Here’s what the Lenguajero team has been up to since the last blog post (7 months ago).

1. We relocated from Oaxaca, Mexico to Vancouver, B.C. It’s been a refreshing change of pace, and we are enjoying settling into a new city for a while.

2. We took a bit of time off from Lenguajero to work on our side project TOEFL Now.

3. The Lenguajero community passed the 10,000 member mark.

4. We launched our first products, two e-books for intermediate and advanced Spanish learners that teach slang and common colloquial phrases from Spain and Mexico. The books, aptly named Spanish in Spain and Spanish in Mexico, have been a great little side project, and we’ve had about 40 sales in the first week.

5. We’ve come up with some great plans for end-of-year. Today we launched the member podcasts, a place for our members to listen to Spanish and English podcasts created by other Lenguajero members. We have some cool ideas for this feature, and will have some follow up announcements soon.

However, aside from learning Spanish we love helping other people learn English. We spent the last 8 months volunteering as English teachers at a small community-based learning center here in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was a great experience that, at least in my case, emphasized how hard it is to be a good language educator.

A couple of months ago we decided to collaborate on a small side project with our good friend Sarah Menkedick, who is a much better teacher than either Natalie or I ever will be. We decided to branch off from the bajillion other learning English services, sites, tools, etc. and focus on a much smaller niche, English learners preparing for the TOEFL iBT.

Sarah has years of experience writing and marking the TOEFL, so we sat down and wrote a TOEFL eBook filled with tips and strategies from Sarah on how to improve your score on the TOEFL iBT. We recently launched the ebook, and the site – TOEFL Now, so if you are preparing for the TOEFL, or if you are an educator please go check out the site and let us know what you think.

TOEFL Now will help you raise your TOEFL score. There is a Speaking section, a Writing section and a TOEFL forum.

We also have an affiliate program. If you have an audience of English-learners it might be a good fit.

Follow TOEFL_Now on Twitter.

As we built the site in Colombia, expanded on it from Costa Rica and Ecuador, and finally launched it and watched it grow from Mexico I feel as though I have learned far more than I ever would in business school. Here are 4 important lessons that I’ve learned during the last 6 months.

1. Launch early and let your users tell you what they want.

This is pretty much straight out of the lean development playbook, which we have followed unwaveringly. In a nutshell this means that we spent very little time developing our initial product. We launched within three months (and we were only working four hours a day at that point).

We got immediate feedback from our early users who all agreed on one thing – they weren’t interested in using the site how we’d originally thought they would. All of our initial assumptions were wrong. We thought that there would be a huge demand for a web space where you could go online, choose a discussion topic from a list, prepare for your conversation before hand, find someone to who wanted to talk about the same thing, and then sit down and have a no frills conversation exchange (in Spanish and English) for 30 minutes. Nope.

Turns out instead that people want to make small talk before they ever move on to bigger and broader topics. However, they do want to practice writing about these topics in the language they are learning, and receive feedback from native speakers. This knowledge helped us quickly build an launch our Writing Club, which has remained one of our most popular features.

The three things that we have focused on are:

1. Not worrying about problems until they are problems (i.e don’t fix it if it ain’t broke).
2. Doing the minimal amount of work at every stage of the development process, then waiting for user feedback.
3. Putting ourselves in a position where we can respond to any issue or idea quickly and efficiently. We did this when the pirates attacked us.

2. Having a product or a service to sell beats the hell out of hoping to make money on advertising.

We recently launched our first product, TOEFL Tips and Strategies eBook. In the last 48 hours we’ve made more money selling the TOEFL eBook than we usually make in two weeks of advertising with Google Adsense.

As David Heinemeier Hansson said on a recent 37signals podcast “Having a price is pretty good for getting profits. You have customers, they pay money for a product or service, and you get profits. That works for us.”

3. “You should think a little more about your SEO and viral strategy rather than depending on your slacker friends.”

We knew next to nothing about SEO when we launched our site, thus prompting the above quote from a friend of ours. Oh, that’s not to say that we didn’t have a plan, because we did. Our plan: Get all of our friends with blogs to link to us with the keywords we wanted, and set the title of our site to match these keywords (in our case ‘Practice Spanish Online’). We figured that would get us on the first page of search results within a couple of weeks of launching.

To anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of SEO strategies the above plan will seem absolutely laughable. We’ve fortunately come a long way since then, and have seen our SEO goals come to fruition as we have moved onto the first page for all of the terms we want to be hitting on, and are in the top three for our primary term (Practice Spanish Online).

We have even started offering SEO consulting services to bloggers who are more interested in writing, and less interested in the technical stuff.

4. Take advantage of living in the future.

“In the age of the all encompassing “Cloud” you no longer need things like your own servers, or an office full of people to get shit done. Instead we looked to the web for solutions to all of the challenges we faced.

One word – outsourcing. Websites like eLance and 99designs connected us with designers and programmers from around the world, and allowed us to outsource the work that we couldn’t do ourselves. At one point in time I was coordinating profile page design with a guy in Taiwan while Natalie was messaging with a team in Romania that was doing the HTML & CSS for our homepage. All this was done while sipping coffee in the comforts of our apartment in Colombia.”

The two paragraphs above are from an article I wrote for Matador five months ago. Not only are we still die hard believers that you don’t need an office we have continued to prove that you can coordinate your project from anywhere in the world. Whether it be outsourcing the development of a Flash voice recorder to Romania, hiring a personal assistant in Pakistan, or connecting with advisors and educators in the United States, France and Argentina, we have been able to connect with the people we need to connect with while sitting in our garden office and feasting on fresh tamales and fruit juice.

Part of the reason is that Google Analytics, although a great tool, doesn’t let us see a lot of the numbers that we want to see. And, because Lenguajero is built on top of Google App Engine diving into our own data is not as easy as it should be, or would be if we were on another technical platform. We have put off doing this for far too long, but after a few hours of data diving we have some better numbers, specifically on our member demographics.

Lenguajero has 4200 members. There is almost a 50-50 split between English and Spanish learners. (In our interview we estimated 5500 members. This number was given in good faith and based on our returning visitors stats from Google Analytics.)

Here is the age breakdown of members:

And here is the country breakdown of members:

We are building the user fidelity and recency charts now, and will update this post with those charts as soon as we have them.

Month four has been quite a bit different from the first three months. Instead of focusing on the short term, we have started to think about where we want the site to be in 6 months or a year, and have started to take steps to reach those goals. This means that there were less features introduced this month, and that we received less publicity. However, that does not mean that we didn’t have a few great moments this month.

• Traffic was down almost 9% against month three. However, this was mainly due to the two huge days of publicity that we had received during month three. Without those publicity spikes, or numbers stayed fairly steady averaging around 750-800 visits per day.

• We made $118 this month, which is a 33% improvement over month three. This is mainly due to affliate sales, as our adsense earnings dropped from approximately $95 dollars to $70 dollars.

• On the advertising note, we moved our advertising platform to google admanger to ensure that we are able to easily serve a variety of ads quickly and efficiently. Admanager also allows us to specifically target ads to users based on profile criteria. Currently we are only targeting ads based on which learning language and geography.

• After listening to feedback from students in a university Spanish course, in which Lenguajero had been included in the curriculum, and talking with the course professor, we made a fundamental long term decision to start working on tools to integrate Lenguajero into the classroom. We developed a beta version of Lenguajero – Classroom Edition, and are currently offering it for free for the next six months. As I mentioned above, this is a big strategic shift for us, and we hope to get lots of university and college professors signed up and trying it out. The more feedback the better!

• We launched the beginning of a series of conversation guides that we will be publishing in order to help Lenguajero members make the most out of their conversation exchanges. The conversation guides are available in .pdf format so that they can be used online, or printed off for face-to-face conversation exchanges.

We recently had the opportunity to ask the students of Professor Munday’s class what their experiences had been like on Lenguajero, and whether they felt that it integrated well with their classroom learning environment. Here are a few of the comments we received.

• Lenguajero ties in great to the classroom since I am in conversational Spanish, and talking with natives is a sure way to improve my Spanish. ~ Jennifer
• In general my overall experience was good. I made a really good friend and we talk as much as we can. I have found many people who are willing to talk and the site is easy to use. ~ Laura
• So far my experience on Lenguajero has been good. It was not hard at all to find someone to converse with, everyone is very eager to chat and learn. The quality of my calls are overall good. ~ Natasha

Encouraged by these positive responses, and by our own belief that we can offer a fantastic set of tools to Spanish and English classrooms around the world we have begun work on a new site feature, Lenguajero Classroom Edition.

This tool set will make it easy for college and university professors to integrate Lenguajero into their class curriculum. The free beta version, which will be ready for testing before month’s end, will allow teachers to:

• Create an account which can be linked to any number of students’ accounts
• Monitor how often and for how long students are having conversations
• Review and monitor students’ Writing Club submissions

We are really excited to be working on this, and want to hear from you. If you are interested in trying out the beta version of this program you can sign up here. If you  have any questions or comments, or if you would like to see other features included in this feature please contact us at august@lenguajero.com