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Since a lot of our current users are young and in school it's really important that we keep the price affordable.

I remember being poor and in college once, where "poor" means I was never in danger of starvation but I did routinely decline invitations to the movies for want of $5.

I also remember a collection of someones (parents, university, scholarship providers, government, self) feeling it was worth $80 per hour of instruction to get me Japanese classes. Please do not use the "Oh noes, our customers are poor!" factoid as a mental excuse to undercharge for your product. ($80. An. Hour.)

I'd also like to note that a significant portion of the American collegiate population has a significant amount of discretionary spending capability. Half of my Japanese class had parents who were paying full freight for that $80 an hour. Do you really need to sell to the other half?

I think we're in a good place for charging for it: it's something that will save users a lot of time and helps with something they're probably already paying a lot more for (learning Chinese). We also have no competition with writing practice, and not much free online SRS with effort put into it.

So how much does it make sense to charge, from an outside perspective?

not much free online SRS with effort put into it

Your customers are not buying online SRS, they are buying an opportunity to improve their Chinese proficiency, and the experience of being the kind of person who wants to improve their Chinese proficiency. Never forget that.

I have a friend with an as-yet-unreleased application for studying Japanese. I told him what I'll tell you: I wouldn't consider charging less than $30 but I would consider trying more than $100. Yep, that is quite a range, and it all depends on what type of student you are targeting. To be perhaps a little unfair to my friends' prospective customers, I would expect to see no anime-related vocabulary in the $100+ product.

Exactly how you present your choice to the user is up to you. ($49 a semester, $80 if you buy a year at once should lead to an ARPU in excess of $100, hopefully.)

Thanks for the positioning advice! I guess I just fell again for the builder's blindness and forgot all I learned from HN about marketing as telling stories to people.

We actually do have some users who put together a kung cu list for us... uh oh!

There's so many competitors entering the market, it will be hard for anybody to charge much more than $5. Plus, almost everybody is using the same set of language data, so it is difficult to differentiate. There are already tons of completely free hobbyist- and university- created tools available if you know where to look. Plus, textbook publishers generally provide a suite of (sometimes free) apps to complement their textbooks.

Luckily, I don't think there is any place for ad-financed products (ads are too distracting when you are trying to memorize stuff like this), so there won't be many free commercial systems.

I am building something very similar to this. I have to say I am very impressed with what Skritter has done so far.

There's so many competitors entering the market, it will be hard for anybody to charge much more than $5

Are you acquainted with Rosetta Stone? They sell language learning software in the "couple of hundred dollars" range. And they're pretty freaking big.

it is difficult to differentiate

People always tell me that about my product. It isn't true for me, and my product is substantially more boring and smaller in scope than learning the key to accessing the history/culture/economic potential of China. A short list of points to differentiate on would be who you sell to, what level of learners you target, what focus of learners you target, visual design, etc etc.

You were actually part of the inspiration for me getting into this market; I even have "bingo card creator" in my notebook.

There are definitely many interesting aspects of this market. I don't think it is impossible to differentiate or I wouldn't be in it. But, I really do think that prices for formal educational books, materials, and software are all heading towards $0 fast.

Rosetta Stone really has executed brilliantly in its segment of the market. It sales and marketing effort has been top-notch. It is also interesting to see how they are attempting to cross over from do-it-yourself language learners to traditional language learners. I would love to know what they are charging schools for their software.

A lot, I think. Some of the libraries we called had switched to Mango because Rosetta Stone had become too expensive.

You've probably already thought about this, but the corporate market is pretty large for language learning. I work for a big company with offices in many countries so they strongly encourage learning other languages. And the corporate expense department won't blink an eye at spending a few hundred dollars for language learning software. If you get a reputation for being the best product in your space, it is worth quite a lot more than $5 per customer.

There is definitely a great difference in the price that customers are willing to pay in different segments of the market--especially K-12 vs. college vs. non-traditional learners.

Ah, yes, you're right. Perhaps I'll also say that there aren't a lot of effective competitors, especially for Chinese writing.

We are making our own set of language data, which is a lot of work but which does help differentiate because students can see we have their textbook.

I always wonder how similar "very similar" is. Of course I'm curious. We haven't seen anything that (we think) is similar yet.

Right now, my product is notably different than your product. But, I think the natural evolution of my product, combined with the natural evolution of your product, means they will end up being very similar. There's lots of SLA software for years, but also I noticed a lot of new SLA software that is pretty slick. I think there's going to be a lot of "effective" competition soon.

Yep, including one of the startups I'm working on. Good luck to you. がんばって。

edit: p.s. our idea was rejected by yc, so maybe it is a terrible idea. we still think it is great which is why we are working on it.

Ours did too. Well, it's probably more fair to say that it was us and not the idea. We didn't have a lot going for us on paper.

"And in actual fact it is very rare to hear a good idea from a group we don't want to fund." -- pg

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=548299

My co-founder noted that the rejection email contradicted this, but I'm sure there is some there is an explanation such as we are bad at selecting successful startups. It is tough to really know for sure, because while some of the groups selected fail, some of the ones who ought to have been selected will never succeed on their own when they may have with some guidance. So don't blame yourself, there are two parties involved and neither are God, just human.

Nihao! Good application, however I would like to see more instruction/tutorial how it works, since it's asking me to draw, but I am not sure what to draw, since I don't know that symbol and I would like to learn it.

ps/ I am interested in learning Chinese, however I am not sure I would pay at that point... Need to see incentives/success stories.

Good luck guys!

Hey cvboss, thanks for giving it a spin!

Yeah, we really do need an instructional demo video on the "try it page." We actually just got the front page up, so new instructional demo videos and the like are on the way. It's good to know people actually want them, and sorry for any confusion.

Regarding you interest in seeing success stories or incentives, we are going to conduct a study next semester with a big batch of students so that we can make claims about the efficacy, is that the sort of thing you're looking for ("With Skritter, you can learn character 44% faster than with traditional methods, see our study") or would it be more enticing to see small narratives from users about how much its helped them?

I am not sure buddy, but it would be nice to see how it fits or replaces(?) the traditional approach from a high level perspective :)

"With Skritter, you can learn character 44% faster than with traditional methods, see our study"

What are your criteria are for verifying the validity of the study? I've proofread lots of graduate papers about studies of second language acquisition and in almost every case the studies are summarized the same way: the results are (un)promising but no definite conclusions can drawn because the sample size was too small and/or there was too strong of a selection bias and/or there were some other significant flaws in the study. A study that would justify such a bold claim would be, as far as I can tell, a landmark study in the field--likely worthy of a Ph.D. People could probably get Ph.D.s just for studying your study! :)

Control group vs. Skritter group, track the time they spend spend studying characters specifically, give them a huge quiz at the end of the semester--not enough? You're right that we can't get a large sample, but we can get a large effect because the Skritter method will drastically favor long term retention.

I, personally, would only feel comfortable making quantified claims like that if they were verified to be statistically significant. I asked some SLA researchers what would be required to get a statistically significant result and their responses were really discouraging. It's really hard to get definite results even with huge student populations across multiple schools. Because of what they told me, I dropped the idea of making such claims about my own software. Instead I'm going to market it a different way.

I think many people will be interested in the results of your study. Do you know when/where the results will be published?

No, we can't even start it until next semester. I did do a smaller study last year that showed average writing retention rates of 38%, and it'll be easy to destroy that. Maybe if SLA research is too tight to penetrate, we can still go the transparent web data presentation route.

If you're interested in getting more students on board to take part of initial group to be tracked, feel free email me at melgirk at the only email service worth using.

We don't have a lot of stats yet, but I'm at 1700 characters after 60 hours of practice, and I probably could only write 600 when I started.

Isn't that pretty dramatic? Do you think you're a better than average case because you also wrote the program?

The Supermemo technique should be good at keeping the pace up to get to that magic 6000 character level. Once you get a lot more data I would think you would have something worth publishing in journals of education and that could be a very nice PR opportunity for you, showing that your software dramatically improves the time needed to become fluent in Chinese.

Yes, I'm probably the fastest on paper because I avoid some of the quirks with the time tracking system. Our top normal user hit 2000 characters essentially from writing scratch (had some reading knowledge) in 100 hours, but now he's at 2200 characters / 180 hours because of some crazy quest to hit 98% retention or some such.

6000 characters is very extreme. I think 3000 is a more magic target.

I expect we can produce some very sexy stats, once we build a data analysis framework for it. Do you think we could publish just based on our online practice data, without doing a more traditional study?

Ah, right, I couldn't remember what the level for basic fluency was.

As for publication, I'm really not sure. I think it would depend on you finding someone else's data for Chinese language learning for comparison purposes. There's probably some conference somewhere you can present at, if nothing else.

The level for basical fluency is 800 characters. Research done has shown that by knowing these 800 characters (which have been specifically determined) will allow you to read 80% of all Chinese ever written.

Woo! You rule! If you were here right now I'd shake your hand.

I've been using your app for months. This is a fantastic way to practice character writing.

Simply phenomenal work.

Thank you!

Thanks, Devin! (Want to get on our front page for saying that?)

Cool! How can I add more than 1 character at a time? For example say I want to add all the HSK1 characters with one click, is there a way to do that?

[update: I figured out how to use Select: List. Strangely it's taking a long time to add the list. The HSK1 list should already exist on your server somewhere, no? Maybe it's doing it character by character? Is this an App Engine-ism? I would think a simple UPDATE student_character_list INSERT '?' WHERE source_list='HSK1'; would be pretty fast (if I even got that SQL right) but then maybe App Engine doesn't support SQL?]

I just created an account. Is there a difference between the functionality for my fresh account versus the hackernews account, other than different usage data?

Ah. You've probably just added the entire list at once, where what you want is the "Add starting from..." checkbox. You should delete those (using Select List) or you'll get overwhelmed. We'll work on that UI.

Yeah, App Engine doesn't do SQL. Makes things interesting.

No difference in functionality--everyone is the same right now.