As we are progressing, our need and dependence on learning different languages has also increased. English is a must if you are planning to prepare for any competitive exam. To help kids achieve their dreams, Amit Agrawal, the founder of OckyPocky has launched an app that can help children learn English easily. OckyPocky offers children an easy gamified learning experience.
What is OckyPocky?
In most simple terms, OckyPocky is an interactive English learning app, focused on non-English speaking families. OckyPocky has managed to become India’s number-one trending education app on Google Play Store. It is India’s first digital platform to offer English language training in 11 Indian languages covering 90% of the population.
We have launched this interactive platform with a strong vision for skilling children living in a vernacular environment. The expression vernacular environment refers to an environment, where the majority of the people around the kid including the parents prefer to use an Indian language such as Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, etc. as a primary language of communication. We want to empower these children by helping them learn and speak English- a language that is practically essential to make a good career in 21st-century India.
What makes you so confident that you say that OckyPocky is one of the best EduTech mobile apps in India for children to learn the English language?
Good question. I would cite two aspects that make OckyPocky one of the best mobile ssss to learn English for children: Our content approach and technology. By approach, I am pointing to the rigorous process including extensive background research that we follow for our content development. We have extensively consulted the key stakeholders including but not limited to language experts, learning experts, child psychologists, parents, and teachers and the learnings based upon their years of cumulative experience have gone into the development of OckyPocky. This approach has helped us identify the problem at its very core and then we used cutting-edge technology such as personalised AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to address it for millions of children living in non-metro cities and villages of India.
It’s been almost 5 years since OckyPocky mobile app came into existence. Tell us where you stand today in terms of market penetration and your vision for future years.
Well, OckyPocky has registered phenomenal growth. Every few weeks our servers crash due to overwhelming growth in traffic. Post Covid, most houses have an extra smartphone which enables high-quality learning experiences. We have sustained it and went on to become India’s #1 trending education app on Google Play Store. We have achieved 100,000 users a day mark in Q3’22. We started with just one language- Hindi but today we offer our services in 11 Indian languages. Every month children from all over India are learning over 10 crore words on our platform.
So many Edtech companies have shut down recently. What are you doing differently to sail through this storm?
When you decide to build solutions for Bharat, you have to be extremely frugal as it’s very hard to design a product for vernacular kids. We are very capital efficient and use technology to scale our initiatives.
The design evolution alone needs time. The same goes for pedagogy innovation that works.
We obsess about validating everything with data and user research. I personally speak to 100s of parents every week and we have a very deep data room.
The next powerful mantra is building a capable team. Our team is extremely focused, passionate, and innovative. Every day we ensure that we are on track to build a better version of OckyPocky than it is today and stay much ahead of our competition.
What are the new avenues that we will witness Ocky Pocky exploring going forward and where do you see it by the year 2025?
We have a whole language lab that is currently building the next prototypes which will get plugged into the app when they reach validation. We are also conducting ground research to find the next languages where users are hungry for English, based on market size and demand, in which we will offer our services.
A big focus is now on expanding the community size which we believe is going to be 10 million by next year. Many schools and other tech companies across the country have also expressed interest in our product for collaboration forcing us to build a partnership program, we believe OckyPocky can help fill the gaps in conventional schooling methods.