The News In Twos

JQuery mobile was not working as I expected and I was not able to make the app mobile. I paused the app effort as well.

But as I was browsing and experimenting with different frameworks, I came across a few blogs on Ionic and Angular. It peaked my curiosity and decided to see if it would work for The News In Twos.

After a few small POCs, I was able to port the code on jQuery to Ionic & Angular and it worked like a charm. The app was now on web, on Android and iOS, all using the same code base, responsive and with a native mobile feel!

After a few months of running the newsletter and acquiring about 150 users, I realized running the project was not scalable. Everything was manual: picking the news, summarizing the news, finding human translators, merging the content into a newsletter, formatting the newsletter and then selecting who to send it to.

I decided to try to turn it into an app using jQuery mobile and firebase.

I paused the newsletter.

First I looked online for other services that provided the same and could not a service that effectively solved the problem I was targeting.

I then decided to do a proof of concept. First trying to find a translation service and then an email service for distributing the newsletters.

With all the pieces set, I launched the website and newsletter in March and reached out to old classmates and language teachers to share the product. I also invested a little money in Google AdWords to drive more awareness.

I was slowly able to get between 10-20 new users per month.

After returning from trip to Spain, I realized that the 3-6 months spent on Duolingo was not sufficient to truly immerse myself in a language. But I did not find any other alternatives than taking spanish classes.

I was receiving daily newsletters of interesting content, at that moment I asked myself: "what if those newsletters were in spanish, I know I would be interested in reading and learning".

Hence was born the first iteration of The News In Twos, ie: a weekly newsletter where the top news is sent in both languages to keep it interesting, but also informative given the target audience is not yet fluent in spanish.