After 3 years, MRR is still less than $100, but I'm happy

I’ve been working on Polygloss, a language learning app, for over 3 years now. I quit my job on 2019 to go back to study. I started developing it during my MSc in AI, and it was how I collected the data to do an analysis using language models in my dissertation. Once I graduated, I continued working on it while freelancing for other companies just enough to keep afloat. After all this time, I only have 43 subscribers, and under $100 MRR. That barely covers how much I spend to maintain the project. But I'm still happy with it. Why?

The app works like this: You pick an image, write about it, someone guesses the correct image. Then the rounds are reversed, they write and you guess.

Polygloss is a really difficult project.

Here are some of the challenges with it:

• It's not business-to-business (marketing is hard, expensive, and you need to make lots of sales since the amounts are smaller comparing with what you can get from businesses)
• It's an education app (the industry's average retention funnel is tricky)
• The in-app interactions are user-to-user (so this means that it needs a critical mass of users to be successful)
• Most of the app is free to use (I believe in accessibility of education, but also I can’t put a paywall in every interaction since the app depends on critical mass)
• It’s a feature-rich product, meaning it takes a lot of time to develop it

So why do I insist on it?

Sometimes this is difficult to answer, but sometimes it is really easy. First of all, I enjoy working on it. I have over 14 years of professional software engineering experience, I have worked in many places: for-profit, non-profit, government, big companies, medium companies, start-ups. And I never liked working on anything as much as I do now. Simply put, it makes me happy.

But also I really see its uniqueness, how it helps people, and all of the amazing feedback it receives.

Another way to look at it, is that 43 people enjoy Polygloss enough to spend money on it every month. I also see Polygloss taking off in languages going through revitalization, like Welsh, and get a warm fuzzy feeling. I dream of making it helpful for thousands of indigenous languages that usually lack investment.

I love languages so I also use Polygloss myself. These are my bookmarks for my fiancé’s dialect. There are no apps that teach it. Most apps are only usable for the top most common languages such as English, French and Spanish. I also use Polygloss for Spanish and Catalan since we moved to Barcelona. But the only way I can start learning my fiancé's South Tyrolean dialect, unless I move to South Tyrol, is using Polygloss.

Every time I use the app, I get new ideas for making it even more useful for learning. I’m not gonna lie, sometimes it’s really demotivating to put so much effort in it and not see it financially grow as much as I wanted it to. But it’s also really awesome to dog-food your own project earnestly like this. This type of excitement is hard to come by with most products. So I still really recommend working on things you like.

Are any of y'all working on a project like this? That you really love but is not doing so well financially? How do you measure its success?