Low retention, where do I go from here?

Could you share your website? I'd be happy to go through it for you and to offer some suggestions.

Low retention is a tough problem to solve. Some part of retention is intrinsic to the to the type of app you're building. For example, if you're building a monitoring tool that people install on their server then forget about, retention will be outstanding. Whereas if you're building a language learning app or a personal productivity app, people churn by default unless they remember to come back and summon the willpower to do so on a regular basis.

First things first, talk to the people using your app. What are the demographic differences between those who stick around and those who don't? Why do the quitters say they quit and the stayers say they stay? What else are they doing to learn besides your app? Are they sticking with that or did they give up learning entirely? Why do they want to learn in the first place? You might discover something useful about who's valuable to target vs who's not, or perhaps which features are sticky vs which features aren't.

(Data point of 1, here, but I've tried language learning stuff numerous times and always given it up. I'd guess retention rates are abysmal for the vast majority of the industry.)

If people aren't responsive, do less marketing and more sales. Recruit people individually, who you meet or seek out, and develop a social connection with. For example, go to a language learning meetup or something. You can't get tons of people this way, but you can forge deeper connections that are more educational.

There are also some other tricks. For example, getting people to commit via paying upfront. Going to the gym and going to school are situations where churn is easy, but both of these institutions collect upfront payments, which people are happy to fork over, and which motivate them to show up regularly. "I paid for this, might as well go."

0.02 I've always churned on language learning apps except ..... When I have planned a trip to a foreign country. Then I stayed. Find people who have already booked a trip to a country with a foreign language then work on a "countdown style " learning course. Hope this helps. Being semi-fluent is a big motivation if you will be in the country soon.

I'd be open to trying it and giving feedback if it is on iOS and has a spanish option!

That's a tough one because it has imho a lot to do with intrinsic motivations. It's the same with courses and co, people buy it, even like it and at some point stop just doing it. Or never start at all even they bought the course. Anyways.

PH and HN are the wrong audiences for many topics. At least, I've never had much success with both. A short spike at the beginning but then it is over and nobody cared at all nor bought anything. The only time HN worked was a controversial post about something tech-related.

In your case of learning a new language, I'd look into the reasons someone learns a new language.

• school
• travel
• hobby/cultural interest, e.g. Japan and anime fans
• work-related; foreign communications or expat
• some other intrinsic motivation

I don't know the languages you offer, but I'd look at work-related or hobby reasons and search for places where those people hang around, e.g. for Japanese any anime, manga or related cultural place comes to mind as well as expat communities. Or maybe there are forums for people in a relationship with someone from another country. Military personal could be another group.

Another reason might be that it is plainly not their style of learning. Or the wrong content path. I'll take myself as an example. I started with dabbling in Japanese a few years ago using a Pimsleur audio course, Anki and a few others for learning the first writing system. I also tested a few of the learning apps.

The didactic of Pimsleur was great and it still surprises me how much I still know. However, at some point, their lessons were not in sync with what I wanted to know. Same prob with the apps. I didn't want to learn the names of fruits or anything like that in the beginning. Nor country names, etc. But they were forcing me to use their path. I am a tourist and want some basic knowledge for basic conversations in these situations like check-in, ordering at restaurants, etc.

The two other major probs and reasons I stopped at some point were my time commitment or better priority commitment, and my intrinsic motivation. The first you can try to help within the app, for the second no chance- seen that in other areas too and can't really help someone who's not motivated at all.

Early morning thoughts: Learning takes effort and ongoing commitment. Perhaps the sign ups came from HN or redit/something and they’re just not that committed.
I’d talk to any users you STILL HAVE as they’re the ones getting value right now. Find out where they came from and/or where they’re going (if travelling), what they’re learning specifically and then figure out how to get more of those people rather than the drive-by types you’ll get who spend all their time hanging out on PH signing up for everything and anything.

It’s possible people who are about to travel or planning travel would be committed. I often feel motivated to learn some of the language to the destinations I’m planning to visit. But just because that’s something I do doesn’t mean it’s a market - talk to some of the users is probably best option right now.

Very difficult, but gamification is a good approach. It's difficult to get users back to any app, but one that requires them to think and study is tougher. There's a lot of research into gamification of education right now, I would look into best practices there.

An example that comes to mind is a digital wellness company based in Toronto - http://www.flipdapp.co/.