Lingua-e

I'd been thinking about this for the last two months. This was my first independent solo project so I was hesitant to make this decision. As of today, there were 378 registered users, not much growth in the last months. It started getting harder and harder to get people to even try my product. The ones who tried it, very few came back once but never again. So I started to wonder if it was really worth it to continue with it.

In the end, I decided that it has been enough! I loved working in this project but it didn't start with a mindset of selling it and I think that's where I failed. I've learned a lot of valuable technical and non-technical things.

I thought about pivoting and niching down and trying to continue on a more intelligent business-savvy way. But I decided it was too big of a project for me to code fast enough and I just didn't want to keep investing more money and time in it. I felt it was time to close this cycle.

And I decided to write this because I read several times the following advice: "Don't spend 18 months building a project that nobody wants to buy". But I did it anyway and now I've learned my lesson, so you there! Just create a SMALL prototype and get it out ASAP. Value your time!

Anyway, I'm not giving up. I will put all my learnings into good use in my next project. I haven't figured out yet what I'll be but for sure I'll try until I succeed!

By this time, two months after launching, Lingua-e www.lingua-e.com had 300 registered users! All of them were gotten from organic traffic from:

• Instagram https://www.instagram.com/learn.english.with.linguae/

• Facebook https://www.facebook.com/learn.english.with.linguae and mainly promoting the posts in facebook groups in my niche.

It's an MVP for now. The main purpose of launching the MVP was to figure out if there are people interested in the project and to iterate from the feedback given and metrics.

So far, some people have been interested in subscribing although it is not possible at the moment, I am working a lot to make that possible in a few months.

Looking forward to the future :)

My journey is very different from other Indie hackers, Lingua-e www.lingua-e.com started as a hobby and with no intentions to make a business out of it. But as I was coding my side project, I discovered I loved creating my own product and I loved the idea of making this full time.

I had been coding for some months by then so I decided it was time to put it live and start promoting Lingua-e.

Then I learnt I shouldn't have launched right before Christmas and New Year's eve. But still, I got 100 registered users and 1000 visits in the first month with only organic traffic from social media.

The first ~10 users were my friends and family. But getting my first registered user, who I had NO idea who he or she was, was the most motivational thing in my career for a very long time.

Although I started coding Lingua-e www.lingua-e.com as my side project, I discovered I loved building my own products. I loved the fact that I didn't only do the backend, I also did: the frontend, the design, the marketing and every little thing that needed to be done. I constantly needed to learn new things.

Until this moment, I had been coding very sporadically only. But when COVID hit in 2020, my lifestyle changed dramatically. I used to travel at least two times a month and suddenly that wasn't possible anymore so I had all this available time locked at home. Then I started coding more and more and the project started taking form. And I was so engaged I was sometimes coding more than 6 hours or more after my regular job!

But here is the curious thing, even if I was dedicating all this time to my project, it never felt like work. I enjoyed every single thing I learnt for it. Instead of making me feel more burned out, working on my side project made me feel motivated as I hadn't been in a long time.

And that's when it hit me, I want to do this full time.

I came up with the idea a long time before I actually started coding it. I have always liked learning languages but I didn't like any of the learning apps I had tried such as Duolingo and Memrise. While they were OK at the beginning and they helped a lot with acquiring more vocabulary and improving my understanding, I could never make correct sentences of my own. So what's the point in learning a language if you cannot communicate with it?

And it makes sense, these apps are more focused into translating sentences from one language to another but when we speak a foreign language, translating is not the way to go.

I started to code something back then in 2017 but I immediately discarded it as it was too much work. I wasn't ready to make such commitment at that moment of my life.

Years passed by and by the end of 2019 I was starting to burn out for the first time. I had an excellent team and team lead but I didn't like the job I was doing, I stopped believing in why we were doing things. Therefore, to cheer myself up, I started coding Lingua-e as a side project in a technology I loved.

I had no intentions to sell Lingua-e or put it live, it was just for myself because I started feeling the need to have more freedom, to work on things that matter to me and to use my creativity more often. It started as nothing more than a hobby and I used to code very sporadically.