed to making kids feel learning is fun. THAT is the intrinsic motivation we see as our duty to cultivate.
To reference The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (because why not), all of these concerns were part of the Primer's issues with Nell in the Diamond Age. Yet, when Miranda (via the Primer) realized Nell was not intrinsically motivated, they used tactics like bringing the subject matter to life enacted experiences or gamification like solving puzzles to motivate her. And in the end, it worked. She went from being a girl in extreme poverty with no interest in learning to becoming successful and the leader of her Phyle (tribe).
We are creating enabling environments to promote learning. It works. It is grounded in the neuroscience of motivation. As for the rest, I will let the philosophers philosophize.
Correct, in part. It is our promotion to motivate someone to signup but many times it is the child pushing the parent by bringing up the cash reward. It is just our first introductory promotion. Every subsequent month challenge is rewarded in Litcoin and kids can use their bitcoin at the Litnerd Store to buy items they want like iPads, Roux, Game stations, collector cards to play the Litnerd game and more. Much better than trying to acquire customers via high CAC ad spend.
- kids love any stories that involve witches and magical powers. I guess the Harry Potter phenomenon still reigns supreme.
- kids love Roblox and we learned A LOT about community engagement by incorporating these elements into Litnerd.
- kids are competitive!! The Leader Board is a huge incentive for kids to keep pushing on the app.
- kids prefer LitQuizzes over any other way of earning Litcoin. Something about immediate gratification compared to, for example, worksheets that are manually graded by our team so you don’t see the Litcoin tally for this until grading is done.
We do! Have you seen some of the interviews with past winners? Our kids range from parents who have a second home in the Hamptons, NY (high networth) all the way to parents from mid to mid-low income bracket. Using usd cash prize is a HUGE incentive to get kids excited. I have observed no difference based on parents income bracket oddly. Lesson: kids don’t care to virtue signal :) Even our school launches go better when there is a usd cash prize for top school.
Having said that, we reward users with our own in app currency, Litcoin, after the first promotional usd prize. The reason it works is that after a month with us, kids value Litcoin and care for it more than the usd reward.
Interesting. I wonder what the long term effects of this are.
Won't the results of classic intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation studies apply?
I'd imagine if reading (and learning in general) is extrinsically driven,
one might move the needle say from 0->5. Once the driver is removed, I'm
having a hard time seeing it succeed.
I do not have studies or large scale data to back it, but my boys (12, 17) have
exhibited the drop-off in interest once the extrinsic motivation and/or peer group vanishes.
Perhaps it's not in your business interest to do so, but it'd be very useful to understand the longer term implications of a program like this.
I do not mean to discourage you - just curious - and wishing I could take back my tiger parenting altogether.
first off, thank you for diving into this. As someone who studied neuroscience at college, we’re getting into some of my favourite topics :)
So, to answer your question there is actually a ton of research on the influence of gamification, reward mechanism and positive conditioning and their effects on learning outcomes. If podcasts are your thing, there is a wonderful Huberman Lab series on this too. I will link towards the end here.
Dopamine, the chemical which controls pleasure, learning and memory in the brain, can be used to hijack motivation and increase attention spans among learners – and when used correctly, it can even make your learning program/app addicting. Basically, what Litnerd does is leverage dopamine release (a big cash prize in this case creates shock and huge anticipation which acts as the initial hook/motivator) to get kids to want to signup and go through the monthly habit of our app and the reading activities.
After the first month, we do not see reading levels or activities in app go down. Even thought the cash reward incentive is gone. Students are still competing monthly and the chance to win more Litcoin (our points system in app) is what keeps them motivated afterwards. We hold competitions monthly and the reward is more Litcoin. For kids, however, an added motivator of our app is the weekly meetup. Kids want to be in the know with their peers each week at the meetup and this helps keep motivation for staying up to date with the daily reading and reading courseware.
Growing up in Karachi, my motivator to get good grades was to avoid getting beaten with a metal ruler. This was normal in my all girls school. Another motivator was that in highschool, our grades were posted in the local newspaper and it was considered dishonor to the family to not have A’s at least. This mechanism of negative reward system definitely plays into dopamine as well but research shows that positive conditioning leads to better long term learning outcomes than negative conditioning.
We have real data to show that in just 4 months, students improved comprehension scores by upwards of 70% and phonics by upwards of 40%. You can bet that i am eager to report back in a full year on how we compounded learning outcomes across Vocabulary, Phonics, Phonemic Awareness, Comprehension and Fluency.
All that to say, I feel you on tiger parenting. And that is why I am so bullish on what we are building and our positive dopamine connection by making learning fun and exciting via monthly tournaments (again, you only have a cash prize reward once. Every month thereafter, it is pure gamification without cash prizes).
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. Would love to hear what you think?
This is a fair concern. The gamification aspect certainly does not take away from our users calm state of mind while reading. In fact, it aides with learning because research supports that if you are engaged in the subject matter you are studying, your learning/memory recall and comprehension all improve. Huberman Labs even had a podcast on this recently. Parents biggest feedback is that this is the first time they felt their child was engaged in any educational app, esp reading. The app is designed to motivate students and our average reader spend 30-40 minutes daily reading and doing reading activities (worksheets and quizzes on phonics, vocabulary, comprehension). Additionally, the weekly live meetup helps provide an offline component of community building in the app. I hope you will give us a try for your child (if you have kids!)
Right now, are focusing on original sequels and releasing new titles based on analytics of popular books in the app. The nice thing about being in business for a couple of years is that we can now assess, with data, which books and IP were hits and which fell flat. For now, going to keep our focus on North America but in the future, most certainly we have a desire to localize IP based on regions. As someone who grew up in Karachi, for example, I would love to see versions of our books where the characters are more relatable to locals.
