How two technopreneurs met over the net and co-founded Vocabmonk

Vidhatanand is an IT graduate who has devoured several web technologies and has worked on various projects, both as a freelancer and as an employee. He has worked as a development lead for Highwire Press, Stanford University, where he wrote the architecture behind some of the largest scientific journals. A strong belief in intelligent learning systems made him active on the various internet forums where he met Vaibhav Kakkar who is an entrepreneur and has managed to build a 250-employee strong India wing for an online marketing performance business. The duo started working together; and the idea for Vocabmonk was there in Vidhatanand's mind since long, but they started serious work on it about a year ago.

Vocabulary building has always been a 'good way to spend time on the net' and with the rise of entrance tests and their focus on vocabulary, students across the globe are hungry for such products. “Vocabmonk is a gamified and personalized vocabulary building tool, with a social touch to foster competitive learning driven by powerful and researched artificial intelligence algorithms,” says Vidhatanand. Bootstrapped with some capital from family and friends, Vocabmonk is based out of Gurgaon and is a team of 6 at the moment. “We are doing one simple thing of giving users a platform to build vocabulary which is currently limited to static, not-personalised dictionaries and quiz tools online,” adds Vidhatanand.

There are quite a few tools already available in the market, but Vocabmonk claims to differentiate on the following fronts:

• A structured and personalised approach to vocabulary building. Powered by its suggestion engine that uses each individual’s learning/quiz data mashed up with their algorithm to create a recommended session for users every day.
• Game mechanics, social and competitive aspect to learning
• A pool of more than 10,000 relevant, expert-chosen words along with more than 100,000 questions based on them.
• Teachers can keep track of the vocabulary building efforts and results of students they mentor in classrooms.

The first version of the product was launched around June but didn't pick up as expected. They weren't satisfied with the design and hence decided to redo the product and came up with a new version which was received well. The average time spent on the site was about 16 minutes at that point in time. Vocabmonk then got the added boost with the social and gamification angle coming in last month due to which the average time went up to around 29 minutes.

Vocabmonk has more than 1,000 active users as of now and has got a good response from the teachers community as well. Focusing on getting more users for the product at the moment, the revenue model will be built on the B2B front. The 'mentors' feature is what is next on the roadmap which will help coaching classes and teachers track the progress of students.

A well-designed product, it'll have you glued if you're a word lover. Check out the product here: Vocabmonk.