Show IH: Lokas, an iOS app to learn Spanish 🇪🇸💃 vocabulary & conjugation the nerd way 🤓

Adam, thank you for your nice words and ideas!!

Working after work and on weekends was definitely a challenge. I was lucky enough to have an amazing friend that did exactly the same thing (shoutout to @edbarbier!). We really supported each other over the last 3 years, and that largely explains why neither of us ever gave up and that we are finally starting to see results.

To answer your question: I see this as a business, in the sense that if I can prove that there is demand and people are ready to pay for the product, I believe I will one day be able to live from it.

I am currently in that proving phase: I pushed a last update last week and then forbade myself to do any additional coding until I collected 300 users and gathered some statistics out of them. I decided that if out of 300 users, I would make less than 10 sales ($8.99 IAP), I would admit that the idea was not good enough, or too far away from product-market fit, and I would stop working on it and focus on other ideas.

Turns out that a post on reddit brought me 60-70 users, and that 5-6 of them converted to paid users after 4-5 days having the app (I document all this on Twitter). It looks like I might finally have a version of the app that is useful to people...

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To show how serious I was about considering the app as a business: 1.5 years ago, I wrote a 10-15 page business plan about the app, answering every doubt I had: why am I focusing on this market even though there are tons of apps already, what will make it unique, how will I promote it, how many users do I need to generate X$ a month, how will I grow the business if I get any success, etc.

Whenever I started having doubts about the idea (happened a few times over the last months), I went back to that document and read what I wrote, saw that it made sense, and my motivation was back up again for a few months.

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Two days ago, I got more than 100 users from ProductHunt, so if the reddit-users pattern repeats itself, some of them will start converting in 3-4 days. Just gotta wait... Which is both stressful and exciting!

Will share the results on Twitter. Thank you Adam!

Thank you! I really appreciate your honesty and have been worried about the very same fact since I decided to consider this a potential business rather than just a side-project.

Precisely, I was concerned about the fact that I was entering a super-competitive market with tons of existing apps, and me not having anything "super innovative" in Lokas, but just trying to create a frictionless learning experience for people that are ok with studying hard, without help or images.

But I also thought that this makes the market already educated, which is a great thing. If I can find an angle or a niche that makes people choose my app over (or in addition to!) other apps, I might be able to gain a few hundreds users a month, over the millions in that market. The key is that they do not have to choose Lokas over other apps, many have several language apps. So I do not need to convince users that Lokas is better than any other apps, but just that it is a great addition to their tools to reach fluency faster.

Since I am looking to generate a few thousands $ a month so that I can become financially independent, I "only" need to find a few hundreds paying users each month, in a market of probably tens or hundreds of millions.

To be very clear, in my opinion, there is nothing that justifies why Lokas is better than those other apps, at the moment. Fortunately, early users (who also use Memrise, Anki, etc.) have reported that there are a few elements that makes them like Lokas over other apps, which was very surprising and pleasing to hear. Also, I am starting to see a very nice $ conversion rate. If I can scale users, this looks promising.

And once English to Spanish works, and generates maybe a few hundred $ a month, there are dozens of languages pairs I can add to duplicate the results... Which also explains why I chose to focus on this app over other ideas.

Finally, I do have ideas to differentiate from other apps, and one in particular would have a small chance at generating a little buzz. I'll implement it once the app will be ready and I will be ready to scale. Right now, I'm still almost in a MVP phase.

Thank you again!

Hi Luke, thank you so much for trying the app and for reporting that bug! This is actually normal behavior, but your comment makes me think that it is not clear enough and that I can easily improve it. Let me explain:

This is actually an interactive tutorial that I added as a "80/20" solution to a problem I had: when I was I was showing the account creation screen directly when you first open the app, I was losing 70% of all users. Terrible UX, I knew it but I never found the time to improve that experience when I was side-hustling because it required a long block of coding hours.
So now that I work 24/7 on indie stuffs, I spent a day creating this tutorial that shows you, in 3 flashcards, how the app works. I saw my conversion rate (app open to account creation) jump from 30% to 70%, so it really really helped.

But I coded it in a way where this tutorial appears on top of the login screen, which means that you see the login for a second before the tutorial appears, hence the confusion.

I see two easy solutions: either indicate "Tutorial" on the first page of that tutorial, or hide the login screen before showing the tutorial. Will probably implement the second.

Will fix this in the next version. You might have saved me from losing quite a few users, thank you so much for taking the time to let me know Luke!!!

Thank you! Yep, it's been quite some time, but on and off. It was the first project I worked on when I started to learn iOS development, and then I kept improving it. I've published a few other apps in the meantime and always had full-time jobs, so I was far from being full-time on this app.

And yes, Redditers were super nice. And I actually got a few sales from the few dozens users I've gained over the last few days, so... I might finally be starting to approach product-market fit. Which would be amazing!

Thanks James

Thank you Alex!! We'll get there 💪