Status: Abandoned

The Idea

I have been learning French and was really dissatisfied with the quality of language learning apps because they would force me to follow a static curriculum as anyone else.

I hated it and decided to build a personalized language immersion app. It would generate stories based on one’s interests, keep track of their progress and progressively generate more difficult stories (i + 1 principle). I even thought about generating music with AI based on their vocabulary.

What Went Wrong

I was familiar with the market. I knew the common pain points. I knew how I would differentiate myself from other clunky apps. I felt this could work.

Rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Finished the app in two weeks. It was working fine but I was a little embarrassed to get other people’s opinion. I wasn’t very confident with the quality of the app. I took a break to slow down as if was very intense two weeks.

During my break, I tried another app that I missed during my market research. That made me lose my hope because it was already doing 95% of what I was doing. They had thousands of subscribed users, a YouTube channel to funnel users and a bunch of social media posts. I was demoralized and decided to abandon it.

Also, AI-generated stories felt different. They were different than human-written stories. It felt a little bit uncanny reading those stories as they didn’t properly represent the real use of the language. It could have been fine, though, because my goal was to help A2 level learners to move to B2 as fast as possible with customized immersion.

Lessons Learned

• Be more through with the market research. The time spent on it is not wasted.
• Talk to as many people as you can before writing a single line of code. Join Discord communities, sub-Reddits, private channels etc.
• Build in public. No one cares about you. When you share a crappy, buggy, ugly-looking app, people will ignore it rather than sitting down and crafting a well-written long essay just to humiliate you.