A man, a mop, a year, and an app

Disclaimer: I own the development company that built Aeir Talk for equity.<p>If there's anyone who can be labeled a "hustler", it's Joe Hill.<p>First, he had to sell us on the idea - we get a <i>ton</i> of people who want us to take equity stakes in lieu of cash, and we almost always turn them away. But not Joe. He had tapped the few investors in our area (Hampton Roads, Virginia) and came up short. Our area is pretty conservative, and investing usually is restricted to real estate and other safe bets. But we heard him out and realized that even though he had no business background, no history of successful exits, or any other factors that mitigate risk, he had passion and an amazing story (along with board positions in a few autism societies).<p>He partnered with EVMS, a local medical school, along with a few speech pathologists with one goal: to bring Apple-like simplicity to medical products. He took the graveyard shift at a local Marriott, and managed to support his wife and two special-needs children WHILE working out of our office during the day.<p>He launched his app last month at Start Norfolk, a regional startup weekend we put together. If you really want to be inspired, check out the launch video: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2WLc1LszZ0&#38;list=UUdXCw6_wPeDrjjwhdj25img&#38;index=5&#38;feature=plcp" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2WLc1LszZ0&#38;list=UUdXCw6_...</a>

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Aeir Talk. Thanks to all who have read the article so far. It's a great joy to see Aeir Talk be so well received and see that it helping a lot of people. Feel free to reach out if you want more information, also the app is at aeirtalk.com if you want to see it. Thanks again everyone.

Pleasant surprise waking up to see this as the top story on HN. I work with We Are Titans (the company that developed Aeir Talk in exchange for equity) and did most of the technical development (along with @nickmjones) on what became the final product. Feel free to ask or reach out if you've got any questions about that side of things.

This actually seems like a much bigger market than just autistic children. I would imagine that many parents that have iPad-crazed kids would would gladly give their kids an app to learn new words instead of Angry Birds. A child would probably be more interested and learn faster if it was Mom's voice talking instead of a robot.<p>Another interesting case that comes to mind is how Clay Christiansen, author of Innovator's Dilemma, used Rosetta Stone to practice speaking again after having a stroke.<p>I would imagine too that you could scale pretty quickly by allowing users to create Flashcard sets, and then other users can buy the flash card sets and rate them. This could turn into a crowdsourced Rosetta Stone pretty quickly.

Regarding the site slowness: A while back, I changed the blog from a subdomain to a directory and didn't update the caching. It was caching pages at the wrong URL and thus being entirely useless.<p>It's fixed now -- sorry for the annoyance to anyone who got held up.

As an cofounder of a startup and an aunt of a autistic nephew, I am inspired. Thanks for a great way to start may day smiling and motivated.

This is invaluable for anyone trying to raise a bilingual child. Big, big thanks to the developers!

Bump! This is awesome!

Am I the only one to have read/noticed: "My background is in bible theology. I went to school to be basically a history teacher." and instantly tensed up??