Startup develops a strategy
While brainstorming ideas for the company, the thought of making video games was quickly dropped, because, as Lee said, “At that point, we were all tired of making games". The final choices were education and medicine, but as they had no expertise in medicine, they focused on education. With more ideas from Samsung Publishing, they decided to focus on the children's education market by making and uploading four music videos for Samsung Publishing's children's songs on their apps. The international response was good. “It was then that we realized that instead of making what we want, we should create content based on what the market wants,” Lee said.[3]
Discussing what market they would focus on, Kim said reaching out to global customers was more viable, as potential customers were limited in South Korea, where the birthrate per year was around 400,000.[7] They further planned to target pre-kindergarten or 2-year-old to kindergarten, looking to open offices in China and the U.S. to make local content geared for each of those markets. According to Lee, the U.S. users favored "interactive, actionable content such as writing letters on the tablet or taking pictures with the character", while Asian users preferred "one-way streaming video content".[8] Based on results in South Korea and China, they focused on creating content in English and Spanish for the U.S. market,[9] and started producing videos with its characters in several languages, including English, Chinese, Spanish and Russian; and operating their own mobile app providing content directly to viewers.[10] Many of the creators at the company were from children's book publishing and many of the apps were based on chant melodies to attract children's attention.[11]
They also added mobile VOD, comics, and finally, games.[12] As the company grew, they continued their debate on games and entertainment versus education. "Education combined with entertainment, edutainment, is hard to achieve. If it's too much focused on games, it has less educational value, and if it's too much focused on education, it will need sugar-coating with game features", Lee said.[8] Consequently, they returned to their forte in September, 2016, when they released a mobile game called “Monster Super League”.[10] Kim said he understood the importance of child education, but thought about the expertise of team members who were prior game developers at Nexon or NCSoft, and who were also fathers.[11]
They realized their market with international growth through Google and Apple app stores and expanded to IPTV in late 2013. They felt their willingness to understand subtle cultural differences instead of just enhancing language aspects benefited them. In particular, for Chinese marketing, they created new work using old Chinese fables and texts that Chinese children would know from kindergarten, and uploading them on native platforms like Youku, iQiyi and Tencent Video in China, where YouTube is banned.[3]
