GogyUp Employee Literacy System

GogyUp embeds just-in-time reading support and training verification within existing documentation, reducing employer uncertainty and increasing employee understanding.

GogyUp (go-jee-up) is designed to capitalize on the opportunity presented by three seemingly intractable, global problems:

1) Current and future labor shortages are becoming endemic, particularly in industrialized regions.   

2) Adult illiteracy, particularly in anglophone countries, remains at consistently high levels.  In the United States alone, illiteracy ranges between 40 to 90 million individuals - depending on how technical the literature is they are attempting to read.

3) Current adult literacy programming is time intensive, tied to a specific geographical area, often reliant on volunteers, varies in quality and lack sufficient resources to ever scale to meet the need.  Keeping with the United States as an example, currently fewer than 10% of US adults have access to instruction they need to become literate despite billions spent on adult basic education.  

The worker shortage and the lack of access to instruction presents an opportunity to approach adult education and training differently: GogyUp ELS.

GogyUp ELS is a standalone, human resource tool for on-boarding, training, and up-skilling employees, regardless of their level of literacy. Designed over 12 months and hand-in-hand with adult ex-offenders and new Americans, GogyUp provides employees with just-in-time, personalized reading assistance for any word in any document and immediate translates commonly used English words. 

GogyUp’s Employee Literacy System (ELS) transforms any text into an on-demand literacy coach so:

• pre-literate employees receive literacy instruction they need to understand their jobs; any time and any place.

• supervisors gain new insight into whether employees are prepared to work efficiently and safely.

GogyUp combines cloud and app-based architecture proven to reliably scale with light weight delivery of content and an adaptive instructional program that adjusts to a student's progress and first language.  

GogyUp is not seeking to supplant or compete with existing adult education solutions.  Rather, we seek to expand those opportunities with the following critical benefits:  

• applying proven, on-demand literacy instruction through any document

• providing employers with a means to train employees with low literacy to work safely and efficiently

• use progress data to determine their employees’ mastery and identify areas for improvement

Before writing any code, we spent months forging relationships with our intended student population and the agencies that support them. We “co-designed” the app and instructional framework with ex-offenders, opportunity youth, and New Americans.  These relationships taught us to abandon traditional instructional approaches and anticipate the logistics faced by disadvantaged youth: inconsistent connectivity, interrupted progress, frequent device loss. Student choice within defined boundaries would clearly be a key motivator.

Central to our approach is to learn from our students.  

July - August 2018: 

• establish 2 - 3 workforce development agency trials to:
  • demonstrate efficacy.
  • capture best practices for implementation.
• recruit 1,000 "public students" to understand how to retain and motivate casual adult learners.

Q4: September - December 2018:

• run 5, month-long commercial trials to:
  • refine best practices for implementation.
  • develop credibility in the manufacturing industry.
  • develop sales process.
• increase retention of “public students” by 5%.
• launch content capture to allow student to import text.

Q1 & 2: January - June 2019:

• 2-3 sales proving business model
• launch Type 2 diabetes health literacy trial with public health clinics

FY 2019: 

Commercial: 

• Achieve goal of .025% of small US manufacturers (about 450)
• Establish sales cycle

Public: 

• 10,000 unique students
• Achieve average US app retention and engagement rates.
• NIH SBIR Phase I health literacy trial with Type 2 diabetes patients.

FY 2020 - 2023 

Commercial: 

• Yearly 75% customer retention GogyUp, increasing 5% yearly
• Yearly 5 to 10% customer base growth 
• Cash balance exceeds 2 years of operations

Public: 

• Yearly 10-15% growth in unique, student acquisition and retention.
• NIH SBIR Phase II trial to expand trial.
• GogyUp spreads to other anglophone countries and is adopted by refugee and other populations.

The GogyUp Reader is, and always, will be free for download and use at the major app stores.

For our public audience, we will leverage relationships we've built with local radio stations and trusted social service agencies to generate interest and activity.  We will also experience with more traditional incentives such as minor gift cards for recruiting additional students who use GogyUp, depending on cultural norms.

To generate revenue from our commercial customers, we will actively work with our association partnerships, publish white papers, and pursue other more traditional methods.

We have currently served about 50 students as we developed and refined GogyUp.  

A group of 10 - 12 Gujarati New American students in northern Michigan were able to use GogyUp with the US Citizenship materials to pass their exams and prepare for interview questions.

Our goal is to retain 1000 public students by the end of FY18 and between 200 - 300 commercial students.

GogyUp’s four co-founders design, develop, and test all of GogyUp’s applications in-house. 

Both Brian and Chris developed the business-critical applications that enabled Proto Labs to grow from a startup to a global company with 1,200 employees and over $100 million in yearly revenue.  

Implementation and sales will be the biggest hurdles to achieve.  Because the system is inherently scaleable and the business model is designed to sustain the public service, we believe GogyUp will be able to be applied to many use cases: 

• Commercial: 
  • onboarding employees with limited literacy
  • upskilling partially literate employees for more technical work
  • facilitate the assessment and recording for credentialling

• Public Service: 
  • health equity (literacy and communication are leading indicators)
  • expanding the ability of adult basic education systems
  • citizenship and civics education

The opportunity to expand our network beyond the Twin Cities region with other scholarship recipients as well as conference attendees. Our current go-to-market strategy depends on word-of-mouth to enable us to build relationships with both employers and the adults with yet-to-be developed literacy.  We believe the scholarship's recipients and conference attendees would be a ready-made network to help us plugin to communities far beyond the Twin Cities and being to develop important relationships with social service agencies and employers in other regions.

Implementation and sales will be the biggest hurdles to achieve.  Because the system is inherently scaleable and the business model is designed to sustain the public service, we believe GogyUp will be able to be applied to many use cases: 

• Commercial: 
  • onboarding employees with limited literacy
  • upskilling partially literate employees for more technical work
  • facilitate the assessment and recording for credentialling

• Public Service: 
  • health equity (literacy and communication are leading indicators)
  • expanding the ability of adult basic education systems
  • citizenship and civics education