Making $10k/m from a French learning app
highsignal.io
highsignal.io
So many people want to learn languages as well so it’s a huge market to sell to. Very smart.
Plenty more stories like this coming out every Wednesday in the newsletter btw https://www.highsignal.io/newsletter/
1) a real expert (a French teacher)
2) saw a problem in his area of expertise
3) decided to start solving it even though he had no clear monetisation plan
4) used the simplest technology he could find to meet his aims
5) It is a popular field
I did French for 5 years at school, got taught lots of grammar rules (which I never learnt in English!). The net result is that last time I was in France I had to point at things on the menu. I always thought conversational French would have been much more useful.
Well done on the app
Ultimately, grammar is most important for speaking and writing. Do you really need to know "this is a secondary subject clause" to speak and write with eloquence? I don't think so. This is anecdotal, but I learned to be a better writer by reading more, not by studying grammatical theory.
Additionally, this could also be colored by my experience growing up in America. We have language classes in school, but literally no one took them seriously. After 3 years of Spanish, I'm not sure if I was even past A1.
As an adult and moving to a foreign country, I'm learning a second language (Dutch) with much more attention to detail but I'm having the most issues with grammar. Not that I don't understand the concepts, but more-so that I do not know any grammatical vocabulary. Verb/noun/pronoun/adjective/adverb/preposition... yeah those are all of the words I know off the top of my head. So when the teacher said, "this is the infinitive form of the verb", I was completely lost. I'm trying to study the grammatical concepts, but because they aren't everyday words, I tend to forget them quickly.
Anyway, thanks for reading my rambling! :)
When I have discussed this with multilingual continental Europeans they have found their understanding of grammar to be a great advantage when learning a new language. To me it is a complete mystery!
It is pointless trying to teach English people foreign languages this way, unless they are going to start by teaching them their native language this way first!
In any case, I am absolutely delighted by this app and it has brought out my inner Francophile :)
I plan on adding more advanced lessons and an constantly improving it so there could be an advanced track within the next few months.
In any case, feel free to shout me an email if you have any feedback/feature request.
May I ask how you built such a large audience?
Maybe I'm overthinking, but I can't see how single person can do this, without really good idea.
I specialize in Berlin bureaucracy. Some guy reviews ebook readers. Sometimes, you have to think small, because everyone is busy thinking big.
First he has domain experience (teaching French and English in Korea). This experience exposes him to a problem (students know grammar but can't speak). He then explores solutions to this problem. First with a blog and a book (sells enough to "cover the bills"). Then he iterates to an interactive book (which now was "selling well"), and then finally moves on to build the fully fledged webapp. And with that, out of the 5 billion internet users, he can convince 800 of them to hand over their cash.
Of course the story is probably streamlined and leaves out the dead ends. You can only connect the dots in retrospect, as Steve Jobs said.
Honestly my idea was not particularly amazing. I was just frustrated with courses that were too focused on grammar and decided to create a solution to this problem. You don’t need an amazing idea, you just need to offer a solution enough people will be happy to pay for :).
I reckon its much easier to just find a market with personal interests and compete with existing players on a smaller feature for a smaller audience since the demand is already validated.
How many times you've heard people hating Salesforce?
Companies with dozens of employees can’t chase a niche with a revenue potential in the low-five figures per month. A solo worker can and do so efficiently enough to leave $10k/mo after expenses.
Have 30 people working together is an advantage. Having 30 mouths to feed (or more, with family members) is a disadvantage.
> The French Together blog is built on WordPress and the combination of GeneratePress + GenerateBlocks and is hosted by Rocket.net. The French Together app uses Ruby on Rails and is hosted on Render.com.
> For emails, I just use Bento + ConvertBox. My general philosophy regarding tools is to always try to use the simplest solution possible.
m is usually minute, I went in expecting a vulnerability writeup, although the sub-header made it quickly clear it was a write-up of a product.
Good clear write up of the product and it's journey though. Nice "boring technologies" of wordpress and rails.
It seems many newer language apps are starting to focus on the "comprehensible input" method touted by language learning influencers like Steve Kauffmann, and at least for me it's definitely working. Comprehensible input (video content, books) along with weekly practice on iTalki has absolutely skyrocketed my language learning progress and really I only put in ~5hrs a week. Lots of money in the post-covid market for language learning as it was a hobby a lot of people picked up in quarantine.
Props to you. I was a bit curious on doing app development and felt it's a bit harder to start with for a beginner. Hence my question to confirm.
Nonetheless I'm sure you're gonna smash it.
> Your French learning journey starts by listening to a fun and realistic conversation between Jérome, Elodie, Stéphane and the other professional voice actors who worked on this French. course.
> They speak fast, don’t they? That’s how all French people speak (especially Parisians, they are the worst!) Don’t worry though, French Together comes with audio recorded at both slow and normal speed.
> Listening to the slow audio helps you train your ears to recognize French sounds while listening to the normal audio prepares you for real life French.
> Do this for a few weeks and you could dramatically improve your understanding of spoken French. Oh and the course also includes audio from a variety of speakers so you get used to different accents and intonations and don’t end up having to ask locals to repeat when you go to France.
It's definitely a whole skill to be able to listen and disambiguate words spoken at a native speaker's pace in a second (or nth) language.
And yes, DL teaches South American Spanish which has a fair few differences to European so that might be the source of the differences.
I wished I'd started with LT, learned the rules, then maybe Duolingo would have been ok for practice (although the gamification sort of annoys me). My Super Duolingo sub is up this summer, I think I might not renew and stick with LT and Dreaming Spanish.
Regarding Latin American Spanish vs European -- in the LT lessons, they cover the differences in pronunciation when applicable and also differences in word usage (Carro vs El Auto) and even later on talks about "Spanish Idiolects" (e.g. the ways individuals speak Spanish).
I didn't try english though.
Esperanto is super easy if you speak both french and english. But man there is less content on the internet than klingon...
Duolingo is a bit like Notion. It makes you think you are achieving things but the direction is completely incorrect.
By "environment" I mean of course apps + devices (combined with real-world sources, perhaps).
Of course, we live in a world where the translations apps on ours phones are approaching a "universal translator" level.
“I make $xx,xxx per month from MySite, click here to visit MySite!” has become an extremely popular marketing tactic, even though in reality the site could be making next to nothing.
I agree with your general point though.
I like your project, but this ^ is blatantly disingenuous.
Disclosing your revenue is a very effective marketing move that gives you a lot of traffic and drives sales up. You cannot not know that and it's extremely unlikely if it weren't one of the reasons for the linked post, if not the primary one.
If you were up to "just sharing", you would've done it anonymously with the name redacted and no links to your website.
The main thing I gain from this is making connections and meeting fellow indie founders. I’m not sure you will believe me but it’s true. Not everything is a calculated marketing move.
And sure, I could have shared anonymously but this would make the content way less interesting than knowing what the app is etc.
So many people neglect this fact especially with all the hustle gurus
The marketing time is mostly testing new sales page versions, running A/B tests etc.
But I also sometimes have periods when I spend much more time coding. The next few months will probably be 80% coding while I create a mobile app.
This is actually pretty low for a software developer.
$5 dollars from your w2 turns into 2.5 dollars after all the governments have taken their pound of flesh...
If they are spending 20 hr per week, that’s equivalent to $140-180k per year.
Plus whatever income they make doing other things.
Also, if you deviate from income norms by 10%, you’re considered to be rich and will be disliked. You will lose in other ways more than that 10%.
Basically, that “dream” doesn’t worth the effort in some places.
It’s a mistake to show off I believe; people treat me like one of them and sometimes I ‘win the lottery’ and treat them to something. But I rather appear poor than rich; it attracts far too much grifters and weirdos. Also I don’t get the urge to spend on crap I don’t need, because it would show I am not one of them. It would be annoying.
In general, people can be a bit sensitive with respect to money across EU. Like, the president of a country buying a suit that is a bit (but not too much) expensive, and there is public outrage. Common, it’s the president of this large country! It’s not so much the impact of that amount of money, rather, topic sensitivity.