Show IH: Learn wordlists by reading articles that match their theme
Hello. My name is Ondra and I'm a high school student.
I'm the "hacker since 12" type, I started out by bypassing time-based parental controls on a Windows laptop by changing BIOS time and later found out by finding a 50 GB encrypted folder that there was a keylogger on my Windows computer. That led me to installing Ubuntu, later trying Arch and Fedora and now I'm back to Ubuntu. I know Python, Java, PHP and HTML and CSS (not much JS). I've also finished a university course on Java (local uni has a program to let high schoolers study a course), all before I turned 16.
Around half a year ago, I found the maker community around Product Hunt and Indie Hackers, and found my passion for building products. Since everyone says I should solve my own problem and find a niche, I've built http://owl.rocks.
By building http://owl.rocks, I've been trying to fix my own problem of learning wordlists/given vocabulary(it's further described on the website). The problem I'm facing now is probably marketing: I haven't managed to get anyone who's not my direct friend to put all words from an unit in. Do you have any idea on why? Or feedback on the site? Is it unclear? I've posted it to some memorization and language-learning-related subreddits and my Twitter, that generated about 200 visitors and 10 inputs of words.
The technical stack is a Flask (Python 3) app hosted at Azure (for free thanks to Github Student Developer Pack). For search, I use Elasticsearch hosted at the same server.
Hi Ondra, impressive work for a high school student!! Thanks for sharing it here.
Yep, well I think it's product rather than marketing. I've got a few ideas. Imagine looking at your product from a user's point of view, and ask yourself: Where are the friction points? Where are the points where the user has to do something hard, and where they might just quit instead? Here are my thoughts going through this exercise:
Try to systematically reduce this friction. Make the home page friendlier (add photos and color) and the text more minimalist. Stop using full sentences/paragraphs and use short phrases instead. Don't ask for a wordlist, but let the user choose from a dropdown ("advanced vocab", "intermediate", "beginner", or something like that). Don't present entire articles. Give me bite-sized chunks to read, so I feel like I'm actually finishing things and making progress.
Hope this helps get you in the right frame of mind!
Hey! I've tried to implement your feedback and reduce friction required to get vocabulary: Now, a visitor can find a list on Quizlet and use it to find articles.
I'll check back once I redesign the landing page, that's next on my list.
It's a nice idea, but before you start marketing a lot more, then should you improve your website a bit. It's a really boring website, there is missing some pictures, and then getting all the articles, is it just some text links, maybe you could crawl some pictures from the articles or like that.
You should also try to look into how a user use your site. I found it as a very slow process, the CTR buttons was not eye-catching, and it took some times to understand why to press the CTR buttons.
Hope this was a help for you :)
I'll change the landing page completely.