On 6 August, Kaishu Story (凯叔讲故事) closed its fifth nationwide storytelling contest, which had associated its name to gogokid, an English education platform for kids.

Kaishu Story positions itself as a bedtime storytelling application. According to the company, it now possesses around 30,000,000 users of its application. Lately, in July, it has just closed its Series C round of funding with USD 50 million.

In this storytelling match, Kaishu Story added an “online English storytelling division” for its title partner. Correspondingly, gogokid rolled out a series of open courses named “A Good Storyteller”.

Besides, the two children education platforms bundled their services up, selling a package consisting of gogokid’s English courses and Kaishu story’s monthly subscription.

On the same day, Kaishu Story also launched a children song sector in its application, which has 8 available songs at present.

Behind gogokid

Kaishu’s new partner, gogokid, is a subsidiary of ByteDance and a sister company of TikTok.

Founded in 2017, gogokid was benchmarked against VIPKID, a famous online English education platform for kids featuring one-to-one mode and North American teachers.

Gogokid entered rather late the K12 English education field. Faced with powerful incumbents like VIPKID, DaDa ABC, gogokid could not distinguish itself with pure imitation. The biggest advantage of the Bytedance-backed company seemed to be the lower customer acquisition cost compared to its competitors since Toutiao and TikTok could be quite supportive in terms of advertising.

In April 2019, the company reduced staff by 70 to 80 percent, at least by 50 percent, according to people familiar with the matter. At the same time, gogokid appeared to prepare online K12 school. Apparently, advertising through its sister companies didn’t solve the high CAC problem.

Being one of the most popular storytelling products, Kaishu Story can bring more users to gogokid, and gogokid’s English courses are also a complement to the storytelling application.