First $900/month after 2 years of development, marketed too late (Japanese Language Learning Web-App)

I made yet another language learning app :)

It's called HayaiLearn (www.hayailearn.com). It's a web-app and supports learning Japanese through Youtube immersion.

This is my first SaaS solopreneur venture so I made a lot of mistakes.

Initially, I thought it was gonna take me only 3 months to build something useful. But it end up taking much longer to refine the product to a point where I love it.

My marketing timeline:
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9/2023 -did one influencer collab that yielded $0 and only a few signups since I had no payments setup

10/2023 - hired google ads agency to setup search campaign with budget of $1000/month. Hired some writers to write blog articles for SEO.

11/2023 - added welcome email automation campaign with MailerLite

1/2024 - ended google ad agency contract, since it was not performing. Kept PMax campaign running at a smaller budget of $500/month just to maintain some traffic

4/2024 - hired a few UGC creators that costed $100 per video and ran it on fb ads, underperformed and stopped it

9/2024 - hired an all around part-time freelance marketer to do social media content marketing for me. Underperformed and dishonest, fired them after the 1st week

10/2024 - ran reddit ads on subreddit to ask for customer research in exchange of $50

1/2025 - ran some fb video ads but CAC is way more expensive than my Google PMax campaign, eventually turned it off

2/2025 - spending 80% of my time making reels for Tiktok. Setup a more refined free trial email sequence. A few customers (from email list) subscribed to the lifetime package which helped me reach ~$900 for the month.

Revenue:
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hovered around $300 MMR from 6/2024 - 1/2025
Went to $900 MMR this Feb, hoping trend continues and not just a one off now that I'm more focused on organic channels

Marketing Expense:
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Fluctuate around $500 per month from Google PMax campaigns and other experiments

UX:
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• hired a UX design agency to create figma mockups for different parts of the website

Tech stack:
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• Infra: AWS, MongoDB Atlas
• Code: NextJS, Typescript, Python, React-query, MUI
• Authentication: Next-auth

TLDR:
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• wasted too much time and money on the wrong things
• should have started social organic content marketing sooner
• should have asked for way more feedback way earlier and do it frequently
• reddit ads for getting feedback was pretty effective for me
• shouldn't have wasted so much time on SEO
• hard to find a good all-around marketer freelancer. Freelancer job has to be very specific
• should have improved my free trial email automation sequence much sooner since it's low effort and high impact
• lifetime packages make a huge difference

Near term Future plan:
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• work on mobile app version
• gamification
• many more exciting AI immersion features.

PS: It's currently a no credit card required free trial but I'm planning to change that soon to requiring credit card. It was previously hard paywall and conversion was better so going back to it. So try now if you'd like :)