How Ben Guez Turned 800K Followers Into a Language Learning App

0:00Ben Guez:What has your experience been like raising capital as a creative founder? Do they see you as like a risk, a moat? Do they see it as both? That's a good question. I think they see the opportunity of the distribution. When you just say, hey, I'm a content creator, I'm doing like something, I don't know if they're going to take you seriously. The good thing is I have a background also in business, like an exit, I get like, it gets more legit. But if I was just saying, oh, I have a lot of people on social media, I'm doing an app, that's going to open the door and maybe like start a conversation. but it's not enough.

0:28They need you to know what you're doing.

0:31Ben Guez:Welcome to the Odd Start VC podcast, the show where we break down how celebrities and creators build billion-dollar brands. In today's episode, I'm joined by Ben Guaes, an entrepreneur who began creating content while still building his previous company and went on to grow an audience of more than 800 ,000 followers across social media. After posting a video of himself singing in French with English subtitles, Ben uncovered a new way people actually learn languages. That moment ultimately led to the founding of Canary, a new app that helps users learn languages through the songs they already love.

1:03Ben Guez:We talk about what inspired Ben to start creating content, how content became the inside engine behind Canary, and how he's thinking about disrupting the language learning app market by combining music, community, and creator-led distribution. So without further ado, let's get to the conversation. Ben, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Scott. It's interesting because normally I talk to a lot of content creators who have been a content creator first and later on they actually became an entrepreneur. You're actually the opposite. You have been building companies for the last 15 years.

1:31Ben Guez:You even had an exit and after you exit you decided to become a content creator. So what initially inspired you to start creating content? Actually I stopped before my exit. I was doing COVID and I was bored like everyone else. I closed my office. We were working remote. And I started doing some TikTok first because I was a little bit ashamed to do Instagram because of my family and friends on Instagram. So I did TikTok and it was doing well. And then I changed my mindset and I was like, okay, let's do also Instagram. Who cares? And then after my exit, I spent more time on it. So that's where it really grew and grew up.

2:09Ben Guez:Yeah, very interesting. What type of content did you initially create and how has that evolved over time? So first it was just like stupid trend that everyone does. But then it became a little bit more personal. Like I was talking about like being French in the US, like dating in the US, like things I know and people can relate to. And that's when I got like better engagement because it was more like personal, you know? Yeah. And when you started with content creation, you said that you started because you were a little bit bored during COVID. But did you always think that potentially you could eventually build your own audience and leverage that to build your own company on top of it?

2:41Ben Guez:Or was that not the roadmap at all? No, it was not. It was just to have fun, like, first. And still now, it's kind of, like, the main reason why I do content is to have fun. But I'm always, like, thinking about business. Like, I'm an entrepreneur. So when I started getting an audience and followers, I was thinking about, like, things I can do, you know. So I even launched a book on Amazon to learn French. And I did, like, a retreat last year, like, Sailing Week in Greece. And then I thought about the app, like, Canary, that I'm doing right now. Yeah, so let's talk about Canary. So you posted like a TikTok of you singing in French with English translations, which eventually sparked the idea of Canary after you saw like a very high engagement and great comments.

3:21Ben Guez:So can you take us back to that initial video? What was it? What type of things did you notice from it? And how did that eventually turn into Canary? So, yeah, I just like posted like a video of me singing in French with the lyrics and the translation. It's not about like the views because I get like video with like 26 million views. but it was mostly about the engagement and mostly about the ratio between the followers and the views so usually I get maybe like five followers for a thousand views and on this one I was getting five top followers for like 300 views so it was like three times better and I was like okay maybe there's something you know maybe that's people like they want to see this content so what I did is I created a page just for that and it was also like going very fast like like faster than my personal page so I got like 100 ,000 followers in like five months so I was like okay that's like social proof for me and I'm like okay let's do maybe something like let's make an app let's make an MVP so I can I can see if it's something that people want to use you know yeah it's so interesting so like there's obviously already many language learning apps on the market so what do you think is broken about most of them and what kind of problem does Canary solve so first of all the Canary is more like a supplement I'm not gonna say that's gonna be fluent like in French or Spanish just using like music but I do think there's a lot of app and let's talk about the the elephant in the room, like the hole in the room.

4:39Duolingo is the king. And I don't want to say bad things about Duolingo, but it's great for gamification. It's like super sticky. You want to come back. You want to do your strike and all these things. But every time I speak to someone in the US, I'm like, oh, I'm French. And they're like, oh, I'm in 200 days strike on Duolingo. And I say, OK, tell me something in French. And they freeze. They don't say anything. And the only thing they're going to say is like, voulez-vous coucher avec moi? And that's like the lyrics of the song, you know? and so for me it was like and I try also do a lingo myself like Spanish and I didn't progress because again it's like gamification but it's not sticky enough for the for to remember the the sentence you're gonna learn and also there is a lack for me of like practice and social practice so that's why in Canary I want to like people to learn with music because I believe in that and even it's like science proven but also like practice with people so you can practice with someone that's gonna speak your language or learn the same language that you're learning

5:35Ben Guez:Yeah, I think it's super interesting also because through Duolingo or any other language school, you also learn the traditional way on how they speak the language. But that is not how people actually speak the language. And through music, you understand slang and you understand culture and that type of stuff. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. You understand the slang. You're not going to learn in Duolingo for sure. So practically, how does Canary exactly work for me as a user who, for example, wants to learn a new language? It's probably easy. You go to Canary, you're going to see a bunch of, let's say you're learning French, you're going to see a bunch of French songs.

6:08Every week there's new ones. You can also search for any songs. And you're going to see the lyrics, you're going to see the translation. You're going to be able to save any words of the song into a vocabulary tab. You're going to be able to do a quiz. So you're going to quiz yourself. You can do a karaoke so you can practice. It's important to practice the pronunciation. and people that learn with music also have a better pronunciation. Like, not like me, a very big French accent. And we also have the social part of it where you can also meet people that either, like, as I said, like speak the language or learn the language.

6:38And we're building like new things like grammar, for example. Yeah, that's pretty much it.

6:42Ben Guez:Yeah, and what type of languages are currently most popular using on the app or what type of songs? I would be very curious. It's mostly French. French is number one, Spanish number two, Italian is number three. but I only have five languages right now and we also have German and English. I mean, it makes sense because I started with my page and I also started with French songs on Canary page. So it makes sense. Most of the users, they want to learn French. So there's two types of music that really get a lot of engagement of songs. It's the one that are super famous and people they remember and they want to learn the lyrics.

7:13The people are the one that's slow and easy to learn so they can really learn from it.

7:18Ben Guez:Yeah, I see this myself. Like I was actually doing karaoke two weeks ago and the song Despacito came up. And literally everyone knows that song because it's so popular, but people are singing it even though they can't understand Spanish, but they kind of want to know what they're singing, right? Exactly. We put this one on Canary. It's a good one. Yeah. And what is the business model of Canary? Canary is just a simple like premium, premium. So if you're free, you can still have access to some video. But if you're premium, you have like unlimited access, unlimited like quiz and karaoke practice.

7:49is I want to introduce later the content creator angle because I also believe that creators, they can like post their own cover and you can learn from it and they can make money. Like we're going to do like a rev share. But also when someone messages you, you can also like make some money. So like kind of like a Patreon model.

8:05Ben Guez:Yeah, and have you already onboarded like any creators for that? And also what type of creators are they? Are they more lifestyle creators like yourself that speak like a language or can that also be like language content creators? It's going to be mostly either like musician or like artist that can like upload like a cover song or like teacher or language learner, like creators. Not really myself, but there is like a couple on social media where you can learn from a video, like from a video. And we have a bunch. The feature is not live yet. So we were like, it's actually live, but not on the app.

8:37It's on TestFlight. But as soon as it's live, yeah, I'm like, we have a bunch of creators to already like to give them access to these features. we can try this can girl for them to make money from this content. Because right now, like on TikTok, on Instagram, it's not the monetization for creators. Especially for people that do cover songs, it's not the best. So for me, I'm trying to see if I can make them more money than what they're making on TikTok or Instagram.

9:01Ben Guez:It's so funny because if you think about the history of TikTok, it obviously came from Musical.ly. And you're kind of actually going back to that, to that original kind of how it actually was initiated, the whole version of TikTok. Sure. yeah and um like with those creators can those creators also partner up like i think what's really interesting about this is that typically creators that speak different languages they don't really partner up or do content together whatsoever but i think now if there's like a german-speaking content creator and a french-speaking content creator maybe they can partner up in such a way and expose each other's content to new audiences which has never been done before yeah that's a a very interesting angle.

9:42I didn't think it this way, but I like it. One feature I want to do in the future is like a duet kind of feature where you can also duet a song with someone else. It can be like two content creators that duet like a song together and can be like one part in German, one part in English and they can post it together. So it's like a collab, you know?

9:59Ben Guez:Yeah. Yeah, I think that is super interesting and that is something that creators also need because they need to get exposure to other audiences as well that they typically can't reach. Very true. Yeah. So what is really interesting about you is I follow you on LinkedIn. You are building this in public, which has been really interesting. So I recommend any listener also to follow you on LinkedIn. And yeah, you're building this in public, as I mentioned. So can you tell maybe a little bit more about where you are currently at in terms of the product and the traction? So the MVP has been live for three months.

10:32I didn't do any paid ads or anything, so it's mostly organic. We have like 6 ,000 users. I launched monetization just a month ago. And we are like 4 ,000 bucks AR after a month. So it's a good signal for me. In terms of team, it's a pretty small team. I have two developers and one community manager. Yeah. And what has been most surprising in the whole launching of the MVP for you? Actually, it's my first mobile app. So I have a bunch of... I had a couple of different businesses before, like SaaS, even FinTech, and an agency. but it's my first mobile app and I just love it. Like it's such a different kind of game.

11:11It's so fun to see all the traction. You go on Google Analytics, you know, go on RevenueCat and you see like the MRR and a little like tweak that you make is going to make like a big change on your retention, on your metrics like D7 or little notification or little tweak on onboarding. So all these things that I'm learning now but I also talk to a lot of people that did mobile app. It's a lot of fun. I love it.

11:35Ben Guez:Yeah. And you're obviously taking a very data-driven approach there where you look at all the numbers and think about tweaks, how you can actually optimize the engagement and that type of stuff. And I think like I talk to a lot of content creators who are really focused on the content creation itself and they have never launched their own companies or whatsoever. So do you think that you have an advantage over other content creators building a tech product? I come from tech. So yeah, I have an advantage of like knowing a little bit about like all these things. And I've been like also in marketing all my life.

12:03So for me, like doing A-B testing when I do like paid ads, it's something I will do for Canary as well for content or A-B test what kind of caption, what kind of content, what kind of format. So everything that I learned for business, I can replicate for.

12:16Ben Guez:for for yeah and you see that a lot of other creators like i would say they're obviously now launching their own companies and i would say that 98 of them are launching cpg brands over tech companies why do you think that's the case why do you think that a lot of creators are actually gravitating towards cpg over tech i think it's easier for them to just think okay i have an audience and i can really like just launch a product and people are gonna buy it i do think it makes sense sometimes for me for example if i was if i was doing it i don't know what kind of product i will do like maybe a croissant or like a champagne i um for me was never like really what i wanted to do because i have like this tech mindset i have like this tech this mindset of saying okay i should be a shame of my mvp and when you do when you do this kind of things you can you you can do it with product i can just launch a champagne brand and it's going to be bad at first and then i'm going to get feedback and i'm going to change it you just have one chance you know with your product and that's kind of what happened with like mr beast with the burger apparently the The quality was not amazing.

13:13For me, tech is like with my personality and my mindset of just going fast and like I don't have the patience to wait and spend a lot of time and money on making a product and then launch it. I just want to like have like a little thing, I get feedback and then I improve it.

13:26Ben Guez:Yeah, and with the rise of like AI and in companies like Lovable that actually make it easier to nowadays launch tech companies or mobile apps or whatsoever, do you think you were going to see a rise of like creators now going to launch tech companies over CPG? Yeah, 100%. As you said, like, yeah, it's going to have like a big impact on this. It's going to be easy to create like a tech product. And because I think that with all the product launch, I think with the data we're seeing right now is that there's a big hype at first, but then after like, okay, I try it, but then I don't know if the sales really like really going high.

14:00Like I think there's a decline, like Prime, for example. So I think the creators and celebrities, they're going to understand that there's a different way to adjust product. And it's like tech and you can really scale like big, you know?

14:11Ben Guez:Yeah. Are there any creative entrepreneurs or creative founded companies that you take inspiration from? I mean, I have like some influencer, what is the name? The brother of Prime. Jake Paul. Jake Paul is, I mean, it's not really his company, but he did a pretty good investment on like some cool company like the AI, you know, the video AI app. And in terms of marketing, so that's like something I look at because like it does really good in terms of like viral marketing. But yeah, I don't have like a really a lot of celebrity of like creators. I'm like, that's pretty great what they're doing now.

14:52Ben Guez:Yeah, I think we're just very early. like we kind of saw the first wave where a lot of them were launching some of the companies behind me, like a liquor brand, an apparel company, a skincare brand. And I believe that we're now going to enter a second wave where a lot of them are going to launch innovative products and services that solve actual customer problems and where they also have a certain edge around product, IP, science, or even technology with Canary being a great example. So I do believe that going forward, we're going to see a lot more interesting tech companies being founded by creators like yourself.

15:23Ben Guez:No, I agree. I think it's going to be more and more, especially with AI. It's going to be something else. Yeah. You also posted on LinkedIn that you're like actively angel investing and that you're looking for companies to make an investment in, but also actually leverage your own audience to promote those companies. I wonder, did anything come out of it? Or are you looking at any interesting AI companies that you can do equity deals with? Yeah, actually, I spoke to a couple. There's a lot of AI companies, so it's hard really to know like which one is just white label a solution already or like doing something like very unique.

15:54I'm like almost like a pretty long conversation with someone that does like calls for SMBs and is getting like good traction, good revenues. But that is very cool. Like there's some very cool concepts. I love it. I mean, there is AI even in Canary because everyone uses every startup use AI right now. So it makes sense to use it. But I, yeah, I want to keep like learning and maybe do some digital investing and some cool ones. But also it's really hard because everyone does AI. And again, you never know if it's really like, it's them doing it or it's so easy right now to white label a solution existing and then like just do it, launch it, you know?

16:32Ben Guez:Yeah, that makes sense. Let's go back to Kenry for a second. So talking about what is the future of the app, like are there specific features or products that you want to develop next or in the near future? Yeah, as a couple, I really want to like, So my two big like angle is like learning and social. So in terms of learning, I really want to push on like making sure there is like a good way to progress. I want them to see like their progress and like their evolution. So we're going to add like more grammar. We're going to also like need to train AI because we're using AI to create the quiz from the song.

17:08So we need to train AI to make the perfect like quiz. We want to also add like feedback, AI feedback on the pronunciation of when you sing. it's really there is some like a solution that does that with like an organization but our challenge is when they sing so it's even a little bit like harder but we're gonna find a way and then on the social angle i also want to have like more creators of course and have like this duet feature where you can duet with like different people so you learn you sing a song together and at the same time you learn about the song i think it's gonna be a cool one and yeah that's a So it's a good start.

17:42Ben Guez:Yeah. And in this MVP phase, you have been really like focusing on, and in the zero to one phase, you've been really focusing on leveraging your own audience to get to that 6K users. Yeah. What would be your go-to-market strategy beyond your own socials? Yeah. So I leveraged my audience. I leveraged like Canary audience because I also created a page and it's like now 170 ,000 followers, but it was mostly organic. What I want to do is paid ads. I tried just to see an experiment. I was starting very high, like 12 bucks an install. But then I optimized to 50 cents an install. So I know that I can scale.

18:21Like when I'm, because I'm thinking about raising like precedes. So when I'm going to raise, it's going to be mostly also like on paid ads. And then all the other, like PR, I didn't do any PR, but PR also is very important when you're doing like that, press release. And that's going to be my main like marketing channel. but TikTok, ads, social ads, and I see always like PR and things like this. But keep like doing the content creation. And when I do organic, it's not just organic on our page. It's also UGC because UGC is really big, but using the content of the UGC for ads. So that's kind of like the funnel you're doing.

18:55You know, you're trying on organic, you see the distraction and the one that's really have like the best traction, you see it on social ads.

19:01Ben Guez:Yeah. And I think also for UGC content create, is this is such a fun type of content to create. Like normally they have to promote like a makeup brand and you kind of have to be a little bit fake, right? Because you need to start selling, oh, this is so amazing. And you probably don't even use it yourself. But with your app, like a lot of people love singing. A lot of people love musicals, theater. So I expect that a lot of people are just also going to do it for the love of it. Not even thinking about like, oh, we can actually turn this into a revenue generation opportunity. Yeah, right. It's like, it's a passion.

19:32Music is a passion, you know? And so many people tell me like, wow, I'm learning actually with music. That's the way I learn like Spanish with music. So I really want people to just like have fun, like sing and tag us. So it's going to be like just organic, even like unpaid marketing for us, you know?