SpeaQwith.me - How an idea became a startup

Have you ever noticed what a huge difference there is between learning a language from a course or online tutorial, and actually using it in the real world? I can remember the first time I had that ah-ha moment as I was talking to a French exchange student. I had been studying French for a while and felt pretty good about all the grammar and vocabulary I knew, but when it came time to speak, suddenly all my carefully planned sentences seemed to fall apart!

So that was a bit frustrating, because of course I wanted to communicate in this language that I had been studying for so long. It helped me realize though, that textbook learning would only get me so far, and that to feel really comfortable in the language, I needed to spend more time listening and talking to native speakers.

Now let’s fast forward a bit, to the years I spent living abroad in Sweden, France, and Spain and Germany. In each new country, my first priority was to find some good conversation partners to help me get comfortable speaking the language. And what I found from these conversations is that when you have something interesting to talk about, learning a new language doesn’t even feel like a ton  of work. It’s just a fun social activity of getting to know interesting new people and cultures.

These positive experiences stuck with me throughout the years and convinced me that everyone should have the chance to learn a foreign language by talking to native speakers.  But I also realized that a lot of people around the world can’t find a native speaker of the language they are studying, either because of geography, money or time. So I thought the best way to get people to talk with each other is to build an online platform where people of different cultures and languages can virtually meet up and start conversations. That way, anyone with a smart phone, tablet, or computer can find the conversation partner that is right for them, and start speaking in online video or voice conversations.

So this was the idea and inspiration behind SpeaQwith.me. Of course, inspiration isn’t worth much without the right people to make it happen. So over the last few months, the core team behind SpeaQwith.me has been formed. The team is comprised of me (Patrick) the founder and lead designer, Christian, the co-founder and lead technologist, and Kerstin, the marketing and communications director. In addition, we are also supported by Armin, our trusted mentor, Johannes, the user experience guru, Utkarsh, the code whisperer, and Silke, the master wordsmith. Together we are ready to start building the application that will get you “speaqing” with conversation partners from around the world and help you meet your language learning goals.

Happy Speaqing

Patrick

P.S. Stay tuned to the blog for updates on our progress and stories of our language learning adventures!