Business update, week 5

August 24, 2025 at 5:55 PM

This week, I continued to work on my language learning tool and speak to more language learners about their experiences. I attempted and then gave up on publishing a YouTube video, which spiraled into a minor confidence crisis that I have now (mostly) recovered from. Finally, I decided to press pause on fast.cards and spend next week testing new (language-related) $10 product ideas.

What goals did I set last week and did I meet them?

1. ❌ 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”

2. Continue improving my tool, in particular:

3. ✅ add support for multiple decks per user that you can switch between

4. ❌ add tool to generate audio for any text (for listening comprehension practice)

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

6. ❌ add articles / roots / parts of speech for at least a few languages

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

What did I do this week?

Improvements to fast.cards

Monday and Tuesday looked very similar to last week. I had a few conversations with language learners but spent most of my time trying to improve my language learning tool, fast.cards. My main accomplishment was adding support on the backend and in the UI for saving and creating multiple decks, rather than only allowing one deck at a time, saved in the browser cache. I made some UI updates as well to make the page adjust dynamically as the window size changes.

This is where the week started to go off the rails a bit. The database work went quite a bit slower than expected. My plan for the second half of the week had been to try and recruit some additional beta testers for the tool, and so I was torn about whether I should focus on that, or try and finish the other features I wanted to finish.

Failed YouTube experiment

I had also been thinking about long-term ways that I can advertise the products I create. One idea I have is to do “organic content marketing” - make (free) videos that are useful to the types of people who might be interested in my products, and then mention the products briefly in the video. The videos are not themselves primarily ads, they’re useful, interesting content on their own (e.g. videos about the science behind language learning, memorization techniques, stuff like that), but they attract the type of person that might want your products. If you do this well and do it consistently, you can build an audience of people who are especially likely to find your products useful.

This approach is appealing to me because (a) I think it could be effective, (b) I think I could be good at it, and (c) it’s free, aside from the time commitment. If you make videos that are actually interesting, the YouTube recommendation algorithm does the difficult work of getting them in front of your target audience.

I did some blogging a few years back which, despite me not really trying to share it much, led a number of people (including widely-read bloggers!) to reach out and tell me they thought it was interesting. So I do think I’m capable of expressing ideas that are interesting to people.

Anyway, my plan was to spend Wednesday scripting a video and setting up the filming stuff, and then spend Thursday filming and editing. And then I'd resume my regularly scheduled [computer] programming.

Instead I spent Wednesday setting up the filming stuff, Thursday overthinking what I was going to say and messing with the set some more, and Friday continuing to overthink, struggling to speak out loud in front of the camera, and then realizing “what am I doing, I just spent three days on this and it’s not even clear how it’s going to help my business”, before giving up.

Confidence crisis and recovery

The YouTube failure then led to some broader catastrophizing about how my flashcard tool is still mostly useless and probably a big waste of time and energy, and “wow, how have I already spent a month on this??”

So on Saturday morning, I decided to take a deep breath and not work on the flashcard tool or marketing… instead, I went to a coffee shop and took a few hours to zoom out and reflect on whether I’m focusing on the right things or if I should change course. I wrote down all the internal questions I was grappling with and gave my honest answers. This was a helpful exercise and I came away with a clearer picture of how to proceed.

Here are some of the conclusions I reached:

• The vision I have for fast.cards is a good idea - a tool that uses AI to give you unlimited vocab, grammar, reading, speaking, and conversation practice in a bunch of languages, all integrated into an intuitive UI - however, building that vision will realistically take several months. It could be months before I get much signal as to whether people will actually pay for it or not. This isn’t really the type of product I was intending to build at this stage.
• Despite repeatedly being advised against it, I seem to be making one of the key mistakes many entrepreneurs make which is focusing on a solution rather than focusing on the problems people have and the outcomes they want. Selling “I made a cool language learning tool” is harder than selling “I will teach you [language]”. In fairness, I was initially solving a very specific problem that I personally experience - it’s annoying to make language flashcards - but I very quickly started thinking beyond that narrow scope.
• If one random person from my class hadn’t pre-registered for my tool, I would not have pursued it (in fact at the time they did I had already started working on other ideas). That is to say, I took a very weak signal of interest and immediately spent a large amount of time and energy based on that weak signal (I’m not even sure that person has even used the product more than once).
• I switched too quickly into ‘build mode’ after someone paid for the product, and immediately started spending most of my time writing code. This felt good because I like coding and the brainstorming and idea validation work I was doing previously was frustrating. I think I committed too much bandwidth, too soon to the idea.
• If I work on something else for a while, I can always come back to this and pick up where I left off. All of the work I’ve done still exists.

I also made this list of “stuff I’ve learned so far” which is helpful to keep in mind. This all counts as progress, even if I don’t feel especially close to making money yet:

• I’ve become more comfortable reaching out to people (strangers, friends, family)
• I’ve done a bunch of ‘audience interviews’ which have taught me about language learning, and about how to give that kind of interview
• I created a web app with user management, a database, integration with a payments system, and which talks to several external APIs. This is all directly transferable to any other SaaS product
• I remembered that I love coding and am very good at it
• I practiced skills for starting and growing a network within a domain
• I’m getting better at launching things quickly and not worrying about perfection

I’ve also learned a lot about the broader language learning / translation / interpreting landscape, and found some other areas within that space that seem promising. So while I'm going to try out some different $10 product ideas, I'll stay within this space and build off what I've learned so far, rather than starting from scratch.

What’s working and what isn’t?

Aside from the stuff already mentioned, there is one other issue I've been having - once I started writing lots of code, my sleep habits devolved into chaos. I kept staying up late working, waking up late, and screwing up all my routines. This is a bad idea and something I'm trying to avoid moving forward. I need to remind myself that staying up late and waking up late doesn’t actually save me any time. And it messes up my moods and motivation and is clearly counter-productive.

What are my goals for next week?

I set too many different goals last week which made it hard for me to decide what to focus on any given day. I’m going to try a new thing where I pick one 'main goal' - accomplishing that goal should always be priority #1. I can include another minor goal or two, but my top priority should always be the main goal.

Main goal:

Launch a new $10 offer and make 2 sales to strangers, applying some of the interview feedback and lessons learned last time around

Bonus goals:

• Continue talking to language learners (already have 4 or 5 conversations lined up)
• Keep learning about hospital interpreter services (I didn’t talk about this but there are some interesting threads I’m pulling on here, will talk about this more next week)

Final thoughts

Weird week but I think I ended in a good place. The next one will be great!

Jake