August 2020 — End of the month update
By: Caleb Andersen
Tags: Nativshark, Edtech, Launch, Language Learning, Japanese

Anyway, hi everyone 👋

August has just ended, I’m writing this on September 2nd. It was a great (possibly the best yet?) and very busy month for NativShark.

We started the month with a clear goal: Launch the product.

The full team went into overdrive and really pulled together. Our project management became something of legends. I think some may have had their doubts if you had seen where we were at on August 1st, but I believed in our team and knew we’d pull through.

I’m honestly blown away with what we’ve accomplished with such a small team. Every team member has grown in their abilities so much in the past couple months, and as a company we’ve learned a lot.

It’s a good feeling to see things actually come together after months of pushing and uncertainty.

But now we’re near 10,000 students and we have more than 1 year of student study time on the platform in such a short time! Amazing.

That said, this is only the beginning. After a short rest for the team, we got right into improving the performance on the site and planning our roadmap.

We’ve been receiving feedback and feature requests on our feedback site: https://feedback.nativshark.com/ which has been an excellent resource to help direct our planning. Hearing your direct comments on the experience of learning with NativShark is and will continue to be key in building the best language education platform possible.

We also put out some videos in August, one of which was a quick Q&A video with questions from around the first week of launch, take a look:

Now that it’s out, students are learning, and feedback is rolling, it’s time to perfect and scale. Speaking of which…

Where we’re at now

The core experience is online. People are learning Japanese.

That said, currently there are some issues and missing features that we’re addressing.

The biggest one currently is that kanji learning is not introduced well.

We’ve been looking at this very closely and have worked out a better introduction and a near-full redesign to the learning experience. We’ll be testing prototypes with the testing group soon.

Perhaps we could have an entire blog post on the new method once it’s ready… Let me know if you’d be interested.

Another issue we’ve identified is with the first 30 or so Units. Unless you’re completely 100% new to the language, or you have a ton of interest in travelling to Japan soon, we feel the choice to introduce nearly only travel lessons was misguided. While a lot of those lessons are amazing, having so many at once can be tiring.

We’re improving this as well.

The last issue I want to draw attention to is the lack of a level / placement test. This is largely because only Phase One is out, and we want to be careful with how we implement such a feature. It is done notoriously poorly in the learning community and we want our Level Check Mode to be meaningful.

That said, we’ve definitely always wanted to do it so I can say: “Level Check Mode” is coming eventually 👍

There’s a couple more minor things we’re adjusting like the in-Unit flow of Today’s Studies and how / where the “My Journey” circles can show up to let you know what part of the Unit you’re in.

We want to be able to see these lovely progress circles from more places!

All I can say is I’m so glad to have it released so we can get real data from thousands of students. I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has contributed to our feedback forums and in the discord community.

I think one of the best things about NativShark, and why I’m so thankful to be a part of it, is how much growth potential there is in the platform and how committed we are to constantly improving the platform over time. There’s no reason it should just sit and be static. It’s well past time for Language Education as Live Service. Thrilled to be the ones doing it ✨

Where we’re headed

So that’s where we’ve been and where we’re at. Time for a bit of a look at what’s down the line.

In the next week or so, we have some more performance optimizations coming out and minor improvements.

Then, we’ll be focusing on our Content Management Platform again so the content team can be much more efficient, even while they’re still such a small team. And because our engineering team is so small, it’ll take the whole team’s focus.

But, this time will give us the focus we need to clean up some of our architecture choices that were made to get the launch out 😅

The content team will be publishing some Phase Two content, and then working on their improvements to Phase One before going back to publishing loads of Phase Two content as they complete it.

During all that, we’ll have had time to finish designing and testing our nicely sized update to the Student Experience, bringing the solutions to what I mentioned in the previous section.

At this point, we’re far enough down the timeline that it’s hard to say exactly what will be next, but a native mobile app and prepping for going multi-lingual are high on the list.

As always, one step at a time.

See you in the next one 🌊

~ Caleb