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.
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 that long to not be profitable.
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 having problems even beginning to imagine how I would pronounce Lenguajero. I definitely think you had a big naming problem and might want to consider persevering.
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).
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.
Sorry, I'm not quite sure if I understand your comment.
What would you like to see them doing? If anything, I'll learn from this and hopefully, the founders might find a good idea or two on these comments.
i know absolutely nothing about the market, but my feeling is there is a pretty big opportunity in charging for one on one tutoring. you could have a whole ranking/review system etc. someone willing to pay for spanish tutoring here is going to be paying a boat load compared to what someone in latin america would be charging. so the key would be finding people who speak spanish and english well enough that they could tutor for less than a local american would do it for. i think that's totally possible - but again that's just one example of what capitalizing most common users could mean, i really don't know the market so i can only guess
edit: now that i think about it there's probably room for american tutors who charge more as well. have a find a spanish tutor search option and have price be one vector, location be another (let people find tutors locally?) etc. etc.
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.
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.
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.
