Millions of adults struggle with spelling.
They can write confidently, but there are a handful of words that trip them up every single time: accommodate, necessary, separate, definitely, embarrass.
Most people simply rely on autocorrect, Grammarly or AI. Those tools fix mistakes in the moment, but they don't help you remember the correct spelling next time.
Autocorrect helps them get by, but each time a problem word arises, there's still a quiet sense of frustration.
Despite how common this is, there still isn't a product that genuinely helps self-directed adults to fix their spelling.
An intelligently adaptive spelling game.
Spelling Garden is a game that intelligently adapts its difficulty to support the player in stabilising and fixing their very own problem spellings. The more they tend to their garden, the more their spelling will improve and progress is visually represented by the health and abundance of their garden.
Spaced repetition is at the forefront of research into how memory works. Spelling Garden gamifies the power of spaced repetition and the daily format hooks the player into a long-lasting daily ritual.
Tend your garden, every word is a plant.
- Science-backed: We use FSRS, the same spaced-repetition algorithm trusted by serious learners, to resurface words just before you'd forget them so that they stick for good. Difficulty is self-balancing. Rather than guessing, we learn how hard each word really is from how players actually perform, and the system gets sharper as more people play.
- Adaptive: a short adaptive placement test finds your level, then the app targets the words you personally get wrong.
- Gamified: Each word you're learning is a plant. Water it daily and it grows. A word in full bloom is a word you have mastered.
- Explanatory: every word in the game comes with definitions, etymology, mnemonics and players can leave notes on their words to help solidify their learning. Often knowing how a word came to be spelt a certain way can make it easier to spell going forward.
Neglect a word and it wilts — tend to your garden to solidify your spelling.
Live now at spelling.garden:
The daily loop works end to end today: placement test → daily watering → unearthing new words → planting them in your own permanent plot. Homophones share ponds as water lilies; vocabulary gaps grow as mushrooms; butterflies visit gardens in bloom.
In the final stages of polishing and private testing now.
Anyone who wants to improve their spelling.
According to research commissioned by the English Spelling Society, 54% of UK adults misspelled "embarrassed" in a spelling test of ten everyday words, and more than a quarter struggled with "definitely", "accidentally" and "separate".
Anyone who wants to improve their spelling or vocabulary: adults, children, students, English learners. And it works at any level, from people who rarely mispell everyday words to those who've never felt confident spelling.
Spellzone already has the customers.
Around ten adult learners a day start a Spellzone free trial and leave again, because the platform was built with children in mind. That is 3,650 people a year who we could be capturing from day one, in the base case.
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- Pricing: Spelling Garden is free to begin with. Once your garden is full, further expansion requires a subscription: £4.99 a month. Our projections assume a conversion rate of 18%, which we consider conservative. Players who can see themselves improving on words that once defeated them have a concrete reason to pay, and we expect the realised rate to be higher.
- Acquisition: the main way we intend to acquire users is by forwarding self-directed adult learners directly from Spellzone at the first point of contact. This is the acquisition channel we've modelled our projections on but we also intend to create organic social media content promoting the game and we also have an SEO strategy that we believe could be highly effective, provided we can work with Spellzone's existing well established SEO.
- Margins: we have already generated a corpus of over 36,000 words, with lifelike spoken word audio sentences, etymology and definitions for each one. Other than marginal server costs we have no overheads. Spelling Garden will be a very lean service to operate and grow.
- A moat that compounds: Spelling Garden is unlike other spelling platforms, and we expect players to mention it to others; social and multiplayer features, planned for a later release, are intended to encourage this.
This is the base case. It excludes organic social media promotion growth, B2B sales to schools and to businesses buying tooling for staff, and any uplift from streamlining the copy and onboarding for adult learners. The only acquisition channel modelled is the 10 adult learners Spellzone turns away each day. We could see revenue orders of magnitude greater than this in our first 3 years.
We built Twixtle and it's going viral.
Jake and Hugh are the creators of Twixtle, one of the most popular daily word games in the world right now. The game launched just two months ago and has since been played >300k times, with an 8,000 DAU at latest count. The idea for the game was actually conceptualised while making Spelling Garden; Jake was inspired by the way homophones like air -> err could completely transform the shape of a word and turned it into a word ladder style game.
One month ago we launched Twixtle+, a premium account tier that gives players access to archive play, bonus puzzles and cross device saving. We are averaging 8 new subscribers per day and are currently generating ARR of £5,000 with revenue projected to be £48,000 end of year 1.
- Two of us built it. No funding, no team, no publisher. The same two people are building Spelling Garden.
- Every player arrived free. The main channel is TikTok, which permits no outbound links at all, so all 76,957 of them typed the address in by hand.
- It travelled on its own. 76 countries in the first fortnight, 170 by now. Two thirds of the players are outside the UK: 20,502 in the United States, 5,446 in Australia, 4,104 in Canada.
- They come back. More than a quarter return the very next day and 7% are still playing a month later, which is where the curve flattens rather than where it ends. 8,037 people have played on ten separate days and 1,747 on thirty.
- And some of them pay. Twixtle+ is £2.99 a month for extras on a game that stays free either way, and 186 people took it in the first month of asking.
Twixtle had to find every one of those players from a standing start. Spelling Garden begins with Spellzone's traffic and twenty years of search authority, and it sells a fix for something people already want fixed rather than extras on a free puzzle.
