Launched on Reddit and it's becoming a disaster
Ok, so I was super excited to launch linguaso.com on Reddit today and I was wondering how well it would go.
Will people from r/languagelearning subreddit enjoy the tool I've been building for so long? I guess we won't know about it today, cause the post has only 2 upvotes and just a comment (at least is super positive!).
Here's the post.
I prepared a video, I wrote the message quite some days ago, refined it, but nothing.
My guess is that the post is not being checked and got lost in the "New" tab...oh dear. If only some caritative Reddit users would upvote it, but how to do it? I'm not going to spam this at all.
So, I decided to cry a little bit and create a funny banner of myself reacting to the Reddit launch. Not really mad or sad at this, anyway, this has just started and I'm happy to have overcome the fear of launching.
¡Saludos y feliz día!
Upvoted.
This is a mistake I've made tens of times haha. We always worry about negative comments or an app crashing, but most posts and soft launches really amount to crickets.
If you're looking for feedback, there's a route that's much more difficult for us devs, but way more effective: Reach out to users manually. This is what marketers harp on us about: do things that don't scale, find your initial users one by one.
You can look at past posts in the subreddit that your app relates to, then find comments that look like they're more related, and direct message those people. Instead of posting about your app, you could post about the problem it solves, see who responds, and reach out to them.
It's still tedious, you're still likely to get few responses, but it often gets you a direct channel to a few people with legitimate feedback if you do it enough.
This is great advise, Andrew, and actually something I've been doing for the past 2 weeks. If you check my comments history you can see that I've been contacting people 1-to-1 through Reddit comments. I'll keep doing that in this and other platforms.
I'm using a tool called Syften for it, BTW, that helps you monitor some topics from Reddit (and others) so you can reply to these comments and posts. It's being quite helpful for this task.
Thanks for the upvote and for the shared insights, Andrew!
Ah, glad to know I'm preaching to the choir! haha
I know I should be doing it, but struggle to take my own advice. Just mentioned syften to my cofounder - we might have to give it a try!
Reddit has very short-term memory and it definitely can be a hit or miss. I remember launching a product once and it gets removed by the mods. I released it after a week during a different time and it ended up getting like 800 upvotes. Don't worry! I'd also not directly link the video because most reddit users are from the phone and they hate clicking links which takes them out of their app. Instead, describe your story in the description and add the link to the end of the text and try launching again.
Yes, I know that Reddit can be arbitrary. Regarding what you say about the post, the video was embedded, not an external link, and at least from the app it plays directly in it; but I'll totally investigate and play around with other formats like the one you say.
Thanks so much for taking time to reply and for your insights!
Love the idea! Did you also launch on other platforms (like Product Hunt)?
Hey Max, nope, not yet. This is kind of a soft launch and I want to prepare the site better for a hard launch. Also, my plan is to have at least a little community so I can let them know about the PH launch.
I want to be more active in that community before launching, too.
Makes sense. We at Algoly (data stream builder) are currently also preparing for a launch on Product Hunt and try to do exactly the same thing (community building etc.). We hadn't considered launching on other platforms before so thanks for sharing your experience! (By now it seems like it's not so unsuccessful after all?)
Yay! It hit the IH trending tab and it's being funny to see, when I'm checking other posts here, my face playing the fool in the bottom posts xD
Good luck with your launch on PH, and as many have told here, don't worry and see it as a unique opportunity, you'll have lots of them to share the value of your product!
Upvoted in the hopes it will still help somehow. Great job with everything, and don't let this bring you down. You could always re-post and keep building awareness around this.
Thanks so much, really appreciated!
I'll do that, will re-post it after some time and post it too to other more specific language subreddits where it may get noticed more easily.
And nope, this won't bring me down. I'm actually prepared for a not-easy path on marketing the app. This just was a great example of how competitive is the attention market and to always keep seeking for one's place.
Again, thanks so much for the upvote and your kind words!
Love the mindset, and your general tone!
I'd like to extend a hand, and help a bit further. I'm a Brand Strategist & Designer. You're welcome to pick my brain on the topic of branding anytime. No strings attached. I might be able to provide some insight if branding is something you're considering and working on. Find me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardbuta/
I've worked with a designer that created the logo, the mascot and the design system, so the brand is quite consistent already (I think); however, I may ping you some time in the future for some consultancy. Already added you to LinkedIn. Thanks for all, Eduard!
Anytime! Drop by and say hello whenever. I'm always up for a friendly chat.
And keep in mind branding isn't just about design. The visual expression of a brand is only a small part of it, done once all the underlying systems have been defined. You've got to first know who you are, who your audience is, how to communicate with them and how to make your brand latch onto their minds through the characteristics you want. If you don't know all these, how will you know what to design successfully? Design, in the end, is focused on achieving solutions with measurable results. Hope this helps in any way ✌️
I can tell why it wasn’t popular.
The title is impersonal, wordy, and reads exactly like an advertisement. Any regular user of Reddit will gloss over your post before they’ve finished reading the title. Call it a “launch”, but this looks exactly like a cheap attempt at free advertising.
Next time, try making it more casual. How would you show this to your mom?
“Website with thousands of YouTube videos with subtitles and a real time dictionary to immerse yourself easily into a language.”?
Obviously not. Something like this is much better:
“I had trouble learning [language] so I built this website! It combines thousands of subtitled YouTube videos and a dictionary to make language immersion easier. Check it out!”
Sounds fair and I liked your rewording. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts, William.
I can't get any engagement on Reddit so far... so don't feel left out.
IMO, Reddit is a tricky beast to tame - you can't sell, you can't promote, yet you have to cut through all that somehow.
What gets upvoted or downvoted on Reddit is 100% controlled by admins. Don't get upset, just realize that marketing is about hustling and there are no easy hits (until you really understand things)
When new posts get massively upvoted or downvoted within minutes, that's usually a moderator that has god-like promotion/demotion privs. There is your red pill of the day
Yo! This seems to be more of a copywriting / marketing problem.
I may be on a different side of things, but I could care less about "a launch." Haha. Most small businesses (outside of tech) don't focus heavily on a launch. They focus on consistent marketing, refining their niche, and serving their customer. So - stop worrying about launching. I have 1 SAAS business doing about $20,000 a month, an enterprise solution doing about $5k a month, an agency doing around $50k throughout the year, and I'm putting out another SAAS this month projected to do atleast another $100k throughout the year. I never "launched" anything. Just made it live, ran traffic to it over time so I could refine it.
The subject is very long and is neither selling a "transformation" for a customer, nor is garnering any shock value to get them to stop scrolling. Your entire subject is to simply get them to read the next sentence.
It's posted in a language learning subreddit. While it seems like an obvious fit, you are actually putting yourself in direct competition with everyone else who's launching a product through there. This is the "red ocean" defined in Blue Ocean Strategy.
Your differentiation isn't what is being learned. It's HOW it's being learned. You're meeting the consumer where they're at. That's AWESOME.
Sell that. And speak to them how THEY want to be spoken to. Like you're grabbing a drink with them. lol.
IDEAS:
Find a place where you have no competition. Serve a market that thinks it would be fun and hasn't seen anything like it. Go for funny/shock value.
Find some big youtubers / trendy videos (a few years ago, the "Damn Daniel" guy haha.) Post in a subreddit talking about those Youtubers.
Post as the founder and don't take yourself seriously. Just say "I was bored one night and built an app so I could learn how to speak Portuguese through Damn Daniel. lol." or you can make a fake account and be like "holy shit you can learn how to speak Russian through watching Cardi B vids 🤣 #2021 anything is possible now."
Guarantee lots more people will reach out. Turn it into a meme and people catch on to "ohhhh... you know what... this is pretty cool,. im going to actually seriously check this out."
Hope all is well!
The same exact thing happened to me - well, actually worse - I ended up banned from a few communities because I misunderstood the self-promotion rules of some of them. Be warned! Many communities you can't even advertise something you've built even when it has a generous free-forever tier! Go figure, it's reddit 🙄
Sure! I have been subscribed to this subreddit for months and I've seen similar posts to the one I posted. Also read the rules.
In some subreddits, for example, you're only allowed to post self-promotion projects on some specific days, like r/webdev where you can just post on Saturdays using the flair Showoff Saturday.
Hi Mikel,
How much does your app cost? What is your revenue model?
I wouldn't worry about the launch. Redditors have no money. Redditors are clustered in lower socieconomic groups. (Yes there are all kinds of people on Reddit, but they're mostly broke.)
Reddit can send you a lot of traffic if you're lucky, but traffic from Reddit does not convert. Do not rely on them for anything. Target people who have money and a pressing need for your product.
Try online communities for expats in various countries. Internationally mobile professionals. Exchange students. Chinese students in the USA or Europe. There are also people who want to learn languages for religious reasons, or to get in touch with a heritage that they lost. Target highly motivated and solvent customers!
Do SEO and content marketing aimed these people to get a steady flow of signups long term.
Thanks so much for your insights, Evan.
My model is a freemium but at this point I've launched just the free part. I'm planning a premium package: 90 days of immersion plan for ~20 bucks. Expandable to a full year for another 30$.
The expat communities is something I had already considered so glad you saw that, too. Actually, there are many people, millions of students, that are trying to learn languages, that's why there are so many players in the market and some of them being that big (Duolingo, Bussuu, etc.)
An unrelated question. We are building something similar, but we are having problems with copyrights, so we are forced to pay or create our own content. How do you solve it for your app?
Hey, that's a good question, Artem.
We have 2 different items we need to consider here:
The videos. In our case, we use YouTube videos and there's no copyright issues on showing them embedded in our site. The only thing we need to do is to comply with their Terms of Use. For example, I had to adapt the UX of the site because initially we were showing the subtitles above the video itself, but this is something that YouTube doesn't approve.
The dictionary. There are some free-to-use resources out there you can use without breaking any copyright. Wiktionary is one of the ones we use. You have also the Oxford Dictionaries API that is a paid one but not too expensive, I'm planning to add it to improve some of the terms definitions and examples.
Hope this helps, please let me know if I can help with anything else. I've seen that you have this app for learning Lithuanian; tested the player and it's great!
Thanks, I didn't know you could use YouTube videos, I should check them out.
Many of our users came from teachers, I think you should look into this channel.
Yes, totally. Great insight. I checked and there are many interesting platforms for language teachers online. I may try to collaborate with any of them to reach their teachers and students. Another option that I considered was to spend some money on 1-on-1 teaching lessons and use that time to talk about the project (and improve my language skills in the meantime :D)
Great idea!
Don't sweat it too much. Refine your message a bit and launch again! I like this video from startup school. It really changed my perspective about launching https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-to-launch-again-and-again.
Also one thing to note, a big launch is just the beginning and little to do with the success of your product. I had what one might consider a fantastic launch 5 years ago. Front page of hacker news for several hours, featured on a you-tube channel, and lots of up votes on product hunt. But then I did absolutely nothing after that. My product has since died off. So I've learned the hard way, that even the best of launches won't carry you through the years. Have to keep working at it! You can read more in-depth about my launch on my blog .
This is great advice and something I was totally considering myself. I'm going to check the video you shared, it looks interesting just with its title!
Thanks for sharing your story, too. It's interesting to know how a great launch can affect (or not) in the long run.
Why someone like to learn a new language ? From where do the need arises from ?
It's all about communication and sharing. Learning a language opens the door to communicating with millions of people that use it in their everyday lives.
Hey Mikel!
First, congrats on your launch!
As a person who tried to successfully advertise something on Reddit for the past 2 years, I can say that it's really hard, nearly impossible to do it (especially if you aren't an active member in the subreddit you are trying to sell your product).
The paradox is:
Reddit is not a good place for self-promotion, the mods are often banning users who self-promote themselves in their subreddits, but the people are on Reddit for sharing and gaining knowledge and value.
But, I can proudly say that I've "hacked the system".
Reddit users don't want to see self-promotion posts, but are really open to getting a private message with something that may bring them a value.
Few days ago, we've released Howitzer - a marketing tool for Reddit, made for Entrepreneurs, Startups and Indie Hackers!
It works in 2 simple steps:
It's still in the early release stage (released to our presubscribers only), but the numbers are great!
We've measured 40-45% response rate, and a decent conversion rate.
I believe that Howitzer will solve your problem with advertising your product on Reddit.
Check it out, and tell me what you think!
https://howitzer.co/
Hey! Yeees, I saw your post yesterday on IH and I thought, wow, this sounds super interesting!
I may use this in the future, but I was thinking about some kind of semi-automated way of doing it. Extracting users' information is super interesting to me, but regarding sending them automatic messages...I want to be more cautious cause I myself don't like receiving automated messages, so I'm a bit hesitant in that aspect. I need to assess it yet.
In any case, the app looks amazing, the landing page is great and super clean and I think this can be super useful. Congrats!
Thank you very much, Mikel!
Yes, sending automated messages can be a hassle, but if you do it with precaution, you may execute great marketing strategies.
My "cold messaging" strategy is this:
Also, the process of of extracting user information may guarantee you that you won't target random users, but you'll target only the Reddit users who would be potentially interested in your product.
However, If you have any questions, want to discuss about Howitzer, or generally about Reddit marketing, feel free to email me, at: [email protected]
Bro this is a sub with 400k members. To get on the front page it probably needs a few tries and being active on the subreddit really helps.
Yes, I actually expected that a single try was probably not enough. However, I didn't know that being active in the subreddit itself helped with the exposition of my posts; I'm more active in some language-specific subreddits (French and Spanish) so I may take a chance on those before posting to the big one.
Thanks for sharing your insights, Nikola.
Hi Mikel, love this post because I've been there haha the struggle is real!
I checked out your website and I LOVE the concept, and execution is neat.
I wanted to flag that on my screen (I'm using an HP laptop), the "featured vocabulary" card is hidden behind the "Watch video" banner - is that on purpose? Another feedback is I'd love to know how/why the videos are selected - e.g. do they each focus on a specific topic? My use case is my Spanish is a bit rusty and I'd especially like to review my conjugation - are some videos especially recommended for that?
This is great feedback, Delphine. Thanks!
Again, thanks for your comment, really appreciated.
Also checked your project, it looks super clean, amazing design. Congrats on the MVP!
Nice project! I had some similar ideas before, but kind of loose interest to build language learning tools in the end :).
Also I see 37 upvotes already so things are going well!
Lol! Yes, building something around languages is not easy, lots of them, lots of different needs and very complex and subjective areas, actually. I saw that you had this Get Tandem project some time ago, nice idea. Doing Tandem is great, I've done it some times and I loved it.
And yes, finally it surpassed the 50 votes. Not a huge deal but enough to feel happier with the post. IH community really helped, so I'm super grateful!
Oh, and I checked your book's landing page, Josef, and I loved that you use a mascot (Tiger aka Meow, who loves following mice on Twitter) xD
I kind of realized it would be difficult to charge money on language learning, but who knows, there are projects that work :).
Thanks for the kind words!
Upvoted. Just keep going!
Thanks so much, Miha!
Congratulations! You have my upvote too. I hope the soft launch will be successful in your own measure.
Great work with site, video and post!
I am preparing to ship in the next couple of weeks and this post made me realize how hard this will be 😀 I don’t have any audience, so will start in a similar way.
Thanks for sharing your post 💪
Hey Piotr, thanks so much!
Yes, now that I'm launching this project I'm seeing how difficult it is to compete in the attention market. The good thing is that it becomes a super interesting challenge.
Please feel free to ping me when you launch your project so I can give it some love! The initial upvotes probably can make a great difference.
Congrats on the launch! Any love for German in near future?
+1 upvote from me
Thanks so much for the upvote Giorgi!
Yes! German is the next language that will get added. My little niece is half-german and I'm planning to start learning German in the next few months, so totally in the roadmap.
It happens! I've created apps that I thought were really cool that totally tanked on some channels. Life is a fickle. Onwards. :)
+1 to that!
Congratulations on the launch. If you can articulate what problem linguaso solves, you can create a post for that in my problem validation platform.
If you do, Please make sure that the post contains only the problem and in the comment explain how linguaso solves that problem in detail with your product link (Contribution guidelines has further details).
There has been few language related problems earlier in my platform e.g. Teach me vocabulary without spending extra time and those who posted their solutions for that have seen good conversions. (Note: linguasa doesn't seem to be addressing this problem).
You have a super cool platform, but it just pissed me off seriously. I have put a lot of effort typing in the description only to have it lost because I didn't have at least 30 characters in the title. You could add just one line of javascript code to prevent me from submitting the form.
Uh no! It's supposed restore the problem title and description in case of an error (happens automatically in FF, uses session storage in Chrome) but there was an issue with how the session storage was handled when title was not loaded in time.
It's been fixed now and You shouldn't be facing this error again. Thanks for bringing it to my notice.
Ok, no problem, this stuff happens to all of us.
It would be more user friendly if I knew about the 30-char lower limit in advance and didn't have to count my chars manually ))
You're correct, There's character count alert for maximum characters but there needs to be one for minimum too. It will be added soon, thanks.
Sounds interesting and needgap looks like a cool idea! Will make a post there, I think I can gain some insights. Thanks!
Have you checked when the people are most active on the particular subreddit? I used the site "Later for Reddit" for that and our Reddit launch went well.
Obviously it's not the only factor but timing is important!
Yes, I used a similar service that stated that the best time was around 3 pm (Spanish timezone). I actually posted it earlier and considered the US timezone and when they start to wake up to post it. But yes, probably will need to refine the posting date/time and the tool you sent seems very complete.
Thanks, Aleks!