How Jungle AI Tapped into Medical Student Influencers

Julian Alvarez, co-founder and CEO of Jungle, formerly Wisdolia, created an AI-powered flashcards tool that generates practice questions in seconds.

If you've ever used Anki, you know creating flashcards is the most time-consuming process.

After exploring over 15 ideas in 13 years, Jungle hit $275k ARR by December 2023.

1. Early Influences and Passion for Technology

Julian started coding at 13, creating a calculator app for iPad that got 30,000 free downloads. The paid version earned 400+ downloads at $0.99 each.

It didn't make him a millionaire but it was a good learning. Only now, after 14 years, Apple released a native calculator app for iPad.

2. College Cheating Scandal

In college, Julian started his first company, Vice, to help factory workers in Mexico, showing his early passion for making a difference.

But balancing school and his business was hard, so he made a bad choice and paid freelancers to do his homework. He got caught and was suspended for a year, losing a job offer from Goldman Sachs.

During that time, he focused on growing as a person by attending Tony Robbins seminars and going on a silent retreat.

This helped him learn from his mistakes and work hard to land internships at Meta, Google, and LinkedIn.

3. The Genesis of Jungle

After graduating, Julian took a job at Meta, but he still wanted to be an entrepreneur. He co-founded Mindflow, which later became Jungle.

At first, Mindflow was a "Learn-to-Earn" platform, but the team tried different ideas, like a social app for personal growth ("Mindflow Social Lab") and a gratitude project ("Sparking Joy"), none of which took off.

Even though these ideas didn't work, they taught Julian and his team valuable lessons about testing ideas early and focusing on solving the right problems.

The inspiration for Jungle, an AI-powered Chrome extension that generates flashcards from online content, struck in a serendipitous moment. Julian encountered a tweet about the desire for such a tool, immediately recognizing the market demand.

Julian and his co-founder, David, built the first version of Jungle in a 21-hour coding session, showing their dedication to ship things fast.

4. Jungle's Success and the Future of Learning

2 months after launching Jungle, strong signs of product-market fit emerged.

The extension saw 15,000 downloads, 637 daily active users, and 236 power users who generated multiple sets of flashcards. High referral rates and improved user retention indicated that Jungle resonated well with its audience.

They introduced a $19.99 monthly subscription for unlimited flashcard generation.

Jungle reached over 35,000 downloads within 3 months, mainly through organic growth and TikTok influencer marketing.

This success is a testament to the team's focus on understanding their target market – primarily students – and leveraging platforms where their target demographic is most active.

Julian saw that medical students use Jungle more to remember things so they focused their entire strategy on them. Anki, the most popular flashcard app, is mostly used by medical students. Doctors use it to remember most medicines off the top of their head so it made sense to focus on this core demographic.

This TikTok influencer brought $2.5k cash in <24 hours. She is a med student promoting Jungle. Jungle was formerly known as Wisdolia as seen in the screenshot.

If you check their old videos on TikTok @junglelearning_, you will see they had hired the same influencer to make videos for them.

5. Rethinking Influencer Marketing

For Jungle AI, influencer marketing led to major growth with viral posts and strong results.

So the team naturally increased spending but saw diminishing returns. So they paused the channel.

Later, they shifted focus to Australia and Germany, where they had more paying users. This pivot brought better results.

So the issue wasn’t the channel itself but how they were using it.

The Jungle AI team learned that growth requires continuous experimentation and adjusting strategies, not abandoning them.

Targeting the right regions brought influencer marketing back on track and underscored the need for flexibility in scaling growth.

One of Jungle's power users, Linda, a medical student, spends 10 hours creating 700 flashcards for each exam. With Jungle, she can accomplish this task in just minutes, demonstrating the tool’s effectiveness in improving learning outcomes.

Julian envisions Jungle evolving beyond flashcards to create better learning experiences at the intersection of learning science and AI. The goal is to help users become super learners who can retain and understand information ten times faster.

6. A Year of Transformation and Growth

In just one year, Jungle grew from a few months of runway to $325K ARR and over 250,000 active users.

After 4 pivots in a single year and facing financial constraints, the team focused on leveraging AI to enhance learning. This focus led to the creation of Jungle in February 2023, which quickly gained traction.

They achieved:

• 270,000+ activated users

• 421,000 sets of questions generated

• 911,000 questions answered

The team made flashcard creation 10 times faster, found a niche in medical students, and maintained healthy organic growth.

The future focus of Jungle will be on building viral growth loops, optimizing funnel conversion, improving user retention, and exploring 10x product ideas that blend learning science with AI capabilities.

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Rabbit Holes

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Until next time!

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. The Blueprint for Mirroring Billion-Dollar SaaS (LINK)

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3. Volume x Time = Quality (LINK)