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Comment by diasks2 | Hacker News Reader

OP here. We went live with the site last week and emailed it to a few people we know in our target market. Feedback is in and we are doing a horrible job of explaining what the site is, the benefits of the site and how to actually use the site. One thing we are planning to do is create a ~1 minute video. Other than that though, I would love your feedback/ideas on how to make our onboarding process suck less.

Also, if anyone will be attending the Tokyo Hacker News Meetup tomorrow night, feel free to give me your feedback in person.

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A video would be a really good idea, and I'd also recommend a trial that doesn't require a sign-up: if this were in any of the languages I'm constantly trying to pick up and it had a way of engaging me immediately without a sign-up I would have spent at least 20 minutes on the trial - I went down the site and did the english tests and it wasn't clear whether I got all the answers right! So, I would put a really clear call-to-action above the fold that takes you through a basic test and asks you to login/sign up on each step to save your progress.

I liked the format and variety of the questions: if you do well with this consider making french/spanish/portuguese/chinese/japanese/russian versions please!

Thanks for the feedback. I've considered doing a guest registration, but then decided to just put some sample questions on the front page that users can try out. Seems like we should possibly try out a guest registration.

Yes, if we can find some success in this market we plan to expand to other markets and languages.

The language market has huge opportunities still to be found - I pay for a private language teacher because I like the custom attention, and I'd pay for a service that could enhance genuine learning. Good luck!

The pricing page helped me make some sense of things, but I still don't have a good idea of what I get by subscribing to the service, which is probably the big thing that might deter me from digging deeper into the site, signing up, etc.

I agree with the reply above, in that I felt a little lost by the practice questions being the majority of the front page experience; the video might help, but collapsing things down so I can quickly get an idea of what the 'speaking' 'vocab', 'writing' and testing services are about might help me make more sense of the site, faster.

I'll come find you tomorrow at the meetup, in any case :)

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