The first birthday of LinguaLeo: results and a look into the future

Today LinguaLeo celebrates its first birthday! Late at night on March 1, 2010, the project team laid out the coveted release and the first mention of it. It was like a leap into the dark, because no one could predict the reaction of the first users to the unusual concept of learning English.

“We sat in our Thai house, watched the actions of the first visitors, read the reviews and enjoyed the moment of the first release ...”

The concept of “Jungle of English”, a convenient dictionary, training and Tamagotchi-Leo liked the people. Praised the interface that motivates game dynamics; scolded for bugs; offered over 500 development ideas for the first week. Many users asked for dubbing words - we found a decent supplier for turning the English text into speech and knocked out of it a discount on an eternal license. Then we chose the monetization model of the web service. In order to be able to use the service for free, we took as a basis the Freemium business model with virtual currency - meatballs. Created genres and collections for the Jungle of English.

Results of the 1st year of life LinguaLeo

• Over the year more than 90 thousand users registered on the site, 2/3 of them came on the recommendations of other users. 20 thousand have become active users of the service.
• We received 5178+ messages with ideas and suggestions for feedback , as well as 827 project development ideas and 686 comments per feature request page . Many of the ideas and wishes of users we have already implemented, and some will be implemented in the next releases.
• In May 2010, the team returned to Russia, the startup ran out of money, 6 months of inactivity began. On the other hand, we have time for respite and reflection.
• In November 2010 we found an investor on the “Start” entrepreneurial group and resumed work on the service. As a project developing in the style of a venture start-up, they used different opportunities for development: they won a competition for residency in the Strogino Technopark, performed on two crash tests, participated in the Skolkovo innovation contest and maintained contacts with a start-up party.
• In total for the year 12 planned releases and about 20 hot fixes were posted.
• The project server was not available 23 times a year during the calculations of releases, care in a swap due to bugs and overloads, the average uptime was 99%.
• We have seen that the concept of LinguaLeo, expressed in the 7 secrets of learning foreign languages , works hard and smoothly, thousands of users have made significant progress in mastering the English language, hundreds of them have written their success stories in our mail. On the network, we found several third-party applications for LinguaLeo (for example, an extension for Chrome and a word card printing service ). LinguaLeo has become for many people the embodiment of the possibility of an effective and fascinating mastering of a foreign language, has gone out of the early beta stage and continues to actively develop.

During the year of the service, users made 6 million 700 thousand translations of words, spent more than 350 thousand hours (39 years) on the service. And the most active 1000 users spent an average of more than 346 hours each, doing 45 minutes a day (the average for the site is 24 minutes to visit a registered user).

LinguaLeo has great plans for the future.

In addition to all the expected goodies (grammar on the service, thematic glossaries, iPhone application, working out the pronunciation in training, adding other languages ​​and interfaces), we are preparing something special for the most active users.
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Thanks to personal recommendations, 300-500 new leo-mans are registered on the service every day. This means that there will be even more success stories of LinguaLeo users in learning English. Thanks for the support!

Our most important goal is to create the most convenient and popular web service for learning foreign languages. The audience of the project is growing, there is interest in the project in other countries, which pushes us to localize the product into other languages. We started in Russia, and we believe that we can win the hearts of new users in China, the USA, Japan, Germany and other countries from our secret list!

Follow the news on Twitter and LinguaLeo - we will delight you with updates and features that will allow you to learn the language even better.

How to accelerate the achievement of our most important goal? Share your ideas!