In 2023, I tried my luck with four different educational apps, but none of them really made any money. Then, while working on an English learning website, I added a simple feature where users could chat with AI. Surprisingly, this became super popular!<p>This got me thinking: why not create an app that lets people practice speaking English with AI characters? I put together a basic version of the app in a month and shared it on voz.vn, a well-known forum in Vietnam. The app got 500 downloads on the first day alone, though I didn't earn any money from it initially.<p>In the next 3 months, I only made around $50. But I think the app had potential, so I kept working on it. I improved the design, fixed some bugs, and added more languages like Chinese, Korean, Spanish, French, Japanese, and German to attract more users.<p>The game-changer was in December, 2023 when I got a popular Youtuber to promote FluentPal. That move really paid off, and the app took off.<p>Now, FluentPal earns $3,000 a month, with half coming from subscriptions and the other half from lifetime package purchases. A lot of B2C users prefer buying the lifetime package because they only want to pay once.<p>That's the story of my app.
Congrats! 3k a month is a already a nice side hustle. Are you personally using the app a lot?<p>I'm asking because I've also had the idea of a language learning chatbot, put together a quick POC but found it super boring super fast. Also, I've found it difficult to learn new words, because when you are speaking, you are only using the words you already know.<p>At the end, I've abandoned the chatbot project idea and just switched fully to basically AI powered anki - <a href="https://vokabeln.io" rel="nofollow">https://vokabeln.io</a>
Great story, it shows how many false starts are
required for most. And also how different countries can have different pressing problems / priorities where it may have been hard to kick this off on an English forum.