Chinese MooLango
Today we officially introduce our new team member that has been helping us reach out to the chinese market: Rui Liang!
Expect a chinese version of the site soon.
(Source: moolango.com)
Lean Startup Conference
As startup founders, we didn’t miss the LeanStartup Conference that went on this past Monday, December 3rd. The speakers were great and we took notes like crazy!
Here are our highlights:
New MooLango? What’s “new” about it?
Hello! As part of the development team I’m pretty excited about this new version. After some weeks of interviewing people and customers we just added a better experience and enhanced control for our users. Briefly, here is the update of our new features:
1. Payment system
Following Paypal’s Checkout Guide and the completely secure, embedded iFrame approach, our customers can now purchase up to 10 hours of conversation in one single transaction!
2. Scheduled conversations
As a young startup, we were struggling to get a critical mass of users that we could provide instant service to. Our solution is adding a scheduling component that allow our customers pick the time they prefer.
3. Suggested and custom topics
Most of our users went for a no-brainer first try, but wanted a more specific topic for their second interaction. We added these two possibilities in the same page.
4. Video control
Whoa! This is actually a pretty funny one. We learned that most of our users enjoy video chatting but they were immediately shocked if it was enabled right away. So now it starts as voice only, and they turn video on as they get more comfortable with it.
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I invite you to visit moolango.com and please let us know any suggestions you have! Don’t hesitate to shoot me an e-mail to ben@moolango.com if you’re interested in trying our service. I can surely provide you a promo code :)
What are you annoyingly passionate about?
We all have something that we can’t shut up about.
For me, it’s movies. Although I have my favorites (Up, Jurassic Park, and Forrest Gump), I constantly talk with friends about the latest blockbuster, the most gut-busting comedy, or the coolest indie flick of the year.
Similarly, a friend of mine can chat about baseball for hours. Another friend, history. A different buddy, sailing. And Barney Stinson, of course, suits.
The best conversations always center on a passion/interest that people share. We are surprised, then, that so many language conversation sites simply put people in a chat room with a stranger and say: “Talk.” The most important question is: “about what?”
With Moolango, we want you to be able to pick a topic of interest that lights a spark in you. Perhaps you are an avid gamer or zombie comic book fan. We want to make the laborious process of learning a second language a little easier by allowing you to talk about Halo 4 or zombies. You’ll probably pick up some awesome vocabulary too :)
Megabeta day
Today we celebrate! We just had our first 7 genuine, unbiased conversations through the website and it’s time to analyze the data and the behavior of the speakers. It feels so good to finally have some kind of validation!
We are really excited to figure out and really dig deep into how to provide a better language practice experience that is just not awkward.
We appreciate all of our friends who are helping in the process. Hopefully, we’ll be including a lot of fixes and improvements soon, so stay tuned :)
P.S. If you sign today, you’ll get 10 free credits, so hop into Moolango! We’re always happy to get your feedback.
Prototype Day
Yesterday we participated in 10xelerator’s prototype day held on OSU’s Mason Hall. The goal of this event is to show our progress and get feedback from mentors and possible investors.
After explaining our value proposition and hypotesis, we did a quick walkthrough of our site showing a quick demo of how users would connect in a video-chat session after choosing a topic.
Everything worked really well, and surprisingly, after the event we got to show our demo to Jay Donovan from techcrunch.com. We’re really excited since probably we’ll be mentioned in Jay’s next writeup … so the Moolango team is excited and speeding up, tweaking the demo in order to be able to give a better UX and get valuable feedback.
We start
After two days of having our brains full of ideas, by day three we had an early meeting with Brian Link. It all went great and he helped us a lot to straighten our goals and mindset.
We think it’s valuable to share and keep an eye on his recommendations:
- Don’t forget any of your big ideas but stay focused on your short term
- Stick with technology you know
- Build to be successful during first 3 months - which I think will require asynchronous communication
- Consider college crowd and mechanical turk to help recruit users
We’re now much more clear on our roadmap and almost done with defining our MVP.
Smile, we’re MooLango!
