Yak Tack

Well, as they say in the tech world, we got “crunched.” A couple of weeks ago, TechCrunch wrote a great article about Yak Tack (https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/15/yak-tack-is-a-super-simple-app-to-boost-vocabulary/). The author, Natasha Lomas, and I emailed back and forth a few days earlier. But I wasn’t sure A) if she was going to write about us, or B) when. Alas, Thursday two weeks ago was our day!

Here’s how she opened the article:

"Word nerds with a love for linguistic curiosities and novel nomenclature that’s more fulsome than their ability to make interesting new terms stick will be thrilled by Yak Tack: A neat little aide–mémoire (in Android and iOS app form) designed for expanding (English) vocabulary, either as a native speaker or language learner."

"Yak Tack uses adaptive spaced repetition to help users remember new words — drawing on a system devised in the 1970s by German scientist Sebastian Leitner."

I was impressed with how much research she did into our Leitner algorithm (which we wrote about a few months ago). And she gave a great, holistic overview of how Yak Tack works.

The article has grown our user base by 35% so far. Good press can go a long way to helping a small company like ours get the word out. Importantly, I’m excited that, through TechCrunch, more people have discovered Yak Tack and are using it to improve their vocabulary!