Business update, week 4

August 17, 2025 at 9:14 PM

Hello! Week 4 is in the books, it’s now been about one month since I quit my job and started working on the business. I feel like I’ve come a long way, but also like that month moved too fast.

This week I continued working on the language learning tool I started on last week - on the advice of the entrepreneurship course I’m taking, I’ve committed to sticking with one idea space for at least a little while, rather than waiting until I find something that feels perfect. So language learning it is, at least until the end of the month.

What goals did I set last week?

• Conduct 10 additional target-audience interviews
• Get my language learning tool to the point that I feel personally like it’s worth $10/month. Currently it’s a pretty minimal tool and I feel a bit uneasy asking people to pay for it. But within a week I believe I can add enough features that for many people, it’s worth $10/ month.

What did I accomplish this week?

More audience outreach / interviews

A big area of focus for me right now is talking to ‘potential users’ to learn what problems they may have that I can solve. Early in the week, I had strong momentum on talking to current and/or prior language learners. On Sunday I talked to two people, then one on Monday, and another on Tuesday. The Tuesday person gave me two more leads, and throughout the week I continued to think of more people I could reach out to.

By midweek, I was very focused on making as many upgrades to my language tool as possible, in an effort to achieve goal #2, “making my product feel worth $10/month to me”. I got into such a coding grind that I tailed off in my outreach effort, and didn’t talk to anyone else for the rest of the week.

In the last couple days, I did contact a bunch more people, some of whom have already agreed to talk, and I imagine a few of the others will as well. The problem hasn’t been lack of people I can find to talk to, or even fear of reaching out, it’s primarily being crunched for time.

I think the conversations so far have been helpful, but I also wouldn’t say that I’ve had any clear ‘aha’ moments yet, or found common pain points that lots of people share. At the moment I’m talking to anyone who’s tried language learning before, but I’ll probably need to start narrowing in on more specific audiences. The body of ‘language learners’ is just so broad (it may literally be a billion people) and so far I have seen a very wide variety of goals, preferences, and approaches.

Coding, coding, and more coding

I’ve been steadily making improvements to fast.cards, the tool I started working on last week. This week, I:

• added user accounts: you can now ‘log in’, which at the moment isn’t super important from a user perspective, but was necessary for some of the next features I want to add
• configured payments / subscription tiers: I set up integration with Stripe to handle payment processing, so now once you’re logged in you can switch between the different subscription plans and when you upgrade, all the backend magic works so that the appropriate features get locked / unlocked. Likewise, not super important yet but I wanted to get this in place now rather than having to deal with it later
• usability improvements / minor features: won't enumerate every little thing, but trying to stay on top of any feedback from my small number of users, as well as improve anything I find personally annoying when I use the tool
• text generation: I added a tool that will generate practice text in a wide variety of formats (e.g. formal essay, casual conversation, encyclopedia entry) and topics in whatever language you’re learning. Goal is to make it easy to get varied text sources with diverse vocab and styles. I think it’s a pretty cool feature personally!
• I also started work on a feature where the flashcard builder automatically provides the correct article (e.g. el/la for Spanish), includes parts of speech, and converts verbs to their root version. I made some progress, but it seemed like it would take at least a few days to add if for the first couple languages so I decided to come back to it after I added some other features. I'll try to launch this for a few languages this week.

These features were kind of a pain to figure out, but are very general purpose… Having done these once, I think I could replicate what I did in just a few hours for any other project

Thinking about paying audiences

I’ve also been thinking about what specific audiences would be especially likely to pay money for language learning tools. I need to spend more time on this (and plan to this week), but some early ideas I’ve had are:

• Employees at multinational corporations who could advance their career by becoming multilingual. It seems like companies that operate across many countries would need many employees to be fluent in multiple languages, and I would imagine those roles are paid a premium relative to comparable, non-multilingual roles. So maybe I could pick an industry and develop materials targeted at helping people advance their careers by gaining language certifications, and include industry-specific resources.
• Interpreters: Some of the next features I want to add to my tool include (a) text narration, and (b) speech transcription. This got me thinking that I could create a training tool for interpreters that generates and narrates text, while simultaneously recording and transcribing what the user is saying. The user would listen to the audio with earphones, while speaking into the microphone. I could then use machine translation to translate the generated text, and compare it to the transcribed text from the interpreter.

At least based on 5 minutes of research, I couldn’t find anything like this that exists. Supposedly there’s still a large market for interpreters - this seems like it could be an extremely useful tool for interpreters-in-training, and one that’s only become technically feasible in the last couple years. You could set the topic to whatever use cases you’re training for, adjust the text complexity and speaking speed.

• Health care workers: Need to research this more, but I read that hospitals are required to have workers who are able to speak in a variety of languages so that they can communicate with patients. There are certifications that employees need to obtain to have these roles, so I could develop training materials targeted at those groups.
• NGO workers: haven't researched this at all, but I assume that many NGOs that operate in other countries have language requirements for lots of their roles. It seems like people in this field could expand their career opportunities by learning other languages, and therefore may be more willing to pay for language learning tools, materials, etc. These all seem promising to me but I didn’t research any of them thoroughly, so a task for next week is to pick one or two and investigate further.Did I meet my goals?

Target-audience interviews: I’ll give myself 50% on this. I started the week strong, did 4 total interviews, have a few more scheduled, and reached out to a bunch more people today. But I wasn’t consistent on it throughout the week, I should have devoted at least a bit of effort to this every day.Language tool improvements: I get a 100% for effort, and a 60% for results. Aside from cooking, eating, cleaning, and exercise, I spent pretty much all my waking hours coding. I didn’t get as far as I wanted this week, but I don’t feel like I fell way short, I think I’m about 3-4 more days of work from where I was hoping to be.

What’s working / what isn’t?Insofar as this month is a ‘practice run’ at building and selling a product, I think I’m doing well. I’m getting reps talking to potential users and taking a problem-first approach, learning lots of transferable software skills, and in the next two weeks will be trying to market my product more. Most or all of this will be directly applicable to other ideas I may pursue later.On the other hand I’m still not sure I’ve made anything that people actually want and will pay for. If I can’t get more users this week, I’ll start falling behind in my course (not that this really matters - I’ll still have access to all the materials - but I’ve been trying to keep up the pace as a personal goal), and may need to pivot to a new product idea to keep progressing.I also feel extremely rushed, probably more than I actually need to be in reality. This isn’t entirely bad because it’s prompting me to work very hard, but it is somewhat stressful. I do think that starting to earn almost any money consistently from non-family-and-friends will help with this.

What are my goals for next week?

• Get 10 people using my tool in some capacity (even if they just try it and tell me “this isn’t useful to me”). Included in this is “market my product in some way to complete strangers”

• Continue improving my tool, in particular:

• add support for multiple decks per user that you can switch between

• add tool to generate audio for any text (for listening comprehension practice)

• improve single-word translations - significant bug with this right now that I need to fix

• add articles / roots / parts of speech for at least a few languages

• Research one of the “paying audience” ideas I have and talk to someone with direct knowledge of that audience

Final ThoughtsAt least for the next two weeks, I have a good plan for what to be doing. I’m hopeful that I can find something that works in the language learning space, but am trying to have the mindset that this is a learning exercise - I want it to work, but won’t be devastated if I decide I need to abandon it and work on something else.In the words of fast.cards: "¡Si el plan A falla, tengo 26 letras más que explorar!"That’s all for this week!

Jake