Two Month Report
It’s been a busy second month for the Lenguajero team, although we will admit to packing our laptops and heading to Puerto Escondido for a week of part work/part beach bumming.
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
