Some Phrasepump feedback

Hi, I just thought I would give you some feedback on Phrasepump.

As a Russian language learner (B2) I really like it. I particularly like the fact that it’s audio first, the fact that it focuses on word frequency, and the fact that it seems to use real world phrases. I find myself closing my eyes, clicking on phrases and listening to them, seeing if I can grok them, repeating etc. It’s actually a really useful discipline to do this in the evening, I find. And this kind of experience doesn’t seem replicable by any competitor app (beyond Duolingo). So kudos.

But … niggles. I signed up for the pro version which I thought gave me access to translations, but can’t find them anywhere (was I mistaken?). The whole interface seems enormously complicated. I find myself with very little desire to explore beyond the core listening/repeating workflow - could it really not be simplified? And whilst the (web) mobile experience is okay, it’s not great. I couldn’t sign up for the pro version on Android Chrome for example, it kept getting stuck in an infinite loop.

I think you have a potential hit here, but it needs a lot of polish. It’s crying out for a blinding iOS/Android native app, dedicated to Phrasepump only, but simplified a lot to make it more appealing to the newbie.

Somewhere on the forum I saw a comment by @David_Wilkinson saying words to the effect of “we’re sorry if parts of the site seem broken, but it’s only the three of us, we’re doing what we can” (I can’t find it now). Fair enough. I would give you guys an A for technical competence, but a C- for marketing and D for customer service and investor relations.

These things matter. It feels like you guys are doing far far too much behind the scenes, focusing on far too many products. Language Reactor is a bit of a mess. Products all over the place. What’s good? What’s bad? What works? What’s broken? As a startup founder (one exit) and part time angel investor, I’d strongly advise you to double down on Phrasepump, mark everything else as deprecated or legacy, and invest in some proper marketing and customer service.

The above may seem a bit harsh, but it’s only because I actually care about some of the products you are developing, and would really like to see them reach their potential, both for your benefit and mine. If I didn’t care I wouldn’t bother.

Best wishes and keep up the good work.

Ah -

I know the last year it probably came across as if we lost interest in LR. It’s only me, Og and Hofit. The code is growing daily and attention is split between prototyping, implementing new features, code maintence, hardware maintence, communicating with users, and more stuffs. Simply not enough butter to butter everything.

Update! Learning Stages, Flashcards, All Words Panel, PhrasePump, API.. - #115 by David_Wilkinson

Or take some investment and hire some good people :slight_smile:

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