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Comment by augustflanagan | Hacker News Reader

We tried a couple of different ideas, neither of which gained traction. The most promising was offering a paid tool to Spanish and English professors, who could sign up their classes and then monitor how their students were using the site.

We actually had about 50 universities sign up for a free trial, although only about 10 actually used the site actively last term. I think the biggest problem with this idea was that most university students who are studying Spanish don't really care about learning, and are just doing it for credit.

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The most promising was offering a paid tool to Spanish and English professors...

Did you talk with your users about this and your other ideas? Do you know what roughly what proportion of your current userbase is made up of Spanish and English professors? If you want freemium to work, you need to be sure that you have enough "power users", and that those users have a hair-on-fire problem even if the majority of your users do not.

You can find out these kinds of things by running surveys, and by reaching out to individual users if you have their email addresses. You might be surprised how easy it is to get insanely valuable information for free this way.

I would say almost none of our users are Spanish and English professors (presumably they speak both languages quite well ;)). The idea was to get them to use the tool in their classrooms, where their students would be the users. They would have special accounts that would allow them to monitor their students use of the site without actually participating.

We did (and still occasionally do) run surveys and ask for member feedback. The feedback was great, and we made a lot of changes to the site based on that. I'm not saying that there isn't a way to monetize the site, I'm just saying that our two main ideas (ad revenue and a teacher tool didn't work out).

I think you need to reaccess who your paying clients are. People that are so desperate to learn they'll try anything - expats in a new country for a job (or dragged along by a spouse), contractors dealing with workers and language barrier, esl teachers, travelers who want to be prepared to communicate with the locals, etc. Less fun, and more solution based advertising. I know I've seen Rosetta Stone ads highlighting it's use with diplomats and the like.

Having moved to a new country myself recently, I would have loved the opportunity to talk to the locals about life in general - where to live, where to go out, etc (though in my case I moved between English speaking countries so the language wasn't such a big deal). I could see the same working for travellers.

Also the chance to make some contacts in the country before I arrived would have been good - making friends in a new city is hard.

I would have paid for that kind of service.

Not just diplomats, either. While we were living in Puerto Rico, we knew one family from Denver; the husband had a management job in a local factory, and the company gave the family a $10,000 budget for language courses. And that was a small company - turns out this is generally worth the expense, because it reduces management turnover.

A 20% conversion rate? Man I'd give up my left pinky finger for that. Maybe even the right one if every conversion (university) brought in enough users.

I would too! Unfortunately the teachers weren't interested in paying, just using it while it was free.

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