I received an email from August, one half of the Leguajero team, last week drawing my attention to his site. I took a look and loved the idea straight off the bat and as I explored the site further I was impressed with the professionalism and function of the thing. Here is a short interview I did with him that will hopefully give a bit of insight into what’s involved in taking an idea and molding it into a great website.
What is Lenguajero and why did you decide to build it?
Lenguajero is a website 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.
We were living in Medellin, Colombia, and had been studying Spanish for a few months. We were getting to the stage where our Spanish was really starting to take off, that is, we were starting to feel comfortable speaking the language.
It was around this point in time that Natalie pointed out that, despite the thousands of language learning websites out there, none of them were focusing specifically on connecting Spanish and English learners with one another for conversation exchanges. Given how much spending time everyday speaking with native speakers had helped in our own learning process, we thought that there was real potential for this type of site. Since we had our laptops with us we thought, “What the hell, let’s give it a try and see if we can build something useful.”
How did you come up with the name?
Coming up with a name was one of the hardest things we had to do. First, we wanted it to be catchy and very targeted to what we were doing. Second, and more challenging, we needed it to still be available. Everytime we had a good idea we would WHOIS the URL and find out that it was already taken.
One day I was walking down the street in Quito, and the name just popped into my head. It isn’t a real word, but it is sort of a play on words in Spanish. A viajero is some one who travels. An extranjero is a foreigner. A lenguajero seems to be a mashup of a viajero, extranjero, and language learner. And, since I just invented the word, the domain was available!
Why did you decided to spend a year living in Latin America?
Both Natalie and I have been blessed to have the opportunity to individually spend a lot of time backpacking around the world. The experiences that we have had doing this have influenced our lives in a number of ways. However, one thing that neither of us had ever done was live in a foreign country and really learn to speak a foreign language.
We decided that we were getting 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.
What are some challenges you faced building a website while living in Latin America?
Surprisingly, we didn’t face any challenges that were unique to us living in Latin America. If anything this experience has highlighted for us just how flat the world has become. Instead of having a bunch of our own hardware and an office full of employees we have taken advantage of the almighty “Cloud”
We built the website on the google app engine which eliminated the need for any of our own hardware (except for our two beat-to-hell laptops), and nicely bundled all the development tools we needed to get the site up and running fast.
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.
Did you have any experience with this sort of thing (HTML, site design, programming etc) or did you just work it all out as you went?
If I have one piece of advice for anyone who is thinking of doing something similar it is this – Bring a code monkey with you (they like to be called developers). Fortunately, Natalie, or mi mono de codigo as I call her, just so happens to fit the bill. With five years of experience working at Amazon.com she is as skilled a developer as they come. While I am virtually useless when it comes to the coding side of things I had spent the last 8 months before our trip working as a project manager for a software development firm, and had learned a lot from that experience.
Did you have to use much of your own money to get this thing off the ground… or investors… or were the costs minimal?
We have funded Lenguajero entirely on our own. That said, costs have been pretty minimal so far. We spent just over $1000 dollars on the original design and HTML work, and that was our only pre-launch expense. Since launching we have spent about $100 advertising with Google adwords, and are going through another round of design work right now that will probably end up costing about another $1000 dollars. That’s it.
Is it your intention to eventually be making a living by running this site? If so, how do you plan on monetising it?
Working on Lenguajero has really highlighted for both of us just how much we want to continue working for ourselves and avoided the dreaded 9-5 work world. Our goal is to get Lenguajero to a point where it could be paying one or both of us enough to continue working and traveling.
We have a couple of ideas for increasing our revenue. One, we are working on developing some new site features that we may bundle into a “premium membership” package. Users would then pay a few dollars a month to have access to these extra features. Another option would be an (or many) affiliates program with companies that sell learning material to English and Spanish speakers. The main site feature, conversation exchanges, will always be free to our members.
Hi,
I’m Natalie from Lenguajero. Maybe you guys have some advice for our next steps. Here are some of our current challenges.
1. Reading Kirsty’s previous post about monthly earnings was inspiring. We’ve earned about $60 in the previous month. ($6 Amazon affiliates, $25 sold article, $29 Google ad words). So hopefully there is nowhere to go but up. Anyone have any advice about affiliate programs?
2. Related – any advice on how to monetize non-USA users? Half of our traffic is from Latin America. We have a lot of Google Ad words clicks but clicks from South America are worth a lot less.
3. Any feedback on the website?
Thanks Kirsty!
Natalie
i found a partner for a weekly hourly spanish conversation via skype on craigslist. i just put an ad on a big SA CL, got many replies and picked a very nice person who reads the articles i send her in preparation. payment is through paypal. so i´m good. nice site design though..
Nice site. I think the site could work well with other languages. Japanese/Chinese for instance. Maybe you could license the technology to someone?
Nice interview as well as nice cite have you talking about. Regarding language i like it.
Nice site and great idea. If you read through recent posts here lately, you’ll realize you need links. The fact that you are using Google app engine might make it easier to get publicity through TechCrunch, Mashable and the like. I would play up the whole ‘Cloud’ angle when approaching them. Also I think your personal story, location, shoe string start-up may work to your benefit. Submit to Killer Start-ups as well since they have a fair amount of reach.
I would try to get publicity rather than burning money on Adsense. Adsense is not the way to try and buy your way out of chicken and egg situation. Adsense on a zero payout conversion is what puts people out of business fast.
You might want to try craigslist and the like to gain some ground for a while. I think you might get a good take-up from CL. You will need to figure out how to post to multiple cities on CL.
As far as monetizing South Americans. I think that is swimming up-stream. I think you need to think like a bar on ladies night. Get the ladies in there free and the guys (Americans) will be willing to pay. Ok, maybe that’s a bit blatantly one-sided, but you need to focus on North Americans if you want to make money or even break even.
With that in mind, be prepared for hard road as monetizing is way harder than building something cool even if it is the best thing since sliced bread. And just to reiterate. You need links, lots and lots of links.
You will need to use guerrilla tactics, and be prepared for a long struggle to reach success. Good luck, and I hope it’s easier than what laid out.
Wow! Very impressive indeed. I second “Language Dude” – you have a unique site so try the startup angle. Write off to magazines and publications too. Encourage the people you have currently signed up to spread the word to their friends either via a prize draw/competition or through an awards programme. The sky’s the limit – I wish you the very best!
Haha! I like Language Dude’s opinion about it. And I pretty much agree. The Internet markets in Latin America aren’t as evolved as in other places: people are a lot less willing to grab a credit card and pay for something. And if they see the bill being charged in dollars, they automatically think is too expensive.
As far as more monetization ideas, I’d hop in LiveMocha.com. Seems to be quite a similar service, although I think yours is a lot more focused and should stay that way for a while. EN-SP-EN services seem to be the most profitable niche out there — although I could be wrong.
However, if you do consider expanding your services in the future, I think Brazilian Portuguese would be a natural choice. Similar markets, expanding infra-structure throwing new broadband users everyday on the internet. And, btw, I’m Brazilian.
Best of luck,
Diogo
Thanks for the feedback!
We aren’t using Google ad sense anymore. At launch, we naively thought that we could use it to fine-tune the level of english and spanish speakers online. (Eg. there are 10 english speakers and 0 spanish speakers today – run an ad). Instead what we’ve learned is that pulling spanish speakers to the site is cheap and english-speakers is way too expensive. Lesson learned.
If this proves successful we’ll think of other languages. Since spanish is the #1 learned language by english-speakers, at least Americans then there is some balance in the community (even if it’s 2:1, it’s not 30:1). I think we’ll lose that balance if we go to another language.
It’s my dream to be featured in TechCrunch.
Vamos a ver.
I think that is swimming up-stream. I think you need to think like a bar on ladies night. Get the ladies in there free and the guys will be willing to pay. Ok, maybe that’s a bit blatantly one-sided, but you need to focus on North Americans if you want to make money or even break even…..
Natalie – after realizing I met you and August in line for a tango show in Medellin earlier in the year, I revisited this interview and saw all the comments.
I agree with Language Dude’s feedback.
It might take awhile to monetize the site, but if you’re passionate about it, the effort won’t feel like work at all. I can say this after almost years of being a WordPress addict.
Speaking of links to your site, I just added one at http://MedellinLiving.com and will also add one at http://GoBackpacking.com
Regards!
August, Lenguajero……? my mind not functioning to well in the morning, it went directly to what is Kirsty going on about? rather than read any further I found the link and clicked through.
Then Wow what a great looking site it looks awesome and instantly I got what the site was about, this in itself is a big plus….. back to the article “now I knew what I’m reading about.
I love the idea the site the name the feel all is good, I would never have guessed it was new with little traffic, after reading the article & comments and then taking a look at the site again…….
I would suggest that you forget anything that remotely goes within 500 miles of monetization for a while, plough all your efforts in to creating natural traffic. I believe the site has the making’s of a mega site maybe not a Facebook or a twitter but the next level down. Your efforts at monetizing will in my opinion impede the growth of this site in a way that is unimagineable sticking the adsense on the site “particularly on the home page” makes it just another site.
I would go look at Facebook & the likes & see what they are doing & model your selfs on the route they have taken.
If you must monetize it now! you could promote one single quality product
Say a Rosetta stone product 2-3 clicks deep.
Good luck
I forgot
re other languages……..
You have chosen the biggest market in this domain, if the site like I believe it could do, becomes huge you wont need anything else diluting it in any way would be a sin.
Ask Goldfish Care – Thanks!! I really appreciate the feedback and the advice. We don’t need to monetize now but we will by the end of November. We’re trying to get a feel for what is possible and what isn’t. I think we’ll take your homepage advice. Thanks for putting it so bluntly.
Dave – The world is so small. I totally remember you. I miss Medellin.
tiffany – That’s the perfect analogy