R.I.P. iSimplifiedChinese

Jun 30, 2011 20:51


Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

It’s been a great experience and experiment, but it’s time to close this chapter. You can still play with the app, but you won’t get any feedback from teachers. Perhaps I will pivot the idea in the future, sell the underlying technology, we’ll see.


Back in March, I read Running Lean by Ash Maurya and I found it very actionable. In particular I focussed on figuring out why the download -> install -> first use -> second use conversions were so terribly low.

In the previous post I wrote that of every 100 people who download the app, about 50 actually run it. Only 10 submit a pronunciation and only 1 listenes to the feedback given by the teachers.

I wanted to talk to my users to find out what was going on, but how do I reach them? Apple won’t tell me who downloads my application. The good news is, as soon as they run the app, I can do whatever I want, including talking to the user. So I modified the application so that I could send it a push message and the user would see a popup message asking for their feedback (picture right). If they accepted it, they would be taken to their email client with a prefab email addressed to me (picture bottom).

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