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.

Over the last month we have continued to crank out new features, sign up new members, and promote our site. Here’s what was new in month two.

• One Sunday at the very beginning of month 2 we decided to sequester ourselves inside our apartment and crank out an entirely new feature, all in one loooong day. The new feature, The Writing Club, has been a huge success. Members write about daily topics in the language they are learning, and receive feedback from other members. We have had hundreds of submissions this month, and members have left thousands of comments and suggestions on writing submissions. My personal favorite has been the responses to the topic Zombies!! My favorite quote “Zombies are my worst nightmare so far! Sometimes I think if they were real, I will hide in a safety place, and I try to find weapons to combat him. The way to kill them is shooting in his head or decapitate.”

• We have been link building all month, and are starting to see some of the results of our hard work pay off. We have moved up to 6th place on our google search query position for the search term ‘Practice Spanish Online’, we are 9th for ‘Practice Spanish’ and FINALLY we are number 1 for the search term ‘Lenguajero’. It only took six weeks for google to stop asking me if I spelled lenguaje wrong.

• We redesigned our landing page (cost of the new landing page was $210)

• We built and implemented an entire flashcard program. Our flashcard program is an SRS system which is designed to help users efficiently memorize and retain vocabulary. This was the bulk of the month’s development and design work. Total design cost of the flashcard program was $650.

• We had some more coverage from, and guest posts on, travel blogs, language learning blogs, and tech blogs. Here are a few.

http://matadorabroad.com/5-steps-to-building-a-startup-while-living-in-latin-america/
http://www.nerdynomad.com/2009/09/03/interview-with-august-about-lenguajerocom
http://www.kirstenwinkler.com/first-look-at-lenguajero-com/
http://briefcasetobackpack.com/2009/09/culture-shock-language-barriers/

• Our traffic increased 61% over the first month.

• We are still running within our free limits on the google app engine, but just barely. I predict that we will cross that limit within the next 2-3 days.

• We have entered Startup Nation’s Home-Based 100 competition. Please vote for us as one of the 100 best homebased startups in America.

• We continue to earn wages of two to three cents per hour (although that is only if you don’t count the $860 dollar investment, in which case we have paid about $810 dollars to have the “privilege” of working on this project.) This is why you should vote for us in the above competition.

• We launched a facebook fan page. We post questions, updates, interesting links and videos, and new writing topics every 1-2 days.

We are enjoying hearing your feedback and are always looking for new ideas on how to make the site better. We are still working hard on developing new features, and will make some of them available soon. If you have any suggestions for the site either leave a comment here on the blog, or send me a message at august@lenguajero.com

Thinking of building a web startup? Doing it on the road is not just feasible; it might be less stressful and more fun, too.

Nine months ago my partner Natalie and I quit our jobs and left Seattle to follow our dream of learning Spanish and living for a year in Latin America. We never imagined that our trip would lead us to start our own company.

First, a quick and shameless plug so that you’ll know what we’re about.

Lenguajero is a homegrown startup that connects Spanish and English speakers for online language and culture exchange. In addition, we provide useful resources to learners of those two languages so that they can improve their ability to speak their new language.

Now, onto the fun stuff.

The following are the five steps we took to build a startup while traveling around Latin America.

1. Do what you love

That sounds pretty cliche, but we quit our jobs last year because we realized that we had come to one of those now or never moments. We had talked for years about living in Latin America and learning Spanish. We also talked about grad school, careers, and a family: all things that would make it infinitely more difficult to travel. Now was our chance and we were going to take it.

From our previous solo experiences we knew that following the backpackers circuit through Central and South America was not a good way to learn Spanish. (Last time I had tried that I’d ended up in a Nicaraguan jail facing a drug charge, and didn’t even know enough Spanish to bribe my way out of it.)

Instead, we decided that we would pick three or four Spanish speaking countries to live in, and would spend the year living out of apartments as opposed to hostels. This would allow us to make real friends and form real bonds within the communities we were visiting.

2. Spend a couple of months without internet

I’m starting to sound like a heretic I know, but seriously it’s possible. The trick to doing this is going somewhere where they don’t have internet.

Doesn’t exist, you say? Actually, there is a Spanish speaking country here in the western hemisphere – whose name I, as an American, am not going to mention here – that comes pretty close to being devoid of internet. – Read Full Article

The idea was to cram everything we owned into a storage unit and head out on the road, writes August Flanagan–co-founder of Spanish learning website Lenguajero.  The goal, learn Spanish.  The destination, Latin America.

View of Medellin from our apartment/office

From the beaches of Mexico to the mountains of Patagonia and everywhere in between, we were going to study Spanish, immerse ourselves in the rich and varying cultures of Latin America, and have an adventure.

It was this desire to master Spanish (and to have an adventure) that led us to Colombia and eventually to the city of Medellin. In addition to the country’s reputation for violence and cocaine, it has a reputation as being a country where the spoken Spanish is clear and easy to understand, the perfect place to learn the language.

With the drug war behind it, Medellin has transformed itself into a calm, modern city with a lot to offer, including better broadband than what we had back home in Seattle. We settled into the paisa culture, and with each passing day as we spoke Spanish with friends, acquaintances, and strangers on the street, we saw a transformation take place – we were beginning to really speak the language. It was in this context that our idea for a business took hold. Read Full Article

The Machines

Sony Vaio - our work horse, and she's only been dropped three times!

Dell Inspiron Mini 10 inch monitor, ubuntu OS, and only 2.9 pounds. Bought it just for this trip.

The whole get-up

Some things you can’t see in the photos.

1. The Sony Vaio has been dropped three times in the last year.  Both the sides are split away from the keyboard and the CD-ROM doesn’t work.
2. The Vaio has a small leaf behind the screen.  Woke up one day in Costa Rica and it was just there.  Not really sure how it happened… When the monitor is on you can see all the veins running through the leaf.  It is actually pretty cool.
3. The keyboard is a Spanish keyboard.  Even though my computer is set up for an English keyboard this is all I got, so the keys don’t all match up.
4. The background is our garden/office.  There are a couple of tables out here, lots of bright flowers, a grapefruit tree, and our own resident tucan who has schizophrenia.
5. It’s been amazing how well these computer have endured the elements.  Aside from bouncing their way along every rough road, while traveling through five countries, they have also endured three days strapped to the tops of our packs in the Colombian jungle.
6. True to our geeky nature we have substituted the normal traveler gear for hardware.  Traveling from Colombia to Mexico we ran out of room in our bags, and strapped the keyboards to the sides, just like most people would a tent.