Polygloss
Express yourself in another language
Last month I released a new version of Polygloss, my language learning app for the intermediate level. I decided I was ready to then launch it on Product Hunt, but sadly the launch was a flop and all the attention that the product page got was from people who already used the app and went there to support it. I realized I made a bunch of mistakes at this launch and I'm happy to answer any questions about that!
Fortunately, I also posted about it on reddit and that was a success. It didn't get as many app downloads as the last time I posted there a year ago. But now the app is in a much more robust state and with more benefits for paid users. That translated into a big uptick in sales. In the beginning of this year, I had set the goal of achieving $500 revenue over a month by July. I reached it in August which is not too far off, and also surpassed it ($600) which is really exciting 🥳
https://www.producthunt.com/products/polygloss-2#polygloss-2
Here are some very cool graphs about Polygloss finances ✨
The timeline is from the beginning of project until now. The conversion funnel from free to paid users improved a lot recently, and Lifetime value has basically doubled. It's great to see it picking up towards a more sustainable monetization funnel 🥰💪
Today Polygloss was accepted to the Google Startup program and we got $2000 in google cloud credits 💖🎉 The app doesn't cost a lot to run on GCP currently: about $15/month of firebase things. But these credits are valid for 2 years, so this will bring our bills to $0, and allow me to try using some features that I haven't yet due to cost. And I could use those $15 for something else.
If you're interested, you can learn more about the program here: https://cloud.google.com/startup
There are different tiers, depending of the stage of your project, and some of them give up to $150K in GCP credits.
A language learning coach wrote an amazing review about Polygloss this week, completely unprompted! We all know how marketing is difficult and/or expensive. So it's an awesome feeling to see the product being recognized enough that it gets spontaneous write-ups like this.
After getting popular among Welsh learners, I've been investing in other communities that are somewhat niche and don't have lots of resources for language learning. I recently noticed that there were some leaners of Toki Pona in the app, and decided to post on their groups and write a blog post. This campaign was quite succesful and we got 60 news users in that language.
https://polygloss.app/posts/learning-toki-pona-language-of-good/
Polygloss really got traction among Welsh learners, and now we recently reached an amazing community milestone. A player decided to launch a challenge from a Facebook to use a specific word in every Polygloss match this weekend (parsnip). This is so exciting that I'm considering preparing a surprise for them. It's really cool to see marketing happening organically like this, specially considering how expensive it can be for a project! It allows us to spend our budget more wisely and really creates a different sense of community around :D
We just implemented lifetime subscriptions, and before we had even announced it through our newsletter, we sold two of them. Combining these with our current 22 monthly subscribers, this is the first month that we cross a hundred dollars in sales ($142) 💰💰💰
https://polygloss.app/posts/lifetime-subscription-and-listening-mode/
Since the iOS launch, which was a huge success, we've had many bug reports. We now released a version with some important new features, but most importantly a heavy cleanup of bugs. This nows means I feel safe to call the current version of 1.0.0 🎉
https://polygloss.app/posts/language-message-history-contest-results/
This is really bonkers and incredibly awesome! After publishing Polygloss, my language learning app, to the iOS app store, I started sharing the news: I sent the news to our newsletter, posted on social media, and in some communities I'm part of. Initially not much happenend and honestly I was a bit disappointed... But then I posted it on reddit and everything changed!
The response was just incredible! It got over a thousand upvotes, was seen 84k times, shared 111 times, and stayed at the top of the language learning subreddit the whole day 🎉🚀 Not only did I not expect it would blow up like this, but also the feedback people left was amazing! People seem to be really excited with the app's idea and happy that it fills a very needed niche for learning a language that most apps ignore. Most of the suggestions people gave in the comments were super useful too!
What was also exciting was that we kept getting lots of hits on our website later on, but instead of coming from reddit as a referral, they were direct hits. This means people have been recommending the app to others, which is FABULOUS ✨
Some more numbers since the iOS launch:
🚀 2651 new players signed up
📝 33 thousand new texts were written
🔡 in 67 languages
💖 average D1 retention is 38.1% (the average for educational apps is 18%)
🥇 151 is the record of simultaneous players online
After working on it for so long and with many ups and downs, the app is finally at the app store now! You can download it here: https://polygloss.app
And in other news, thanks to a grant from an entrepreneurship award from Queen Mary University of London, I also got my first paid intern who started last week :D
We also got an app trailer, which I'm in love with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2n4ILf0pc4
This is all so exciting, heart rate has been up all day 😅🚀
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