moolango

[moolango]

Enjoyed your presentation at 10X and as a potential investor will follow your progress carefully. Two questions:1. Can you prevent people from going off line and setting up their own conversation with someone they found on Moolango? 2. Certainly understand how this could go like wildfire amongst American colleges and universities but how will you market to international companies and universities?

[moolango]

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.

#chinese #team #rui liang

[moolango]

We are looking for your feedback! What do you suggest us to include or improve in our video-chat room? 

#chat room #user feedback

[moolango]

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:

@XcellentTea brought up 10 points of #GetOutOfTheBuilding to go real with your startup

Don't ask your uncle

Set up a booth, do a public demo

Interview Potential Customers

Put your office where your customers are

Throw a party

Talk to experts on the field

Find the decision maker

Listen to what customers have to say

Pre-order, landing pages, analytics

Ask for the introduction

@brezina gave 10 tips for rapid agile development

Create an MVP

Do off-brand testing

De-emphasize visual design (engineers doing their own design)

Utilize common components

Buy cheap, disposable users

Be willing to kill apps

Use Android for quick testing

Develop an internal API

Maintain and build a team structure

Minimize interdependencies (4-6 hours of interrupted engineering magic)

@glusman talked about the three myths about 'going lean'

Myth: People give a damn about lean

Truth: People dive a damn about their work

Myth: People want to test things

Truth: People want to build things that people use

Myth: You can test your way to a great experience

Truth: Vision guides experiments and experiments validate vision

@jocelynw showed us the order in which IDEO.org brought to life the Clean Team Project in Ghana.

First, prototype the product(s)

Second, prototype the services (price, payment system, etc)

Finally, prototype the brand.

@steph_hay gave a great lecture about using simple vocabulary instead of sexy words. She couldn't be more specific: "Drop the crap. Learn and use the real-person words that make you easier to find, understand and choose."

@sgblank, before being interrupted by @AlexOsterwalder that showed his pretty cool new value proposition canvas, reinforced that entrepreneurship can be taught to those who volunteer. It's about both theory (a little of it) and practice (lots of it). To master it we need to cover the Entrepreneurial API:

Business model canvas

Customer development

Agile engineering

@ivorymadison went straight to showing us how vanity metrics keep you focused on appearance, not reality. She mentioned a couple of startup mistakes that we see very often: living above your means and spending money trying to appear succesful.

In metrics per se, she advised us not to use:

pageviews, total members, new members, unique visitors, percent growth, conversion rate, Twitter followers or Facebook fans

Instead, she encouraged us to:

measure revenue, sales volume, customer retention, track individual customers and illustrate cause and effect behind the actions taken

@ashmaurya did a quick appearance teaching us about data in innovation accounting. He said we should focus on a single key metric, but always monitor the complete lifecycle - "Metrics by themselves are not enough, they just tell you a story. You need to find the things that are going on, the people behind the data."

#lean startup #conference #steve blank #steph hay #alex osterwalder #Jocelyn Wyatt #Matt Brezina #Tendai Charasika #andres glusman #ivory madison #Ash Maurya

[moolango]

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. 

--

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 [email protected] if you're interested in trying our service. I can surely provide you a promo code :)

-Benjamín

#new version #update #paypal #moolango

[moolango]

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 :)

[moolango]

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.

#Moolango #megabeta #validation

[moolango]

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.

#10xelerator #Tech Crunch

[moolango]

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!

#Brian Link