My (Minimal) MVP is Working, What Next?
I finally built something.
So I've had many projects over the years that I believed would be valuable. But then the next shiny thing would come along and I would swap to the next thing. I honestly loved talking about how this next project would work great and solving complex problems that I believed I would encounter when creating the project. And I would never actually see the true nature of the problems I was solving since I didn't build anything.
So I finally picked something and built it out.
And don't get me wrong I still have other projects on the side. However, I'm slowly getting better at realigning my focus to ensure that I can build out something and see it through.
Background
So this first project started after living in Amsterdam and struggling to learn the Dutch language. Unfortunately, this was the middle of COVID and the Netherlands had a fairly restrictive curfew. Whatever Dutch I was learning wasn't easily reinforced through meeting people in person.
I resorted, as usual to language learning sites and apps. I've tried dozens of apps over the years and each appeared to have its merits. I found that when I learned straight vocabulary I would be more comfortable speaking since I could say the gist of what I wanted to communicate. Yea my grammar wasn't awesome but you don't need correct verb conjugation for someone to understand you. But, I found the greatest jumps in language learning were when I was forced to speak the language.
And the crazy thing was, despite my horrific grammar and pronunciation, people were happy that I was attempting. I've honestly never been maliciously criticized for speaking broken Dutch, French, Spanish, or Italian. (These are the only languages I've even tried to learn and I would by no means say I can speak any of them, some only a few phrases)
I noticed the same thing when ESL speakers were speaking English. If they could say a few keywords with minimal pronunciation I would be able to understand what they were trying to communicate.
So, I set out to build something which would immerse people in the language they were trying to learn and broke almost all grammar rules.
First (Actual) MVP
Immersion was the goal. Online language apps had this invisible barrier that you have to stop what you're doing, open the app for a lesson, and then go back to what you were doing before. Likely what you were doing before was in your native language and thus you only learn your target language through the context of the language-learning software you're using.
In comes a browser extension. I built an extension that would enable me to learn a language anytime I was using Google chrome. Effectively any time I was online.
And it's not fancy. It works by replacing words 1 to 1 in my browser with the word translated into the language I'm trying to learn. So the sentence 'the black cat' might translate to 'le black chat' changing both the words 'the' and 'cat'.
There are immediate problems with grammar learning this way. But the exposure to words day in and day out has been extremely helpful. The aim is to have someone learn enough such that they know the words they need to say, but maybe not in the correct order.
This approach has another benefit. While I do show the translations in a word lookup on the extension, often you can infer what the translated word is through context. For example, 'the black cat ran away from the dog' to 'le black chat ran away from le dog' is a strange sentence, but I found my mind seems to just treat 'chat' and 'le' as 'cat' and 'the' automatically without knowing the translations up front. This is a simple example but I've found it holds for many translations.
So this is the extension, a simple word replacement. A user selects their language and then each day three more words are added. I've chosen to start with the top 1000 words in several different languages that a user will slowly start to get exposed to more and more.
And more importantly, I've got the extension listed in the chrome store. This turned out to be not as easy as I would've thought.
Next Steps (And how you can help)
What you'll immediately realise with the extension is that the UI sucks. To initialize a language you have to go to 'Change Language' > 'Change Language Dropdown' > Select your Language > 'Update Language'. Not a streamlined process.
Regardless, what I would love to know is how best to go about what I think are the next most crucial steps.
Advice I Need
- How to improve the UI/UX, how to create a design that can scale, and how best to evaluate the most important components.
- How to market, how can I best go about marketing this extension so that people start using it more and I can cater the development to a potentially paying userbase
Any learning resources you could provide in these domains would help a lot here.
I have some more long-term lofty goals for where I want this extension to go but those are mainly software and data problems which is my area of expertise. What I don't know are marketing and UI/UX design.
So if there are any indie hackers out there who have been in the same position as me and could offer guidance for how best to learn and approach these elements of my project, I'm all ears.
TLDR;
I built something, give me some criticism, here it is: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/immersion-ai/jnmjgojkocjnmpeaajnhgljmpallopma?hl=en&authuser=0
