GogyUp Literacy Support System

The ability to read and comprehend complex information is foundational for achieving economic security in an increasingly technical workplace. However, the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) estimates 36 MILLION working-age U.S. adults are unable to recognize basic vocabulary, determine the meaning of sentences, and read more than a paragraph of text. GogyUp’s Literacy Support System (LSS) converts employers’ training slide decks, printed work instructions, and human resource materials into interactive job aids by embedding in-the-moment reading assistance within existing documents.  For employees, the LSS functions as an “in-pocket” tutor combining in-the-moment reading assistance and word-by-word translation with longer-term, sequenced and personalized reading instruction.  For employers, the LSS provides real-time verification that employees understand how to work safely and efficiently, reducing workplace communication barriers that impact productivity, safety, retention and potentially removing barriers to employment created by limited literacy or English proficiency.

GogyUp is designed around three interconnected issues that present a significant challenge for both the 36 million U.S. adults with limited literacy or English proficiency (LLEP) to obtain living wage work and for employers to hire and train them:

1. Up to one-sixth of the U.S. working age population is estimated to lack basic literacy and therefore ill-prepared for an increasingly technical workplace, unable to upskill within their current employment or advance their education.

2. Adult basic education (ABE) systems have severely constrained capacity: less than 5% of U.S. LLEP adults have access to literacy instruction.

3. An increasing demographic “dependency ratio,” the number of adults unable to work in relation to the number of working age adults, could create opportunity for LLEP adults if they can demonstrate comprehension of work instructions.

GogyUp’s Literacy Support System (LSS) provides one solution for those three issues:

1. LLEP adults get the assistance they need, whenever and wherever they need it.

2. ABE systems can use GogyUp LSS to expand their programming.

3. LSS provides employers with a turnkey solution for onboarding and training LLEP adults that verifies what each employee understands while anonymously increasing their employees’ ability to read.

Co-designed and developed hand-in-hand with employers, adult educators and LLEP immigrant and native-born U.S. adults with limited digital skills, the GogyUp’s LSS is a highly scalable, cost-efficient solution that transforms the resources already used by employers and ABE systems into instantly accessible in-the-moment training and longer-term, personalized and sequenced reading instruction.

The system consists of two interconnected products:

1. The free GogyUp Reader app functions as an “in-pocket tutor” providing employees with anonymous, assistive reading technology for any word or phrase on their mobile devices or the Web. 

2. The Learning Manager: a lightweight publishing and progress tracking system that embeds GogyUp’s proprietary assistive technology and instructional framework into existing text documents and publishes them to the Reader. Employers then use GogyUp’s progress tracking to follow each employee’s understanding of the content, enabling them to verify understanding or adjust their training as necessary. 

Employer subscriptions fund the continuous development and support of the entire system, expanding the opportunities for any adult to improve their literacy skills while also providing a low-cost option for ABE systems to expand their programming.

GogyUp serves three stakeholder groups: 

• LLEP adults, defined as falling within PIAAC’s definition of literacy level 1 or 2.

• Employers facing a constrained pool of talent from which to hire.

• ABE systems with limited capacity and funding.

Before we launched GogyUp LSS, we collaborated and iteratively designed with formerly incarcerated men through Urban Ventures in South Minneapolis and New Americans learning English and studying for different certifications at the International Institute of Minnesota.  These partnerships informed our hybrid approach to allow adult learners to gradually build competence in fundamental literacy skills while comprehending documents they need to understand, in-the-moment.

Data from 350+ “public” learners who downloaded and used GogyUp on their own and from over 50 learners in pilots with citizenship and ESL level 1 - 4 classes at Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servico (CLUES) point to the system’s ability to sustain engagement and provide effective instruction.  

With GogyUp, adults gain an engaging learning experience, employers have a low-cost method to expand their ability to onboard and train from a wider talent pool, and ABE systems can expand their programming to better meet their learners’ needs.

Unless opportunities to become literate are expanded, 36 million adults will be prevented from joining the pathways to professions that hold the greatest opportunity.  Assistive reading technology, when coupled with longer-term, personalized and sequenced literacy training, can remove LLEP as a hiring and training barrier for the immediate term while also providing a scalable means for adults to become literate, and the ability to upskill, over time. 

As employers become increasingly aware that they need to expand their hiring pool, GogyUp will be a turnkey solution that can open up the door for individuals typically overlooked by current hiring practices.

Until we establish sufficient traction, we are conserving our resources by employing one founding team member full-time and the others on a part-time basis. Important, but less urgent projects, are tasked to four paid interns, supervised by Ned:

FTE 1.0: Ned Zimmerman-Bence - Marketing and Business Development
FTE 0.5: Jodi Eiesland - Marketing and Business Development
FTE 0.5: David Radcliffe - Engineering
FTE 0.4: Chris Koranda - DevOps and Engineering
FTE 0.2: Brian Lukis - Engineering and Design

GogyUp is advised by a volunteer committee with expertise in Human Resources, Adult Education, Workforce Education and Business Development.

A founding GogyUp principle is to design with (and not for) our end-users.  We maintain partnerships with organizations such as Urban Ventures, the International Institute of Minnesota, and CLUES to maintain a direct connection with the adult learners using GogyUp.

To broaden our internal expertise, we have engaged with Macalester College to hire several first-generation college students as paid interns.  As GogyUp becomes established, we hope to turn back to those 15 talented students and hire them back (or tap their personal networks) as well as hire participants from our partnerships.  We have reserved 30% of the company’s equity to ensure that our future employees fully share in the company’s success.

Finally, we look forward to reorganizing as a Minnesota Specific Benefit Corporation and achieving B-Corp certification.  Both milestones will help guide the development of our corporate culture and attract the investors and capital to support our social mission.

Applying mobile technology to deliver instruction, even literacy instruction for adult learners, is not new. For example, Cell-Ed (our only direct competitor) teaches reading via SMS. Cell-Ed’s scalability is constrained by relying on instructors to deliver instruction in real time and its focus on general literacy doesn’t provide immediate value to LLEP adults and their employers. 

Other potential competitors include reading assistance apps (e.g., BeeLine Reader, Speechify), micro-learning platforms (e.g., DuoLingo), online for-profit diploma completion schools ( e.g., Penn Foster) that are transitioning into “career schools” and Pearson’s GED Works.  These all miss providing a direct value to LLEP adults and their employers:

• In-the-moment reading support utilizing employers’ current training materials. 

• Customization to meet each employer’s unique training needs.

• Turnkey - most of these competitors require significant up-front expense in time and resources to implement.

GogyUp’s key advantages to these competitors will ensure we achieve our social mission:

1. A hybrid approach to apply assistive reading technology so any adult can understand an employer’s materials immediately and then follow a prescribed instructional sequence to build their literacy skills over time, with materials they need to understand at work and in daily life.

2. The free direct-to-consumer app that scales instruction beyond our employer customers and, in return, receives valuable data that continually train our instructional model and provides our linguistics team with .

3. A value proposition that lowers both barriers to hiring and communication within the workplace positions GogyUp as a core human resource function - and a reliable source of revenue.

GogyUp’s assistive technology includes an adaptive formatting that contextually realigns block text paragraphs that shifts cognitive capacity normally devoted to shape discrimination to comprehension and metacognition.  Other assistive technology include:

• On-demand word-by-word translation between the English text and a preferred language specified by the learner.

• On-demand spoken word and phrasing (spoken syllables and sounds are in development).

• Font sizing and choice.

GogyUp Reader’s proprietary and adaptive instructional model for phonemic awareness (the ability to identify and manipulates specific English sounds) and phonics (how sounds are represented by letter combinations) is delivered and monitored by an training engine built on the same half-life regression and trained spaced repetition models that form the basis for other successful training apps (e.g., DuoLingo).  A similar approach to vocabulary training is in development.

To reduce bias in our machine learning and personalize instruction for adults with preferred languages other than English, we have re-mapped our phonemic awareness and phonics instructional models to each prevalent language within the Twin Cities region and have begun similar work for the Chicago and Milwaukee metropolitan areas.

GogyUp Reader is continually tested on devices 3 to 4 generations old and is designed to function primarily offline with the occasional connection to sync progress data and content.

The Learning Manager was developed with customized, industry standard open source content management software to provide a responsive Web-interface that our customers and partners can access on mobile devices and PCs.  

User data from over 40 “formal” learners, those participating in an organized pilot, and over 370 “public” learners who independently downloaded and engaged with GogyUp on their own, indicate that GogyUp maintains engagement: 

• Public Learners: The median time between first and last session was 7 days with a range of 0 to 86 days and averaged between 5 and 6 sessions per learner. 69% had more than 2 sessions.

• Formal Learners: Learners who voluntarily downloaded and engaged with GogyUp had a median time of 71 days, averaging 10 to 12 sessions per learner. 94% had more than two sessions.

Because we removed pre-assessments from the app’s design to reduce user friction and maximize engagement, we do not have before and after data from which we could conclude learning. Yet we were able to track progress and effort in phonemic awareness and reading comprehension activities:

• Public Learners engaged at a higher frequency with reading comprehension puzzles and had 107 repeated attempts with a improving their misfire responses by a mean of 2.7.

• Formal Learners engaged with fewer attempts (partly because there were fewer comprehension puzzles in the pilot content) but had a similar improvement: a 2.6 mean reduction in misfires.  An ANOVA comparison generated a p of 0.8799 indicating that both groups had similar levels of progress.

This study established critical baselines to compare with future longer-term pilots and the impact future functionality and pedagogy changes might have on our public learners. 

GogyUp’s genesis was during the 2008 - 2012 economic crisis when Ned ran an online high school that was inundated by adults seeking to finish their high school diploma yet couldn't enroll due to their inability to read. 

He began by researching the impact low literacy and English proficiency had on not only the individuals and their families but also the impact on employers ( shrinking labor pool, inflexible talent, etc.) that threatens community economic vitality and society as a whole (e.g, lost earnings potential, endemic wealth inequality, stifled innovation, public health, and civic participation, etc.) in the literature and our community.  This work confirmed and expanded our knowledge of:

• The existing resources that could be leveraged and amplified (e.g., employer training materials, ABE programs).

• Catalysts that could amplify the available resources (i.e., personalized instruction to augment existing employer and ABE training).

• How stakeholders should drive the design and development if they are to benefit from the product.

The GogyUp team developed our theory of change that incorporated our previous research with community partnerships to validate and expand our knowledge and provide the on-the-ground reality to improve our theory:

• Activities: Adult learners incrementally develop their ability to read through engaging with assistive reading technology and micro-lessons in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension while interacting with text and other documents they encounter in the workplace and throughout daily life.

• Outcome A: Learners become more proficient in reading and are then able to engage with opportunities to enhance their earning potential: upskilling within a job, moving up the ladder, pursuing education and other training pathways to more lucrative careers. 

• Outcome B: Learner’s increased ability to access technical and complex information increases their productivity through decreased errors and safety incidents, increasing their financial security, their employers’ business health, and their community’s economic vitality.

• Outcome C: A virtuous feedback loop of learner data continuously improves GogyUp’s training engine that accelerates and scales outcomes A & B.

We believe this theory and our instructional model can be applied to additional content areas including STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Math), health literacy, financial literacy, etc.

1 year goals:

• Grow to 5 partnership pilots and 5 employer customers.

• Establish sustainable revenue.

• Triple user base.

In 2021, we will leverage our recent approval to be a Minnesota distance learning platform for ABE to expand our pilot programs and seed traction in communities with smaller manufacturers and fewer options to train potential LLEP employees.  We are submitting SBIR grants with partners at the University of Minnesota, Michigan State University Extension and the Georgia Institute of Technology:

• Phase I USDA grant for feasibility study in rural manufacturing.

• Phase I NSF grant to study the impact of GogyUp on adult comprehension.

• Phase I & II NIH grant to study GogyUp’s impact on type 2 diabetes education.

Our second app, Snap Reader, soft-launched this past September.  Intended for a strictly in-the-moment experience, it employs the same assistive technology in GogyUp Reader. Its user base is currently at 6000 and we expect to build that to over 20,000 in the coming year.

These SBIR projects (or similar opportunities) and pilot partnerships in Chicago, Milwaukee, and rural regions of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois we believe those activities to be the catalysts to bring in the employers and “public” learners to start building out an ecosystem of literacy apps (see illustration below) to impact millions of LLEP adults.

Within 5 years:

• Recurring user base of 1,000,000+ adult learners across platform

• Established employer customers in manufacturing and health care.

• 1 year cash balance to fund operations and develop additional markets.

  

  
  

Data from GogyUp Reader and Snap Reader indicate we are providing value and maintain engagement.  GogyUp’s customer value premises were validated by over 120 interviews with human resource professionals in our target customer list, business owners, chambers of commerce,  and workforce development specialists.  

Our greatest barrier maybe customer inertia.  Before COVID-19, manufacturers were successful by maintaining the status quo though the literacy and English proficiency issue was becoming critical enough that we could secure commercial pilots.  

We may also face a form-factor issue in regards to employers, especially manufacturers.  Most do not allow mobile devices to be used in the workplace and "high volume" onboarding and training sessions are orally presented.  Introducing a reading app to verify understanding and provide additional opportunity to comprehend information proved to be too disruptive in one trial at a manufacturer.  

Maintaining a clear divide between compensated and uncompensated time may prove to be a legal / regulatory barrier to adoption until we identify  how to limit access to customer's material in individual GogyUp accounts and on personal devices.

Now that COVID-19 is a better known quantity and we have the efficacy data to answer the “does it work?” question, we are returning to the companies that were most receptive to assess how COVID-19 has impacted their onboarding and training processes.  During Q1 2021, we expect to complete our 7 week "I-Corps" style customer discovery process that will incorporate information in sales process to vet and qualify customers. 

In the current environment, ABE programs and target partners are overwhelmed and understandably slow to adopt something new that demands some attention away to urgent needs.  We have applied for a local grant to fund "learning catalysts" positions we plan to fill from within our partners' participant pools.  These individuals will engage with their peers to spark adoption (and use) of GogyUp within the student body, removing the burden of implementation from the ABE program while maintaining coordination with our partner.

Because we serve immigrant populations and those who have experienced systemic racism, we are not currently collecting demographic or personally identifiable data (PID) aside names, email addresses and unique device IDs users opt to provide for account creation.  We therefore do not currently collect demographic data but plan to develop means to anonymize data from users to correlate age, place of birth, preferred language, and other demographic data with progress, reading preferences, and other user data to inform product development and refinement.  

We plan to eventually connect that correlated data with employer customer data to identify impact on employee earnings and career pathway as well as  employer earnings and workforce vitality. 

Our goal is to eventually compile a dataset to assist policy makers, educators, and employers identify trends in literacy education and societal needs. 

GogyUp's five co-founders (1 full-time, 4 part-time) bring a unique blend of management and domain knowledge in pedagogy, data science, mobile development, and DevOps. More importantly, our personalities and shared values balance each other's strengths and allows us to openly question each other’s assumptions to avoid confirmation bias. 

Ned has a diagnosis of ADHD and a verbal learning disorder that impacted his ability to learn to read and communicate. Ned’s twenty-five years in education spans many fields including his work at national level implementing Open Educational Resources in  K12, post-secondary, and adult literacy programming, and lead a teacher-developed online high school from start-up phase to national accreditation. His deep expertise in educational technology and reading pedagogy provides him with an unique systems approach to project design.

Jodi's oldest son has severe dyslexia that without consistent parental advocacy would have presented significant barriers to his fulfilling his potential.  Her professional experience implementing workplace health clinics made it clear a literacy solution was needed to remove barriers workers faced in accessing health care. These experiences provide her with insight into the barriers faced by emerging adults with limited literacy.

Chris, David, and Brian have a combined 50 years of experience in enterprise development, DevOps, machine learning and mobile application engineering.

We round out the team’s expertise by an advisory committee of ten mentors who are regionally and nationally recognized leaders in adult education, immigrant rights, business development, workforce development and human resources.

We are currently partnering with Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servico (CLUES) to pilot GogyUp in their citizenship and ESL level 1 - 4 classes in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

We are partnering with Michigan State University Extension to study how GogyUp could be implemented in rural manufacturing.

To test GogyUp as a health literacy solution, we have partnered with the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, School of Medicine, and the Community University Health Care Center.

Our partnership with Georgia Institute of Technology will assist us in studying how GogyUp's assistive reading technology impact in-the-moment comprehension.

We have in the past partnered with the Emerging Fathers program at Urban Ventures in Minneapolis and the International Institute of Minnesota to co-design and iteratively develop the app with adult learners.  Due to program changes and the impact of the Federal immigration policy, those partnerships have been tabled.

Additional partnerships are in active development with workforce development agencies in the Twin Cities and Chicago.  

GogyUp pursues a hybrid B2B / Direct to Consumer model.  While both will provide necessary revenue streams to achieve our mission and generate a profit to expand our business, we believe the marjority of our operating revenue will be from the B2B side of our business.

B2B: GogyUp’s strategy to achieve mission is to incorporate a “reciprocal design” systems thinking into our business model.the GogyUp Literacy Support System is supported by tiered subscription fees paid by employers to post their content and track their employees progress.

• Subscriptions forms the revenue stream to continually develop and support the freely available available GogyUp Reader.  

• “Public adults,” GogyUp end-users not affiliated with a customer or partner, use the Reader to build their literacy skills with high interest content supplied by our partners and documents they need to understand and interact with on a daily basis.

• Data from public adults trains the platform’s algorithms for all of its products (beneficial to both business-to-business and our consumer customers) as well as building a never-before available adult learning dataset from across GogyUp's user base that can inform the development of add-on services for all its customer bases.

Direct to Consumer: The Snap Reader app soft-launched this fall and is marketed to the adult dyslexic community and general population.  During it's pre-revenue stage, we are modeling subscription-based pricing and expect to begin generating revenue in early Q1 2021.  

We intend to fund GogyUp through non-dillutive sourcces such as SBIR grants and, once we've established sufficient traction, Program Related Investments to fund expansion and development the team cannot do on its own.

Because the best funding source is revenue, we shifted briefly last spring to develop a direct-to-consumer app, Snap Reader, to target dyslexic adults and the parts of the general public who might have limited literacy or a reading impairment. We expect to begin charging modest subscriptions in early Q1 2021 with the goal of achieving $120,000 ARR. 

Our 2021-2024 projections, based on current Snap Reader user data and assumed organic sales, indicate positive cash flow by Q2 2022.  To reach that milestone, we are leveraging our partnerships to apply for research grants through the U.S. SBIR program at the NSF, NIH, and USDA.

To date, GogyUp has been roughly 75% self-financed by its founders.  Long-term debt through a "family and friends" raise supplemented the boot-strapping funds in 2020.

Given the public exposure, we will share amounts raised privately.

We are applying for 2.25 MM in SBIR research funding that will fund additional product and business development through 2024.

To fill cash flow gaps and begin paying founder salaries, we expect to raise between debt to be serviced with Snap Reader subscriptions.

Depending on our success in achieving Snap Reader revenue and raising SBIR and PRI funding, we expect to expend $375,000 - the vast majority in salaries.

Absent salaries, business expenses are roughly $12,000 to 15,000 for marketing, cloud computing, and legal expenses.  We maintain a $200/month membership at the Impact Hub MSP, which serves as our physical headquarters.

We are excited by the potential to partner with innovative workforce boards and other partners to:

• Refine how we engage with manufactures and other employers.
• Determine the best form factor for our technology in a workplace setting.
• Identify emerging needs in regional workforces and how assistive reading technology with scaled literacy instruction could positively impact those needs.
• Capture best practices for implementation.

We are also excited by the possibility of expanding our access to mentorship through SOLVE partners, specifically to learn how we develop and implement our sales process and test our assumptions about our business model and revenue projections.

We have been fortunate to have great mentorship to date.  As we develop our business, we will need additional expertise to move from the pilot stage to a business with trajectory in regions beyond the Twin Cities.

A key issue we are working through is the distribution of the manufacturing sector and which manufacturer to target (or even to shift focus entirely).  Advice and mentorship would help us resolve this issue more efficiently.

Because we are serving populations who have endured systemic racism and other oppression, connections to organizations that can establish trust between GogyUp and our "target" end-users in different regions would also prove to be immensely helpful.

Finally, advice on establishing an advisory board and transitional board of directors and introduction to potential board member who could help guide the company and solidify our go-to-market and fundraising plans would be immensely helpful.

Both Goodwill Industriesand the International Rescue Committee (rescue.org)  would make phenomenal partners for establishing and then replicating workforce development pilots on a national scale as well as act as fiscal agents for additional development grants and PRI investments.

Introductions to national adult literacy and workforce development organizations such as COABE, ProLiteracy, Jobs For the Future Inc, and National Skills Coalition could quicken our ability to identify and develop relationships with regional partners.