What I learned building a language learning app for 2 years...

2 years ago I started building an app that totally bombed, here's why...

The app (iOS, android) helps you to learn a language by listening to foreign podcasts, and auto-generating transcripts. You can click to translate words that you don't understand into your native language.

To be clear I worked on it during evenings and weekends for over 2 years, I also took longer breaks of a few months between after getting fed up with it.

After a stupidly long 1 year of building in the dark I launched and got about 150 users mainly from a very motivated Reddit group and the app store but I had 100% churn after 1 month.

1) Solve real pain

Obvious in hindsight. The pain I was solving for didn't exist.

I miss-attributed the pain of language learning with a potential solution. I love listening to podcasts in English, so I thought it would be great for language learning.

In theory, it is.

In reality, no one asked for it and no one was upset about not having it. So I think it didn't really solve a problem people had.

2) Have a go-to-market strategy

As I wasn't really solving a painful problem I found it difficult to get users.

I read the book Traction and started to understand the principle of finding a marketing channel. The book really helped me to brainstorm and I'll definitely come back to it again for my next project.

I knew from experience a subreddit that would be the perfect audience. So I posted there and got around 150 users. I was also getting users organically from the app store.

I got some very positive feedback from the subreddit so I was quite excited until they all churned after using the app only once. 🤦🏻‍♂️

This was the validation I needed to stop!

You could argue that I could have continued and refined the app, but I don't think it would have helped.

The painful problem with language learning isn't the lack of great or interesting resources - it's the actual pain of doing the work.

Duolingo is successful because it addresses the real pain - feeling like you're making progress and making it addictive.

Leave a comment if you think this is wrong (I am no expert) but I think people are only willing to pay for solving real pain.

So what did work?

Collecting users from the app store and Reddit. Although 150 users aren't many it was enough to prove my hypothesis. I think if I had an even more pain addressing solution it would be much easier to get more users.

I learned to program - The one huge benefit from this was learning how to build production scale microservices and react native apps. This helped me a lot in my job and is a good consolation prize I can put down as expensive training.

If you liked this blog give me a follow on twitter I'm going to build my next side project 100% in public 😅 plus I've just joined so have no followers!