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What it feels like to fail

aflanagan.com

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Re: What it feels like to fail

#11

Post by augustflanagan »

Vivtek wrote: post #7

This is not what it feels like to fail. You've got an active, committed community of 7000 users - that is not even close to failure. When I built Despammed.com in 1999, I peaked at around that. Donations were plenty to keep the site running and even paid for the mortgage once or twice when things were tight. You've got a much more committed community there, and while you're not going to be the next YouTube (because l…

Thanks Vivtek. I appreciate the feedback. While we do have 7000 users I would say that really our "committed community" is much smaller. The site does pay for itself, and on average makes $100-$150 a month in profits from ad revenue. But, I certainly could never count on it to pay for a mortgage.

We have no intention of shutting down, and will definitely keep it going as a hobby (and yes, maybe a premium version, or some other revenue model will come into existence in the future.) Until then, I'm looking for a new project to start, which isn't so bad. ;)

Re: What it feels like to fail

#12

Post by jacquesm »

I really don't think that you have a failure on your hands.

You should stop to think that way and start to think about how you are going to monetize your users, one way would be to literally ask the community: "Hey guys & girls, this is going great but I need a living, what should I do for you to throw some money my way" might be a good start.

Most small scale bootstrapped start-ups would be trumpeting their success from the rooftops if they got a dedicated userbase like that.

Re: What it feels like to fail

#13

Post by orblivion »

Vivtek wrote: post #7

This is not what it feels like to fail. You've got an active, committed community of 7000 users - that is not even close to failure. When I built Despammed.com in 1999, I peaked at around that. Donations were plenty to keep the site running and even paid for the mortgage once or twice when things were tight. You've got a much more committed community there, and while you're not going to be the next YouTube (because l…

Since you mentioned donations, I figured I'd ask you this. I've got a site I'm working on that I want to commit to full time, potentially without any other source of income. When you say it was "enough to keep the site running", do you mean enough to maintain servers, or enough to maintain your refridgerator and roof as well?

Also, is it ok to have a donation based site if you eventually hope to profit significantly from it? Or does that tend to imply that it's a "community" or "non-profit" sort of thing they're putting money towards?

Re: What it feels like to fail

#14

Post by smwhreyebelong »

I think it's a great idea. Are you sure you want to give up on it ? Why do you call it a failure ? I wouldn't call having 7000 users a failure. You have plenty of room to grow.

Let me know if you want feedback. One reason a lot of people trying to learn a new language give up is because of lack of motivation after a while / not finding people to converse/practice/learn with (and I talk from first-hand experience)

Re: What it feels like to fail

#15

Post by augustflanagan »

orblivion wrote: post #4

So... did you ever try a revenue model? Make some sort of premium account? I'm not speaking from any amount of experience, but you have 7000 users, you're about to throw in the towel on the business end of things anyway, I would think it's worth trying to come up with something.

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.

Re: What it feels like to fail

#16

Post by wdewind »

natgordon wrote: post #9
wdewind wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe it's a bit late, but i have to agree. try and put yourself back where you were a year ago, where 7000 users was a dream. also, no offense but the name is godawful. there is simply NO way for my brain to remember it. ive seen it probably 5 or 6 times now and i still dont know how to say it, much less remember how to spell it to go back to the url. thanks for sharing your story, but don't give up yet. a year aint…

Lenguajero is a pretty bad name. It's easy to pronounce in Spanish (and is actually kind of witty) but is terrible in English if you don't know Spanish. I'm the other co-founder of Lenguajero.

yeah i kind of guessed that was it, it must be pretty hard to find a word that is witty and works well in both languages.

if you guys are serious about it being a failure, im sure there are a few HNers who would gladly take it off your hands and grow it into a biz (after rebranding it of course).

Re: What it feels like to fail

#17

Post by abstractbill »

augustflanagan wrote: post #15
orblivion wrote: post #4

So... did you ever try a revenue model? Make some sort of premium account? I'm not speaking from any amount of experience, but you have 7000 users, you're about to throw in the towel on the business end of things anyway, I would think it's worth trying to come up with something.

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 tha…

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.

Re: What it feels like to fail

#18

Post by wdewind »

malnourish wrote: post #8
wdewind wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe it's a bit late, but i have to agree. try and put yourself back where you were a year ago, where 7000 users was a dream. also, no offense but the name is godawful. there is simply NO way for my brain to remember it. ive seen it probably 5 or 6 times now and i still dont know how to say it, much less remember how to spell it to go back to the url. thanks for sharing your story, but don't give up yet. a year aint…

I also feel that perhaps a name change (I have difficulty recalling it, even now) and a revenue model, perhaps capitalizing on the most loyal users, and word of mouth advertising, could really gear the website forward. I wish I would have known about it when I was more into Spanish.

capitalizing on the most loyal users seems like a good idea to me. if they could make a business on it and you could skim off the top they'd be incentivized to grow it pretty quickly.

Re: What it feels like to fail

#19

Post by augustflanagan »

Just to clarify. I'm not shutting down Lenguajero. It will keep on running (at least I'll still use it to practice my Spanish :)), and maybe we'll come up with an idea on how to monetize.

One of the challenges we faced in monetizing the site was monetizing our international members. A really big chunk of our users are from Central and South America. When it comes to advertising we don't make any money off these users (say $0.05 per click versus ~$1.00 for someone in America). The majority of these users also don't have credit cards or paypal so getting them to pay for a premium version of the site would be difficult.

Re: What it feels like to fail

#20

Post by augustflanagan »

abstractbill wrote: post #17
augustflanagan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

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 u…

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).

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