20 Aug 2026

One Graph, Three Doors: the portfolio deck

The deck makes one argument: build the asset, monetize later, and the asset is the per-learner known-word graph.

It starts from a problem the category has and nobody solves. Acquisition happens one step past what a specific learner already holds, not at the average level of a CEFR band. Measuring that properly is tedious enough that people quit, skipping it gives you population averages, and borrowing it means depending on a competitor. Meanwhile large language models made content free to regenerate, so the libraries incumbents spent a decade building are the part of the moat that is evaporating. What is left is the measurement, and everyone keeps theirs locked up.

The answer is to make the measurement the activity. Every product is something a learner would do anyway, built so that playing it emits vocabulary signal as a byproduct. Three doors, one graph underneath. The graph then buys what a fixed course cannot, starting with a chapter tonight that this reader can actually read.

The learner it serves is the one the category graduates and abandons: a few hundred words in, and nothing to read with them.

The deck itself is not posted here yet. It was built for a private room, and it gets a read-through before it gets a public URL.