Pipplet turns 4!

We’ve learnt so much along the way, and we’re proud and excited of what the future has in store for us.To celebrate our 4 years, I wanted to take a moment to look back and tell a couple of our stories...especially some of the ones that challenged us the most!

Our first idea was a test where candidates evaluated each other. We thought this idea was cool because it really demonstrated how well candidates were able to interact with each other in a foreign language.

However, what we thought was a good idea on paper was, in reality, extremely complicated to explain and above all impossible to sell. A bit of a failure! That being said, it was the feedback gathered from this idea from some colleagues working in HR, that helped us to come up with the next iterations of Pipplet...so maybe not a complete failure!

Back to the drawing board - we realised a major criticism of current testing methods was that they were too automatic. Tests at the time, mostly in multiple choice question format, did not provide any in depth information or understanding of a candidates language skills. Our HR colleagues wanted a quality assessment, which was accurate and in-depth.

So with that in mind, we set about thinking of another way to assess the test. We had already designed a great interface for the test, but instead of an automated evaluation, or peer to peer as in our first idea, we decided to build a community of language teachers, who would evaluate candidates and deliver detailed test results to the test sender within 24 hours.

We shared this new concept with our HR colleagues again, and this time, the feedback was much more positive! They liked that candidates could take the test whenever they wanted, and that it offered a far nicer experience than the traditional tests. They also liked the fact that they would get an accurate and reliable result within 24 hours, and that it was assessed by language examiners rather than machines.

While it was tough accepting our first idea wasn’t a good one, in the end it was the challenge we faced and the way in which we adapted which got us where we are today. The hard part wasn’t making the new version of Pipplet, but instead, giving up a year of hard work. We learnt an important lesson from this experience - always listen to feedback and be sure to take it on board.

In 2017 we had an article in Maddyness. We were super proud to be featured - some recognition and visibility for the Pipplet brand!

Unfortunately, journalists often write based on what they want to talk about - in this case, artificial intelligence and chatbots. The article presented our language test in a way which made it seem as though we used a chatbot for the evaluation. At the time, our idea was definitely not to create an automatic test, but to enable candidates to take the test another way - Facebook Messenger - but with the evaluation still done by humans!

Unfortunately the mention of chatbot in the article did its work, and people looking for us on Google saw the article, and thought that we used artificial intelligence to evaluate languages. We had to repeatedly explain to potential clients that this wasn’t the case and to make them understand that we didn’t use chatbots to assess the tests but instead qualified language teachers!

Although the article created a few problems, we are still grateful for the visibility Maddyness brought us - without it we may not have had been fortunate enough to have so many conversations, at a time when we were busily trying to get our brand out there.

Here you can see another common challenge faced by startups - sometimes you have to choose between saying exactly what you want, and getting exposure for your brand.

2018 was a crazy year, with a lot of changes at Pipplet, new customers, lots of feature requests, plenty of bugs to fix...

When September came around, Matthieu and I completely forgot about celebrating the anniversary of Pipplet. Lucky for us, we had 3 super trainees (Camille, Charlene and Nada - bravo to Nada for still being with us :P) who brought us a cake and party favors to mark the date.

It was such a nice surprise, and really reminded us to take a moment to appreciate all we’d achieved. We forget all too often to take a pause and look at how far we’ve come, but it feels good when we’re reminded to!

So there you have it, a few stories from the last 4 years. We have plenty of others in our head so feel free to get in touch if you want to hear some more :)