By March 2010, Learn10 has achieved two years of service, 33,000 registered users, as well as founders with their marriage in tact! Any other application entrepreneurs who work with their partners will know about the experience of running such a strange family business. We are now two years old and have a great deal more knowledge about supporting an eLearning language application than we started with.
Our experience of setting up and running Learn10 over the last couple of years has been interesting. After the initial rush of enthusiasm was somewhat drained by our eighteen months of 12 hour working days and 7 day working weeks, we were both blown away and burnt out. Learn10 has been merrily ticking on with little intervention over the last nine months. Though we have had great press coverage from the specialist tech press we’ve built relationships with, there was less interest from the mainstream media, who, we are reminded constantly, are themselves inundated with press releases. Our press releases had no immediate effect on the outside world and the lack of enthusiasm was quite contagious, but lessons were learned.
We have entered no competitions, bid for no rounds of funding and made no major new developments to Learn10 in the last nine months; but otherwise life has been interesting, with a stream of workaway volunteer visitors staying with us at our sustainable living project (deep in the Bohemian countryside an hour south of Prague) and the expansion of our little family by two kitties and one lively Rhodesian Ridgeback pup. I continue to teach English the old fashioned way, and my programmer/business partner continues to build websites for other people.
After being under snow for the last three months, we are looking forward to spring, and to our renewed enthusiasm for our past obsession. It is time to monetise or die!
