Back in the game
Earlier this year, on May 6th to be exact, I announced that my startup, Lenguajero.com, was done for. Finished. Finito. Terminado.
This announcement came after couple of very tormented months, during which time I tried in vain to either increase revenue or drastically increase traffic. I needed something to justify continuing to work on a project that I loved, but that was generating almost no revenue. Nothing seemed to work, and I was so frustrated with myself and the site that I did something cowardly. I wrote a post-mortem, and then I just walked away.
I puttered around on other projects trying to figure out what my next steps should be. I dedicated a few months to learning to code (still learning). I tried launching a few new sites (most of them flamed out without anyone taking notice), and I kept searching for “the next big idea”.
Finally, about a month ago, I started to realize that perhaps I had given up too soon. Despite spending almost no time on it, Lenguajero’s traffic had been holding steady and the community had passed the 10,000 member mark sometime in September. I started spending a lot more time on the site. I updated some existing features, and built some new ones as part of my learning-to-code adventure. I also started feeling genuine joy to be working on the site again.
But, to continue to justify working on Lenguajero it had to start making more money than it was. Lenguajero needed to sell something.
Now, this seems like an obvious choice for a website that wants to make money. As David Heinemeier Hansson puts it “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.”
The problem was I had never come up with a good idea for a product or service to sell on the site. This time around I wanted to try something basic. Instead of building something complicated that was based on our free community (i.e. a freemium service), I decided to write two guides about something I know about, and something our users care about, learning Spanish slang.
Since slang is something that is very country specific I decided to write about Spanish in Spain, and Spanish in Mexico. I also wanted to include more than just translations and examples of using Spanish slang. I wanted to write something that would give travelers a better understanding of the culture they would experience when traveling to these countries. I decided to base the guides on four loose subjects:
- The history of the Spanish language in each country
- Modern slang with definitions and examples on how to use it
- Books, movies, and music that would be help people improve their Spanish, and better understand the slang from the section above.
- A brief look at the food in each country (mainly because I love food).
It took about a week to write each guide. Since I’m not a native Spanish speaker I also didn’t want to be the authority on Spanish slang. Luckily, working on Lenguajero, and living in Latin America for the past couple of years, meant I had lots of friends who could help me out. Laura (Spain) and Jorge (Mexico) helped edit the slang in the guides. It took me a couple more days to design the layouts in InDesign, finish the cover design, and then get the books converted into a format that could be uploaded to the Amazon Kindle Store.
I set the price of the guides low ($4.95) and sent out an email to our Spanish learning members on Sunday night, hoping that the low price and the email blast would drive a good number of sales starting on Monday morning. So far it’s been a great response, and a really high conversion rate from the email (the past 24 hrs has netted 4x more than a normal month of ad sales).
There are quite a few steps I need to take to make this a perpetual passive income channel. First, I need to do some A/B testing on the price once this initial sales drive from the email is over. I had considered doing it on the initial email, but wanted all of our members to have the chance to get a guide for a low price. The second thing I want to do is drive enough sales on the Kindle to rank on the first page of search results for the term ‘Spanish’. And finally, I’ll be working to develop other country-specific guides (Costa Rica, Argentina, Colombia and the Caribbean are all on the list), that are a little more niche than the first two.
Of course the end goal of all of this is to generate enough revenue that I can continue to work part-time on building Lenguajero. While I don’t think that Lenguajero will ever turn into an enormous community like LiveMocha or Busuu, I feel confident that there is still a place for a small community of Spanish and English learners on the web. I’ll keep working towards building that community. This time with a little more patience and a few more ‘Notification of payment received’ emails popping up in my inbox.
